Cantonese Classes

On the first day of class I turned up and found out that i was an hour late... bugger. And i joined the class and did fine. The class was seven people mostly from England and America with a couple of them pretty good and the rest looked like they were struggling to me. The teacher for this hour was "May" and I thought she was pretty terrible. Didn't wait for students to answer, jumping in and answering for them, concentrating on students that were good already, not getting students to practice but just asking if they understood and if they did or didn't answer then moving on (it's very easy to say you do understand, but unless you actually do it you don't really know).
So at the end of that lesson I asked if I could join a higher class, only to find out I was now an hour late for that one!
Well this class had a great teacher and only two other students. Arlyn who is 13 years old and from the Phillipines. She really really wants to go back to the Phillipines, but doesn't want to let her Dad know that. She's just about to join the International school here and is busy learning Cantonese in the meantime.. partly to be able to speak to her Dad. She used to communicate with him via her older brother who seems to enjoy making her life difficult!
The other student was Emily from Taiwan who has also grown up in America. She's in her mid/late twenties is my guess and can read and write mandarin, so the main thing for her is pronouncing the Cantonese words. She's living with her cousin in Hong Kong and seems to fill her days with shopping and domestic chores, but only because she doesn't really know other people here.
At the end I asked if they would mind if i stayed in their class and it was settled i could stay. I was really pleased as three students was so much better than seven and we had a lot of fun during class. A bit later Laurent joined us, he was 22 years old and is Swiss Vietnamese, about to go to Beijing to do a year's research in Physics and has a girlfriend from Shenzhen living in Hong Kong.
What a great bunch... we had a lot of fun and started having lunches and dinners together.