Esperanto.

Sunday evening. I've just finished two days working at the Nanjing University language festival (see entry below). Each day, seven hours of teaching. Each class about 150-200 people, I guess. I had such a good time. In fact, let's not mince words, I had a ball. I just love getting up in front of a class and doing it. It's a skill I never knew I had until I came to China. Put me in a big classroom with students and I can just connect with them, I don't know why.

I guess there must have been about 10,000* (or more?) people visit. This really is just a wild guess. There seemed to be people swarming around all the time, like a carnival atmosphere. TV coverage, radio, the papers, all of that. Actually, I made it to the Chinese government website - see here.

Quite amazing to see the interest in languages here. You'd think no-one in China would be interested in, for example, Arabic but you'd be wrong. Or Vietnamese. Or the Czech language. Or African dialects. There was a ready audience for all of these.

But the truly eye-popping surprise was Esperanto. I always knew what Esperanto is but I never thought I would ever live to see it used at all, let alone used as a real language of conversation. I was dead wrong. The faculty staff speak Esperanto, not English, amongst each other. Of all the classes taught this weekend, mine (English) were easily (and understandably) the largest. But number two was Esperanto. Number two! Then followed by everything else. I had, until recently, absolutely no idea, not the foggiest, that Esperanto had any real currency. Wrong.

As the day was ending, I ended up, somewhat accidentally, in a photo-shoot with a few big-wigs on the steps of the main building in Nanjing University. The photographer was a guy from the local press. I was told that he was just someone they found to do the photography work for the weekend. It had turned out, quite to everyone's surprise, even the Esperanto-speakers in the faculty, that the guy was fluent in Esperanto (now, this is China we're talking about, right?). I'd seen him taking pictures over the course of the weekend and had forgotten about him until that moment, when I remembered he'd approached me at some stage on the weekend and asked me (in Chinese) if I understood Esperanto. He spoke no English.

* just found out 13,547 students was the final number.

p.s. In the photo at the top, taken at the festival, the guy is teaching Esperanto.