Spring? Winter? Summer? Who knows?

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, the weather lately has been extremely changeable and unpredictable. Only a week or so ago I was sitting here in a t-shirt, sweating, and now I'm back in my thick jacket and woolly hat. Grrrrr. It's also be raining rather too much and quite hard, which means that our corridor gets flooded. Just another thing that needs fixing. [The toilet that was removed from the other foreign teachers' apartment is still sitting out in the courtyard and I suspect that it will be for some time to come].

Not much of excitement to report this week. Had a nice meeting with my language exchange partner on Wednesday, followed by lunch at her house. Then a meal on Friday evening at another Chinese friend's house which was really good. Delicious food and good company.

The students are quite tired these days, having both morning and evening reading sessions to contend with. Rick took a photo on his phone during the break in one of his morning classes. All but 5 or 6 students out of a class of 50 or so had their heads down on the desks. I'm not convinced of the value of it, but someone's obviously decided it's a good idea.

A couple of photos from our brief exploration this afternoon.

Wining and dining and a lost(?) laowai

On Friday the four foreign teachers went out for dinner and a few games of pool, as we quite often do. We went to eat in one of the restaurants we like. As is the way, we don't know its proper Chinese name and so we call it 'The Picture Menu Restaurant' (I'm sure you can guess why...) Having the pictures means that instead of ordering the same dishes that we know how to order all the time, or even ordering blindly from a Chinese menu, we can actually try some new stuff that we like the look of.

We'd just placed our order and one of the teachers had gone to choose the beer, when a group of people came into the restaurant. All of a sudden we noticed that one of them was a foreigner (a 'laowai'). Rick's reaction was 'Look at that!' Not entirely polite, but understandable under the circumstances - there are seven or eight foreigners in the whole city and up to now we have met one Indian guy and there are of course us four foreign teachers. The other foreigners (we've been told) are here working for companies.

Anyway, it turns out that he's Brazilian and is here working for some company. We must invite him out for a drink or a meal some time. I guess it's pretty lonely being here by yourself... (Incidentally, he was as shocked as we were to see other foreigners!!)

Today we were meant to visit an organic pig farm, but instead we went to some government hotel in the middle of an artificial lake. I had a quick look at the room prices and it's not cheap. It was all a bit random, as life often is in these parts. We ended up eating our lunch in a big room which just had this one table in the middle. There were lots of government types and some people from Shanghai(?) There was also a presenter from the local TV station (I think!) We managed to escape the strong alcohol (more or less) and stuck to the beer, which was a good choice. The Chinese guy that had driven us there drank so much he was unable to drive us home! Fortunately, we got a lift with someone else instead.

Back to work again tomorrow. The weather suddenly got warmer last week, which is nice. Sadly, it got a lot warmer very quickly, leaving me no time to enjoy any in between warm-but-not-too-hot weather.

In other news: I'm still waiting for the first copy of my magazine subscription to arrive. I have visions of it sitting on a desk somewhere with someone wielding a black marker, striking out anything they don't like the look of. We'll see...

China in the 21st Century

I like my coffee in the morning. This how the coffee-making process looked this morning.

No power. Why? Apparently the lines were being checked. For what? Don't know.

Ah, China...

Fun in the sun

The first sunny day in a while today, so we got out and about and had a bit of a wander.

In the main square here in PX, there are often people out and about, having a walk, having a chat or partaking in one of the forms of entertainment on offer. Today there were also a few people gamely trying to fly their kites. Anyway, as well as the bouncy castle and electric cars, there were also these horses. Unfortunately, no-one was riding them while we were there. However, I've seen them in use once before and it seems that you press down on the foot pedals in order to make the front legs go forwards and the back legs go backwards (at the same time in a kind of 'splaying' manner) and the wheels move the horse along (somehow). I resisted the temptation to have a go on the biggest horse. After my plastic stool-breaking incident last week, I've become extremely wary of sitting on anything here!!!

There are also a couple of pics of our visit to Anyuan a few weeks ago. They're building a 'film city' which is (I think) a mock-up of old-style architecture which can be used as film sets.

Then, just in case you think that China is clean - I do try to take pictures which look nice and so generally avoid taking photos of the litter which gets everywhere - a picture of some rubbish.

Enjoy...

Developing our immune systems

We were shopping in the supermarket yesterday and needed to buy meat. We usually get some pre-packed pork fillet, but there wasn't a piece that we liked the look of (too much fat), so we got the butcher to bag up a piece that was lying on the chopping board. It was nice to watch him putting the meat in the bag with his bare hands, as he smoked a cigarette...

As an aside: it's not uncommon to see tables in the small towns/villages here with raw meat sitting on them for sale. At least it's freshly slaughtered, I suppose, but no refrigeration, no hygiene, no protection from flies. So in fact, the meat in the supermarket is relatively clean. I hope.