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After neglecting this blog for a while (an understatement) I have decided to update it to chronicle the rest of my year as I have some time on my hands. Currenly I am in Singapore, having a luxury weekend eating lots of western food and indulging in some retail therapy! Little brother Zack is messing about in front of me! Not for long however as on Tuesday I shall be back at work before going to Hong Kong next weekend. Only 5 more days of teaching left before we are joined by Ella and make the journey to Guilin to meet up with the rest of the gang!
Basically, I am on the home stretch. Chongren is such a small town there is basically nothing to do here, and we spend most days when we are not teaching (we teach less than 14 hours a week) watching TV or sleeping. If you are feeling homesick it sucks because it's all you have to think about, especially if you haven't seen your friends in a while!
Our travel plans for the summer are starting to take a definite shape. We will be spending two weeks in the south going to Guilin and Yangshuo for some rock climbing, cycling and gazing at beautiful scenery in the scorching heat and then on to Yunnan for some ancient towns and to hike the Tiger Leaping Gorge . Then our group splits a bit and I will be heading up the silk road for another two weeks, ending in a trip to Kashgar and then flying back to Beijing to do the capitol and its surrounds before flying home on the 5th of August (also my mum's birthday J). Going home will be a bit of a shock. China is so different.
Recently we have been up to more though. Beth and I are on a get-fit-and tanned-for-summer plan which involves playing badminton, running, exercise videos and a little bit of hiking thrown in on the side. Two weekends ago we went hiking with a new friend Kirby who is an English translator, he took us out with his friends to climb the highest mountain in the county, which is about 2 and a half thousand feet high, stupidly, because we had climbed it before, we wore shorts because we thought we would hike along a carved dirt road. Instead, as it turned out, we were basically off road hiking among tiny paths. Our legs got ripped to shreds, our exposed skin burnt, coupled with loads of bug bites and close spider encounters! As we had already been to the top last autumn we decided that half way Beth and I would call it a day and meet our friends at the bottom by the car (a taxi that 7 of us had piled into).
Beth and I got down in about an hour and gave them a ring. They told us they were lost but they were still going for the top and would be about three hours, so we decided to try and hitch-hike home. The Chinese have an inbuilt no-giving-up policy and stick it out to the end when it comes to things like hikes. Meanwhile, Beth and I walked down to the closest village but found nothing, not even a shop for water. So we walked about another 2 or 3 kilometres to the next village and bought ice-creams and cold 7 up but still couldn't find any cars to take us home, so we started out for the next village and on the way a guy on a motorbike came up to check if we were ok. He offered to give us a lift so we both climbed on to his bike (a tight squeeze - without helmets :s) and he drove us there in about 5 minutes as we tried to take selfies on my Itouch to document our first motorbike ride!!! Finally we found a guy who would take us back for about £3 each, made it home and had a glorious shower. I then covered my legs in sudocreme. Later we went to Kirby's house for dinner with his family and then a little bit of majong (a sort of Chinese gambling game played with tiles) and then climbed the gate to get into school to bed. That was a pretty exciting day for us! Ha ha.
Last weekend we also went to visit Dan and Rob, who live in Yihuang, a town similar to Chongren and an hour on the bus. While there we met their new friend Angie, a Singaporean-Chinese who had moved back to China for a year to apply to English universities. Her English is pretty good and the boys took us out to their new western restaurant where we got pizza and chips with cheap beer. The pizza was pretty good; decent cheese with peppers, tomatoes and sweet corn, although, it did take two hours for them all to arrive. The next day Angie took us to her family's restaurant on the other side of the river where we got waffles with proper marmalade, honey and chocolate sauce! Then we were taken to a back room and it got even better! We were served lunch with Angie's mother, step-father, uncle and aunt and then white wine was brought in. White wine in China, for us, is unheard of! It was delicious and imported from Germany. After lunch Angie's mum arranged for us to get free bus tickets home and even offered us a lift to the bus station. Sometimes the generosity and hospitality of Chinese people amazes me.
More recently we have had a pretty easy week. On Monday I only had two lessons with my favourite senior classes, on Tuesday and Wednesday we had the days off because officials were arriving and the students were sitting internal exams. Monday night we were told to make sure the apartment was presentable as we would be greeting the officials there at any time from 8 onwards so we had to have a massive clean-up operation as it had become quite a state! Then in typical China fashion at Wednesday lunch time the phone rang and we were told we had afternoon lessons after all. Not so bad for me, I only have one class on Wednesday had become quite a state! Then in typical China fashion at Wednesday lunch time the phone rang and we were told we had afternoon lessons after all. Not so bad for me, I only have one class on Wednesday afternoon but Beth had 3. Without a lesson plan I had a couple of hours to fix one up so I spent my time making a power point about zoo animals only to arrive at my class and find out that the projector didn't work. Brilliant. That meant coming up with some games and a quiz and letting the students go early.
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