Approaching the finish line…

I ended by last blog post by saying that I was alternating between periods of wanting to go home, and periods of really enjoying my time here. That weird mix has carried on for the past two months… whilst I've done lots of fun things with lots of lovely people, I've also experienced a huge drop of motivation in terms of the Chinese course, and have felt really frustrated and bored at times. I still love learning Mandarin, but when you're stuck here, feeling rather fed up with the place, it's very hard to find motivation. Ah well, I'll stop moaning now haha and recount some of the good things I've been up to over the past few months.

Major highlights include two visits from our Cambridge classmates who are studying in Beijing. First, Lucy and Charly came to visit over Qingming Festival weekend. Despite not feeling my best that weekend, it was so good to see them that I ended up having an excellent time anyway. Activities included: insane amounts of food, trip to microbrewery, house party at Saul's, climbing up Mt. Fu etc. Saul also took us all to one of Qingdao's many bathhouses which was INSANE. I'd been to one of these Korean-style bathhouses in Shanghai many years ago, but this one was of another class entirely. You begin by entering the single-sex area, where you strip off, shower, then spend as long as you want alternating between different temperature pools. Charly and I also treated ourselves to a full-body massage, which required using all your core strength imaginable in order not to fall off the plastic-covered massage table as a Chinese lady in her underwear pours milk over your naked body then pummels you - fantastic. Squeaky clean, you're then handed a pair of pyjamas (pink for girls, blue for boys - gender stereotyping woo!) before heading upstairs to the communal area which had pretty much everything you could imagine: Korean restaurant, café, gym, more saunas, TV room, sleeping room, reading booths etc…I felt so relaxed when I left that I vowed to come back every week until I returned to the UK. This dream, however, was brutally shattered when I found out a week later the neighbouring KTV bar had burnt down, and the damaged caused to the bathhouse would take over a month to repair. * Sob *

A few weekends later, Charly came to visit once more, this time with Oshien, which was great fun as I hadn't seen him for ageeees. Again, much food was consumed and Mt Fu was climbed - we also had an amazing picnic day at the beach, as the weather was so good.

I mentioned in my last post that I did some voice recording for a high school English textbook. Well, I got another job with the same company, only this time I was recording for a textbook in Maritime English… random!? My favourite part was recording the May Day calls ("MAY DAY MAY DAY MAY DAY This is vessel BLUE WHALE BLUE WHALE BLUE WHALE whisky x-Ray Charlie Papa I am ON FIRE…") and recording the dialogues with Sam, during which is was impossible not to giggle. The next day I went round to Sam's new flat to watch the whole of Eurovision with him and several friends which was great fun and injected some glitz and glamour into an otherwise grey, smoggy day.

Helena and I have also gone on some trips with our favourite teachers. In April, our absolutely adorable Classical Chinese poetry teacher, Huang (who let's face it, Helena and I both have a bit of a crush on haha), took us on a trip up Mt. Fu. Then in May, our translation teacher, Luo, took us to Mt. Lao, the huge mountain about an hour away from Qingdao. He brought his 12-year-old son along too, who was cute if a little cheeky and a bit spoilt. It was cherry-picking season, so we spent a good few hours walking leisurely around the leafy green mountain, picking and consuming hundreds of juicy cherries. Afterwards, Luo treated us to an absolutely gigantic lunch. We stuffed ourselves until we could barely walk, then I went home to sleep it off, perfect!

Hmm what else? Our awesome modern Chinese literature teacher, Ma, is moving to America in the summer to spend a year as a visiting scholar at a University in the States, so she asked me to 'teach' her English in preparation. As her English is already very good it ended up just being conversation practice, and she's a really interesting lady so I was very happy to help out. Due to us both being fairly busy, I only ever had 3 or 4 lessons with her, but they were always very enjoyable. I'd go round to her house, which is situated in the lovely old part of town, and we'd chat away for a few hours (often about feminism, woo!) before having a delicious home-cooked dinner.

My wonderful estate agent/friend Kaka has obviously played a large part of my life in the past few months too! I recommended him to a group of students coming over from Nottingham Uni, and he was so grateful that I'd found him 5 or so new clients that he took me out to dinner a few times. Through this, I ended up meeting Kaka's new roommate Fei Fei, a really interesting and quite sassy lady who I like a lot. We became quite good friends and hung out a few times during my last few weeks in Qingdao - I only wish I'd met her earlier!

I'm sure there were plenty of others things to, but those are the highlights!