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你好,
So today was Tom's visit. We knew he was going to be arriving in Yihuang at 12 noon, so we spent the morning just doing the last tidying of our flat - we swept the floors and put away the last few pieces that were lying out.
We had finished all that we wanted to do by 11am, and not wanting to pace the flat for an hour, we walked along to the little 'fast food place' and sat with hot drinks until we deemed it a reasonable time to walk along to the school.
We met with Ivy, Mr Luo (the headteacher) and a few other members of staff (possibly the secretary and the deputy heads if I remember correctly from our welcoming banquet) and stood at the school gates waiting on the car to bring Tom and Sophia from Fuzhou. The visit from Project Trust is quite important for the school, they even had 'Welcome Tom to our school' on their electronic noticeboard (in English! This was great). I will admit, Lucie and I were quite excited as we have been looking forward to this visit from the start of our time in China, and it was nice to have contact with a white person who we know who wasn't a volunteer - if that makes any sense at all.
When Tom arrived it was handshakes to all the staff and hugs for us. It was so nice to have a fluent English conversation with someone other than each other! We walked around the school to the dining room, where the school kitchen staff had prepared a banquet in honour of Tom's visit. As Lucie and I had not been to a proper banquet in ages, we had forgotten how much the Chinese eat. Dish after dish continued to come out onto the table - fish, duck, chicken, pork, vegetables, noodles - and they just kept eating. They get really worried when we stop eating and always try to get us to eat more, they just can't get the concept that we are full before all the dishes are out on the table. The meal was nice, and there was lots of toasts and 'Ganbei-ing' - at one point Ben (our calligraphy teacher) wanted me to toast and ganbei with every person on the table, luckily Ivy intervened. Even with all the toasts I managed to limit my drinking to two bottles of beer - and even saying that the bottles here are quite a bit larger than the ones on the UK - it was only lunchtime after all!
After lunch, Lucie and I had free time to spend with Tom as all the teachers had lessons. We showed him our apartment and he was quite impressed with the effort we had made with the flat after the mess we found it in. We then had to do individual interviews for our OCN Awards so Lucie and Tom headed out for that and I chilled in the apartment for half an hour before going to join them for my interview. It was pretty simple, just 10 questions including, "what are 3 aims you have for the next 3 months?" and "have you been homesick?"
We then had to head back to the school as Sophia had arranged for us to make dumplings with one member of the kitchen staff. Instead of it just being the 5 of us (us 3 + Ivy and Sophia), Mr Luo, Mr Lan (our Mandarin teacher), Tony (Head of English in Senior 1 - his English is really, really good), Mrs Huang, and a few other Senior 1 teachers which I recognised but cannot name, joined us too. It was great fun, Lucie and I saw a side to the teachers we had never seen before. We had a great laugh with them trying to show us how to roll the dough and how to fold in the filling. Tony was especially good at the rolling and folding and Ivy informed us that he is a 'home husband' - even though he works, he cooks for his family every day.
We made loads and loads of dumplings and then the kitchen staff took them away to boil them so we could have them for dinner. And they were delicious, which was surprising because of how simple they were. The dough is just flour and water, and the filling was pork, spring onions and a little salt. I think Lucie and I might even have a go at home at some point.
Unfortunately Tom was going to have to leave Yihuang at 5.30pm so he could travel to Nanchang and stay at a hotel near the airport, as last year he almost missed his flight in the morning from Nanchang to Beijing as the mist was so bad so the driver had to drive slowly, so they weren't taking the chance this year. Luckily, Lucie, Tom and I managed to convince Ivy and Sophia to let us go with him so we could spend another 2 and a half hours with him on the journey to Nanchang.
It was great seeing Tom, and sad to say goodbye, but we know we have so much to look forward to this year, and all too soon it will be time for us to return to the UK.
This was a slightly longer than usual post for this month, and tomorrow will be the same because tomorrow is November 20th. That means we will have been in China for 3 months!!
Off to bed now as my first class tomorrow is rather early,
Until tomorrow,
再见 x
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