So fresh back from Xining and running on about 4 hours sleep as I type this; A pretty good weekend to be frank, we headed out at about 7am on Friday and hopped off to the train station and after worrying about being late all the time the train was delayed by about an hour. This was my first experience of a Chinese 'Hard seat' on the train. My main issue with the forenamed seat is the 90 degree angle that the back of the chair operates at and the one meter space between each row of seats. Could have been worse though.

After half an hour of being lost in a strange new city and arguing with taxi drivers we made it to the school 'Kung Le' or something. The main building looks like half a school. Kind of like the front has fallen off somehow but, the kids where happy and it was nice to be in a quaint little school rather than the power-house of education that is the High-school attached to the north west normal university.

The first night was spent with a South African man named Loui who gracefully invited us to his place; he was indeed a man of mystery. South African born he moved to china when he was 13, found himself a Chinese wife and soon to have a Chinese baby, he is also the sort of man to own a bottle of illegal black-market whiskey, the whole collection of Black Adder on one DvD and a home-made Katana. Yup. And so at 2am after blasting through 'Have a drink every time black adder is a b******' we swaggered back to the school.