Hello!

I am currently writing from our apartment which is on the sixth floor (with no lift) on our new school campus. We are here! The weather has been swelteringly hot, but today some rain has come and made it a lot cooler and comfortable. We have been here now for four days and our Chinese colleagues are all very helpful and friendly. We have been taken out for meals, and have been to karaoke bars twice now (they absolutely love it out here, as well as waltzing on the dancefloor). matt and I have been in stitches. Last night however, we decided to venture out into our city of Leiyang to find a restaurant. We quickly got lost as every street looks the same (dusty, dirty, broken pavements, but very vibrant and full of life - people eating, dancing, playing cards). After two hours of wandering around without finding said restaurant, we embarrassingly resorted to ringing Gwendeline, a kind and beautiful chinese teacher who has pleged to be our friend and her and her husband drove to pick us up. She has made us memorise how to say in chinese "i would like to go to Leiyang No 1 Middle school please" so that taxi drivers will knbow where to drop us off next time!

We do not start teaching until monday now as our schedule is not ready, and so we have plenty of time to settle in, do some lesson planning and trying to find our way round our new home. There is clearly a lot of poverty here. Everything is of a very poor standard when compared to the west, but we are confidently reassured by the chinese that the city is becoming much richer due to its coal mines.

Every morning at 6 a.m we are woken up by loud orchestral music blaring from the school speakers, calling the students to do their morning exercises (bearing in mind this is technically still their summer holiday!). China is a land of contrasts, some parts very beautiful and awe-inspiring e.g. the great wall and the forbidden city were both breath-taking. The people are for the most part friendly and welcoming, e.g. a female taxi driver refused to let us pay the fare as a welcome to china gesture. However, there are a few things that are rather difficult to condone and witness. Hocking up and spitting big gobs of phlegm is a regularity for men all over china, no matter where you are, even inside a restaurant. The driving is apalling, SO dangerous, beeping the horn all the time, driving down the wrong side of the road, pedestrians walking on the road instead of the pavements, carrying their very young children with them on motorbikes wearing no helmets - we have seen a family of five driving on one normal sized bike, no jokes. Much of the time we are stared at as if we are aliens, which is funnily enough the word that is used to refer to foreigners. Matt successfully killed two cockroaches that liove in the rotten door frames of our bathroom door last night, but i am afraid that they might have a big family just waiting to have their revenge. Our apartment is alright, its liveable, sort of. Once all the facilites have been fixed (when we arrived, broken was the air conditioning, fridge, washing machine, and many window panes!). But most of these have been fixed, even if it did involve leaving a massive mess for us to clear up, and a botched job at that! (the panes of glass are held in place by nails banged in at angles to support the glass). Cracks in all walls and ceilings, a dribble of a shower nailed in next to the toilet seat with no shower curtain so the bathroom floor is constantly wet. However, I am not complaining!! We are aware that we must learn to adjust our expectations for a few months and bear in mind that we are very lucky compared to many people living in china. Our wage is double that of our chinese colleagues and we have weekends off, their only free time are sunday afternoons!

Anyway, hope all this has been enlightening to anyone who was curious about our experiences so far. Will write again when I have begun teaching.

Missing my family very much, hope you are enjoying yourselves in menorca!! Lots of Love from the Orient...... :) xxxxxx Rosie xxxxxxxxxxx