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So, as I mentioned in my last blog, the other 6 volunteers in Jiangxi province came up to visit us last week, arriving on Wednesday evening: Beth and Cat from Chongren, Rob and Dan from Yihuang and Matt and Ned from Zixi. They arrived late Wednesday afternoon, whilst Nicole and I were still in Jingdezhen (I know, I know, bad hosts), so had a couple of hours to settle in and explore before we got back and met them at KFC. This was our first of 4-5 days together, so I'll go through it day-by-day, just because it's easier for me to remember that way!
Wednesday
Having met at KFC at about half 6, we had a really nice, relaxed evening in, catching up and playing lots of family-style games together - namely girls v. boys Taboo and that game where you have the name of a famous person stuck to your head and you have to work out who it is. The girls won Taboo by miles, for those who are interested, although partly thanks to Ned, and we had more trouble than we should have with some names in the name game. I'm thinking mainly of Beth trying to guess "Winston Churchill" here, although "Muhammed Ali", "Frodo" and "Homer Simpson" all took a while as well.
Thursday
Nicole and I were teaching Thursday and Friday, but as our lessons start so late we had the whole morning to spend with the others. The night before, Ned had agreed to join me on my run around the lakes but, as he'd only brought skinny jeans with him, he needed to borrow some shorts. Well, the only shorts I had spare were a very feminine floral pair, so he had to borrow those. Not that Ned minded - he was definitely in no hurry to take them off after we got back. I think it was several hours after we got back before he had a shower and changed, supposedly because the hot water had gone (which it had - it didn't resurface for the rest of the visit, which was, erm, fun) but the rest of us had our suspicions...
I don't really remember what else happened before I went into school to teach, so I'll skip ahead to the evening. When I got back, everyone was home and the girls were preparing a meal for us all. They were making about eight different dishes, including making their own noodles from scratch! Dan and I joined to help roll the dough for the noodles, using wine, beer and soy sauce bottles in place of a rolling pin; my dough was rubbish and had to be taken off to be finished by someone less incompetent. Dinner was brilliant - our own mini-banquet - and the rest of us had eaten half of it whilst Beth and Cat were still in the kitchen finishing off the final dishes. Whoops. Then we had another chilled night in together, talking and playing games.
Friday
After a lazy morning, Beth, Cat and Dan all headed out for an intense day of gift shopping, so I took the boys to lunch at one of the garage cafes, whilst Nicole waited in for the workman coming to fix the water. Apparently they'd seen this cafe, one of our favourites, before and remembered it as "the cockroach place" because they'd seen a huge cockroach running across the counters. Lovely. We ate there anyway, Matt, Rob and I being able to laugh at Ned as he was criticised for his chopstick technique by an old man at the other side of the room, who enjoyed correcting him so much that he came over to demonstrate, laughing the whole time.
That afternoon, Beth, Cat and Dan came into school to join me for my Senior lesson. I'd told a few Senior students that my friends were coming to visit earlier in the week and they'd been so excited that I'd promised I'd bring them into school at some point. The class they came to was 400, who I'd only taught a couple of times because there was always another teacher (who has since turned out to be the vice principal) there when I turned up to take their lesson. My lesson plan was just to let the students chat to Beth, Cat and Dan and ask any questions they wanted but they were all quite shy so this didn't work quite as well as it could have. That said, between us and the students, we did manage to sing quite a few songs (two students came to the front to sing by themselves, which I was pretty impressed by) and even got Dan to do the worm across the back of the classroom. After class, Beth and Cat were heading back to the house to decorate it for mine and Nicole's joint birthday party, so Dan and I headed up to the office, where we met Nicole, to kill time until I was allowed to come home. Whilst we were up there, the girls had asked us to email some photos of their passports and visas to their waiban - apparently it was urgent. Well, we played lots of Tetris, did a lot of facebook stalking and even rewrote personal statements, but we completely forgot to send the photos. Whoops.
When we finally were allowed home, it was to find balloons taped to the gate and front door. Inside was even better: the whole front room was lit with dozens of candles, there were paper chains hanging about everywhere, a big "happy birthday" sign made from coloured paper on one wall and, of course, music. Beth, Cat, Dan, Nicole and I actually went out for dinner almost straight after this but when we came back it was to begin the party officially. This started with Nicole and I opening all the lovely presents the others had bought us: from Beth, Cat and Dan, we each had a little charm bracelet with our initials and some charms they'd chosen specially; from Matt, Ned and Rob we had slipper socks, slippers and a little Angry Birds cake each. The cakes were actually the sort we've been eyeing up in the bakeries ever since we got to Jiujiang, so they couldn't have chosen better!
We spent the evening similarly to before: drinking, chatting and playing games. At one point, Dan disappeared upstairs and returned in a Pikachu onesie; this obviously needed to be shown to as many people as possible, so we headed off to the 24hour KFC. It was about midnight, so we didn't see as many people as we might've hoped on the way, although we found some Chinese businessman in KFC who wanted to have their photos taken with us. (The guy next to me in the photo was very obviously trying to make himself as tall as possible, so I went up on my tiptoes to be a pain. Master of subtlety that he was, he then tried to shove me back down by my shoulders before the photo took.) Then back at the house, after everyone else had gone to bed, Cat, Dan, Matt and I stayed up trying to make a ouija board to communicate with any ghosts that happened to be around. This wasn't particularly successful. Maybe the ghosts were offended by our slightly-shoddy homemade ouija board, maybe the language barrier was an issue, or maybe they took offence at me and Cat laughing the whole time, but whichever it was the whole seance idea didn't work out.
Saturday
Originally, we'd all planned to use Saturday to go to Lushan mountain, the big famous tourist destination ridiculously close to Jiujiang that Nicole and I still haven't visited. As it turned out, Nicole and I couldn't go because we'd been invited to the wedding reception of a teacher from our office, and the others couldn't really be bothered. Instead, we all had a good lie-in, Nicole and I only getting up in time to meet Winston at 11.30 to head to the reception. This was held at a nice restaurant about 10 minutes drive from the school; I got a bit nervous walking in, as I definitely didn't recognise the bride at the door and she definitely didn't look too pleased to see us. Luckily, it turned out there was another wedding upstairs, where we actually did know the bride! (Although I don't know her name...) We gave her our presents (as given to us five minutes earlier by Winston) and sat down at a table in the corner of the room with Winston and a couple of other teachers, where we spent most of the meal trying to work out the differences between Chinese and English weddings with Winston. The big ones we got were that at Chinese weddings, everyone gives the couple money instead of gifts, and the brides usually rent their dresses, unless they've been made by a family member. You also sign a register at the reception, so that the bride can send a present back to anyone who gives her a gift but doesn't attend the reception. The big things I remember about this wedding reception were eating turtle (tasted pretty good when you actually managed to find some meat amongst all the shell and gristle. Mmmm.), lots and lots of confetti canons, and the bride and groom shuffling around in a circle as though they were on a rotating podium, kissing, to Whitney Houston for honestly about 3 minutes straight.
When we got back to the house, Dan and the girls were in the kitchen cooking pancakes for everyone - top house guests! After this came bacon and egg sandwiches, which although quite different to their English equivalents, were apparently pretty good. We still had no hot water, so Beth and Cat went to the hairdressers to have their hair washed (I'd braved the freezing shower that morning and it was absolutely horrible) whilst the rest of us sat about the house, variously playing Angry Birds games, fixing up kites found in one of the spare rooms and messing about on the internet. When Beth and Cat got back, we all set off for a walk round the lake with our newly-fixed kites and ended up hiring two boats from a guy with incredibly bad teeth. The boys' boat patrolled the side of the lake, flirting with the Chinese girls walking by there, whilst the girls' boat went on more of a tour, trying to get closer looks at the lake-side temples.
I'm going to try and wind this to a close now, as this blog entry is getting pretty bloody long now and I'd probably have to skip over the rest of the night anyway as a couple of my students have now found this blog! Let's just say there was baiju and beer and hide and seek, and it ended up being quite messy for 6 out of the 8 Jiangxi volunteers. We said goodbye to the other volunteers on Sunday morning, but will see most of them in Nanchang for Christmas shopping in a couple of weeks. There is a very small selection of photos from their visit on this blog - all taken by Nicole who takes her camera duties very seriously! but loads more are going up on facebook, for those of you who can see them there.
Ella xxx
- comments
Jim I think we need more information on the rest of the night -- couldn't you use code! Anyway, you haven't written anything your grandparents couldn't read so forget the snoops. Anyhow, v entertaining.