Ok - I am doing well on the not leaving it so long this time since last entry!!

I hear the weather is picking up in England? - Hope that's Summer's finally on it's merry way to you! - The Olympic Torch is on the island today and passes through Haikou! One of our friends was interviewed on the news - unfortunately we miss this event due to our teaching commitments in Wenchang! Hey ho...

Facebook is now accessible so I will try catch up over the next week or so with albums from my earlier travels… even though a lot of them will probably bore the hell out of you!! Since last time, we have been receiving various fruity gifts from the family upstairs; one being a watermelon the size of a small child... they are a lovely family and their daugher is in the Junior years at the school we teach at... Sometimes when we sit on one of our balconies at night and they hear us talking, the daughter or her 'sister' [who we think is an older cousin] try speaking down in English and we attempt Chinese - there have, of course been face to face conversations too... And on these balcony nights we watch the goings on in our street - sometimes until the early hours and it really is quite something:
The shack across the road we have now decided must be a drug-shack and every night we watch the drunken men staggering down the road (too much rice wine) to their village down the track... And also the frequest police that turn up are not, as you might imagine, there to arrest the owners and close this successful business, no, they are there to stock-up on their weed needs... along with tuk-tuk drivers, students...

My phone died last week (which i later found out was due to a virus it caught from the net computers in Haikou when i was uploading photos there last...) and ironically on the battery it says: 'Made in China. Finished in China' and i added '... broke in China. Fixed in China' - and it hopefully won't get anymore illnesses whilst i'm away - as it is my camera! But it was quite exciting as the boss of this shop where i took it to be fixed took it and mended it himself! - Being waiguoren does have it's benefits afterall!!

So Sarah and me headed back to Wenchang the Sunday before last - saying goodbye for a good few weeks as we don't intend on heading back to the city now for a while - in the hope to save a bit of kuai and also get to know more of Wenchang and explore etc!

Whilst staying in haikou in volunteers' beds who had departed for England, I woke up in the morning covered in a huge rash. I slapped on the antihistamine and both of us were scratching away… knowing bedbugs were the likely cause... We later found out it was not surprising seeing at the guys hadn't washed their bed sheets their whole time living in Haikou! Ahem, 4 months. Lovely! No mater, antihistamine tablets and cream did the job and after a short while the itching had subsided and the redness gone down… So, back in Wenchang, getting off the bus and into a tuk-tuk: what a sight we were! - Stepping off the bus we got a look of 'the whities are back in town' along with confusion - we had a little extra than when we left: A bag of rice the size and weight of a child (!) A pack of 24 toilet rolls (their cheaper back in the city - and happened to be on offer the day we did our shop…).. and a few hundred tea bags.. and of course our packs from out weekend stay! So we bundled into a tuk-tuk… and off we rattled to our flat.

Sarah and I have been invited to go and stay at a students' home one weekend (she's Sarah's 'top' student, who we have played basketball with at the weekends…)- she has fairly high standard English and is an absolute sweetheart - we would be absolutely honored to go to her home and meet her family. They live in a village a little way from here. It's quite exciting and I will keep you posted on how that goes…

Wenchang. I really love it here and Sarah and me really do call this our home now...

Last week, our students were having mid-term exams - which meant we got a few days off… and then followed but a national holiday on the Thursday! Thursday brought us a very exciting, even if physically draining day as one of the volunteers back in Haikou organized an activity day for our whole group - in the middle of the island… So we had a 2 hour bus-ride to Qionghai and then what should have been a moderate price for a 50km taxi ride into the middle of nowhere… however with it being a public holiday the one driver who knew where it was not budging from his price. He was really rude and even after some local teenagers stopped and tried to help us (an ever-growing mass of people gathering around us at the bus station).. I was going on my own judgement and adding 50% to what the price should be was fair, consulting the teenagers and also a contact back in the city and they all agreed with me the price he wouldnt budge from was still too much. Being the hard-headed lass I am, provoled by the unpleasant rudeness of the driver, we walked away and got a motorbike instead. I was attempting to talk to some moto taxis and find one that knew where we were going…I found a nice smiley man with a pleasant attitude and got him down to a good price - so we were then on the back of a bike for the next hour! With our packs… on the bumpiest of dirt-tracks - definitely a ride to remember (I will try get a clip up on facebook)!! We had had to be up at 6 and out at 7 to complete our mammoth mission of even getting to the adventure place, whereas the rest of the group coming from Haikou, left at a leisurely hour, traveling on expressway roads in an air-conditioned minibus!! (They obviously don't know how to travel!).. and we arrived after experiencing another Chinese bus, crammed full of hairy, BO armpits (and that's just the women!) with the chain-smoker driver directly in front of us for 2 hours! But anyways, after arriving at the place, we met up with our mates from Haikou and paid our driver and off he went... then started our activity day! It involved boating out to a remote part of the jungle.. which took 2 takes seeing as the first raft we got into began to deflate and let in water... The following is an extract from Sarah's blog as i think it sums it up in a much better way than i possibly can!

"...Eventually, we were jungle trekking, being constantly stalked by a cameraman. I was more than willing to be the first to abseil down a sheer rock face, with jagged rocks and swirling water below me. We swam to some waterfalls, some of which we abseiled down, others where we leapt from their mighty top, down passed their cascading water and splash into their deep plunge pools below. Utterly awesome. We went white water rafting too, although saw little white water, really I felt like ratty from "Wind in the Willows" just bobbing along on the river..."

So that night we headed back to Wenchang and eventually got to bed after what felt like a very long day... But no hope of a lay-in in China... The next morning, I was startled awake at 6am thinking that bombs were being dropped over Wenchang as there were VERY loud booms... Which turned out to be fireworks and firecrackers marking the beginning of the May holiday... (which, for the next 3 days, were let off every 2 hours through the day and night) There have been many a morning in Wenchang when i have been up early and sat on my balcony watching the night turn to day while Sarah is still sound asleep... but that morning, we were sitting on our balconies watching colourful explosions in the sky and a large gunpowdery-cloud consume our entire road... The Chinese know their fireworks and they know how to do them well - you often hear them going off - particularly during the day (us English really don't understand the whole firecracker thing as you don't see anything - they're just one big noise) - but they go off for celebrations, birthdays, company openings... but needless to say those few May holiday days? - I didn't get much sleep!

Last but not least, I must mention aerobics. It is free to go along to and is held on Mon, Wed and Friday nights in the market square...We went last night, and learnt some new moves... But just as we were getting into it - a few hundred Chinese women (nice to see they are dragging some of their husbands along now,ha!) and 2 English girls; one 6ft, were interupted by first a motobike riding right through the class... and then a 4x4!! - We stand at the back, but nowhere is safe! As the way you face ends up being reversed, so there's the 2 of us in hysterics at the front... and me feeling as elegant as the BFG when the ballet-esque warm-down comes around. Marvellous.

Toodles for now! xxx