A quick note on the weather

Just a very quick post to talk about weather.

My director of studies, who has been here for three years now, keeps talking about the coming winter, and how cold it gets. I, of course, man that I am (and well protected by my Perma-Jersey (TM) and Insu-Blubber (TM)), have poo-pooed all of her warnings.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, alarm bells rang that a pom, from England, home of the world's shittiest weather, doesn't like the winter here. But I, being a real man of amazingly real manly stature and whatnot, have ignored said bells.

Today, China decided to send a different, and altogether more effective, portend of the coming doom cold.

There was a wind which blew in from the river, that carried with it a cold such as I have never felt. It was a normal wind, nothing overly dramatic, but there was on it - like the first smell of sulphur before a massive storm, or the soft hush of the crowd before a pianist starts his first piece - a definite indication of things to come.

I hope you are all enjoying the warm weather back home.

Walking

Today, having decided that I am getting properly bored of Xia pu (the suburb I live in, whose name I can never spell the same way twice), I decided to go for a walk around the rest of Huizhou today.

It turns out that when they call something a city, there are reasons, despite how much it may feel like a village because you've been living in a small 3 square kilometer portion of it.

Anyway. Tristan (An English guy here - see pics of him in the Shenzen album) and I set out around 9:30 this morning, with no real target in mind, other than to go to the other side of the island.

At this point, as is my wont, I will digress a little, to explain the shape of Huizhou to you. It is... An enigma, wrapped what may be one, two, three, or four rivers. There is a large island in the middle of the city, which may or may not be an island, depending on who you ask or which map you look at.

Ok, more seriously - There is a really large river which runs through what I always thought of as the northern part of the city. Apparently this is actually the middle of the city. There is then another smaller river which runs parallel to the large city, but a couple of KM south of it, before curving and joining the big river. We live just south of this little river, and every day I see it on my way to school, and makes me wish, about 7 days out of ten, that I could row on it.

The bit that gets confusing is how they both link up, and that's where there could be one or two or seven rivers, and the island may or may not be an island.

Regardless, we walked to the other side of the big river today, and it was good. I've posted a number of photos of the walk. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, it's better you look at them than I type fifty-four thousand poorly chosen words. Oh, but I will say that actually, this city is pretty big. Not, like Joburg big, but easily the size of Durban. The point is that there's clearly a lot of exploring to be done, and no more weekends of sitting in the dorm for me.

Now, some stuff I swore I wouldn't do. When I said I was going to write a blog, in my head it would be filled with exciting stories of thrilling events in China, of truly life-changing epiphanies, and of witty anecdotes about life in this crazy country that I, the intrepid westerner, had struck out to discover.

It would never, of course, be filled with trite comments about my daily life, or even worse about stories of the kids I teach. (Again, a digression... After realising how terrible a rowing coach I was because I got too emotionally involved about it, these kids will never be "my kids", but only "the kids that I teach". Which is better.)

Back to the story. I'm going to tell a story about the kids that I teach. Because I'm all about breaking rules, YEAH! That's the way I roll! Cough cough.

The other day, one of the classes was doing a project on something or other (the topic eludes me now), and two of them were humming a little tune to themselves. It sounded vaguely familiar (as so much of China does - more on that later), and I asked them what it was. Turns out it's a song called "Lemon Tree", which is a big hit amongst young kids in China now. The thing is, I remember dancing with Beth Dickens to this song at my Matric farewell. In 1996. And it wasn't new then.

This brings me back to a comment I almost made earlier. So much of China seems familiar, but isn't.

I went for lunch on Wednesday, as usual. I decided, though, to try somewhere new, because I could. I walked over to the island. I wandered around a bit. I saw a picture of a waffle, with cream and some kiwi fruit on it. I thought that looked delicious. I went in. I ordered one. All of this is familiar. The bit that was.... not... was when it came. With peanut butter and watermelon slices.

It tasted ok though.

The best weekend yet

This weekend has been without doubt, the best one so far in China.

On Monday, myself, Claire and Tristan (a couple from the UK) decided to head down to Shenzhen for the day. It's about 90minutes by bus, and pretty cheap, so really easy to pop down for the day. We didn't really have an agenda, just decided to go see what all the fuss was about.

Now I'll tell you, over here, Shenzhen gets a really bad rap. It's supposedly dirty, and noisy, and amazingly busy, with absolutely no greenery. Just a futuristic post-holocaust movie made by some second rate director kind of place. I beg to differ though. And fair enough, we didn't get to see the whole city, and I wouldn't really want to live there, but for what it is, it was awesome. The city is actually amazingly clean. I'm talking, like, freshly washed clean. Everything there is pretty new, remembering that it was little more than a fishing village 20 years ago. The people were all amazingly friendly (ok, that's a constant in China, so perhaps a moot point), and the vibe was actually amazing.

I bought a really nice bone chess set, in a wooden box, for 540Yuan. This was bargained down from a starting price of 1600Yuan, so I felt like I got a pretty good deal. In truth though, I probably could have gone more - no worries though. We did some other random shopping (Tristan got a watch, Claire got some boots, and I got a price on the smallest digital projector you've ever seen), and then went for lunch.

Lunch was at a proper pizza parlour, with actual pizza, that tasted like pizza. Hen hou! (Very good!)

You know, it's funny, writing it all down now it doesn't sound so great. But the day just flowed, there was no pressure, no tension, not even so much as a moment of boredom or.... glitch.

We got back to Huizhou around 7, and then headed with Polly, Axel, and Loretta, off to the revolving restaurant. This is one of the prime restaurants in Huizhou, and I can see why.

The meal consisted of a buffet, stocked with truly amazing dishes. I'm not a fan of buffet's, because they tend to focus on bulk rather than quality, but that simply wasn't the case here. Each station had fresh, amazingly good food. There were oysters on ice (I got stuck in), brilliant salads, and, best of all, steak. The chef did have a bit of a desire to overcook it, but I managed to argue with her until I got about 400g of steak that tasted like happiness.

A good bottle of wine, some pretty magic coffee, and a whole lot of great company later, and I was a very contented man last night.

It's funny, but reading this post, it sounds like an amazingly random day.

Obviously I will need to post more often, and hone my "craft" to the point where I can actually try to describe pure joy.

Relativity

Albert Einstein famously described relativity thus: "Sit with a pretty woman for an hour, and it'll seem like a minute. But sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it'll seem like an hour".

Now I, unfortunately, haven't been sitting with any pretty woman, per se, but in as far as this whole country (or at least this city) is a beautiful woman, I guess the analogy holds water.

I guess what I'm trying to do here is come up with a really long way to say I know I haven't posted in a while, and for those that have been waiting I am sorry. For those that haven't been, this is going to be a long one, so I'm sorry to you too.

But where to start?

My birthday. My first birthday ever outside of good old RS of A, and my first birthday in a few years without Mike, which was strange. Apart from that though, it was a great day.

Mike phoned me in the morning from S-Korea, and we had a good solid chat, which made my day straight off the bat. Then there were also the tons of emails, wall posts, instant messages, and other best wishes from everybody back home, which were magic.

At school, I had kept it fairly low key, but of course a few days before the day it popped up on facebook and so everybody knew. The day was pretty much filled with congrats on managing to live as long as I have (everybody else is in their early twenties). And then, surprise on surprise, one of my classes threw a party for me. We did a lesson a couple of months ago on the calender, and had been filling in everybody's birthdays. One of the girls wrote mine down, or remembered it, or something, and they organised a surprise party for me, complete with delicious cake and a gift (a bedside lamp). Suffice to say, I didn't give them any homework.

The evening, a few of us went to a restaurant, followed by a couple of drinks at a pub. All pretty chilled, none of the usual debauchery that these sort of events provoke.

Moving on to some debauchery though... Halloween. Now in SA, we don't really do a hang of a lot for Halloween, so it's not a holiday I know much about. But the Americans here (God bless their little cotton socks), really got into it. Anyway, long story short, we had a really Chinese style party, which involves games. One game. Basically, we got divided into teams, and then had to do a treasure hunt all around Xia pu (the suburb we live in), performing various tasks at various venues. Each team had two westerners in, and a varying number of Chinese staff. The reason for the westerners is that Chinese people don't really drink much.

Hang on, digression needed. Chinese people drink a lot, because when they go out, they drink, and they always go out. But a night out for the average Chinese guy would consist of maybe two bottles of Tsing Tao followed by some violent retching in the toilets. I'm generalising here, but not much. We are somewhat revered, and often greeted with wide eyes, for our ability to drink. Which really isn't much.

Back on story. Our team was myself and a French guy, Axel, along with about 8 of the Chinese staff. There were six stations around Xia pu, which we had to run between. This means that at furtherest, we only had to cover about a km between stations. Unfortunately, at each station, in addition to our task, we had to drink three bottles of beer (I may have described before that these are 600ml bottles, not dumpies). Axel and I each took a bottle per station, and the Chinese staff shared the other.

Again, a digression. At the time, that didn't seem like a lot of beer, but now, in the cold hard light of day, my maths is better. The whole trip took us about an hour, and explains a lot about the rest of the night.

Once we reached the end of the race, which was in a nightclub...

http://picasaweb.google.com/zak.wood/Halloween

That's enough. The next day wasn't a happy one.

And now, suddenly, I've run out of topic. I'm sure that some other stuff happened over the last month, but for the life of me I can't remember it right now. I will re-post in a day or two, once I have mulled it over.

Thanks again to all those who have sent me news and pics from back home - more are always welcome!