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.