Sunday 15th December, 2013                    1515

A lazyish day of sorts. Lucy cam to clean this morning although all I asked her to do were for floors and some of the windows. Until I get everything stowed away there’s not a lot of point in doing anything else, however considering my balcony has eight windows and I have French doors separating it from the bedroom she had work enough. Just a shame they don’t look a lot cleaner than before! To be fair to her (and she did complain about her not seeming to make a difference) I have yet to locate something right for cleaning windows here. Oh sure, you can buy window cleaner but there is nary a chamois or even a duster in sight. I ended up giving her two cotton pillowcases with which to do it.

When she had gone I started to get dressed and noticed a new pocket had appeared in my new coat, only it wasn’t a pocket. Six inches of one of the seams had opened up, I think it happened when I caught a broken classroom door handle last week but never noticed and nobody said anything. Mind you, I have walked around for hours teaching with my flies undone before now and nobody has let me know. Whilst I have the required accoutrements to sew, I didn’t think I could do a particularly good job on this occasion because the lining and stuffing prevented attacking it from behind. I decided to ask at the sweet pork place when I took Pepsi if they could help - lots of the ladies who work there knit and do cross-stitch.

Using only body language I managed to make myself understood and was told to take the coat off. In short order there were three women on the job, one sewing and two holding everything in place. Whilst not exactly an invisible repair, I must say they made a pretty good fist of it and when I tried to pay them for their efforts they refused to take any form of payment.

We have rain forecast later today, all day tomorrow and most of Tuesday so I have now parked up out in the open for the night (no shelter at the new building) but took the precaution of putting the cape over the seat so at least tomorrow I shouldn’t get a damp backside.

Kevin has returned from Beijing most disappointed to find the capital is not a particularly vibrant or attractive place - in fact even the Chinese teacher that went said that he couldn’t believe he had taught about Beijing for years and when he finally got to go he couldn’t believe how drab and uninteresting it was. I think I may have liked it, though only for the food!

Monday 16th       1800

Christ, suddenly I’m chock a block with engagements.

First of all after lunch I was given the poem I’m supposed to read at the teachers concert. In Chinese. I sent it away and asked for it to be translated into pinyin, which was done, but in type so small I would need a magnifying glass to read it. Anyway, pinyin is only good if you know how to pronounce things like Q, ZH, J, X etc (and they are all different depending on which words they are used in!) so I need to get a student to speak the words to me so I can rewrite it in my own version so I can get the right pronunciation. So far so good. Then I was hit with the fact the concert is THIS Friday!!!!!! Love a duck……

Then I had Apple wanting to come to school to discuss my Santa performance for this Sunday. She’s just left, all excited as she is the hostess and I asked her for “my” theme song to be played just before I make my grand entrance - Santa Claus is Coming To Town. Slight problem is that I am being collected at 1430, the show starts at 1500 and finishes at 1730. Santa appears near the end (maybe 1630 or so) and so I need to be kept out of sight until it’s my turn. The bash is being held in an hotel so they wondered if I would mind being put in a room for the duration with beer available. I said I was sure I would cope - talk about the Green Room!!! Still, I need to make my complexion florid to be a convincing Santa, especially as apparently most of these kids actually believe he is real!

Then I had a phone call from Prof Fang’s assistant Jane asking me to be part of the foreign language department’s tug-o-war team next Wednesday afternoon. At 1500 when I have a class that shouldn’t finish until 1510. I can work around that as I will be doing final exams next week and that class, because of the New Year day holiday need to be started this week. I will now do the bulk of them this week by working late - I’m considering doing the entire class at once so as to have a completely free day next week but I shall see. It’s probably not possible because I have invited the lovely Yvonne for a Japanese that evening and we are meeting at 1645 and with a dog that will need a walk it will be difficult.

Stop press: I just found out this Friday is only a rehearsal so at least I don’t have to panic quite as much.

Whoever expects a Christmas rush when you are a teacher??????