Tuesday 25th November, 2014                  1400

And the rain continues.

Not heavy but insistent, nonetheless I stuck with my plan of going to town for breakfast and shopping. Indeed, after breakfast I went to the supermarket and on the spur of the moment bought the ingredients to make lasagne. Well, naturally not the lasagne sheets themselves, they are only available online at huge expense, but the nuts and bolts. Anna has asked me to teach her how to cook western food and so tonight Matthew, she will be cooking it! It seems strange not to be making something like that for a western Wednesday but who cares?

I have definitely learnt the secret of this bus taking lark though. The secret is to go and come back early on a weekday. The buses are sparsely populated both ways so there is no need to look old or infirm in order to be given a seat!

Afterwards I took Pepsi to my office, just before school finished for lunch and they became manic. They were dead at noon and then all hell broke loose for precisely one hour, after which I was the only customer. The restaurant trade here is all or nothing and the speed with which people enter, get their food, bolt it down and leave is phenomenal. Not just students either, it is simply the culture - even formal meals are abbreviated by western standards.

One of my first actions on waking of a morning is to switch on the laptop and read the news. I visited the Daily Telegraph site (always do after checking the BBC) and as always went to the China section, where there was an article on the crackdown on building strange edifices. As the lead picture was of the piano house in Huainan which I visited in the summer, naturally it caught my eye. I opened the article and started reading. As I scanned it, I thought a quote from Trip Advisor seemed familiar. Hang on - I think I wrote that! Of course I wasn’t sure and so had to then go to their site to read my own review. Sure enough, it WAS me! In all honesty there are only two reviews and mine was chosen but it was gratifying to see mine chosen over the Australian Brisbane entry. Also it’s the first time I have seen my comments in the DT - plenty of other papers but not that one. I am sure my friend, reviewer extraordinaire and published author Geoff Woodland (shameless plug for his book Triangle Trade, available on Taobao, Amazon and all good bookshops worldwide and well worth buying) with four times as many reviews as me has been oft quoted but there’s a certain je ne sais quois about chancing upon your own comments in a national broadsheet.  For anyone remotely interested it is here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11249894/Five-of-Chinas-most-bizarre-buildings.html

After pondering last night on the e-bike situation I am three quarters of the way towards chopping in the old one for a new model. My current one seems sluggish now and winter notwithstanding, a bike that I can’t trust to take me to town and back is of no use to me. Certainly many people here have them just to potter about on campus but my bikes do a lot of mileage. If I can take the bike without getting frostbite tomorrow then I will do so. It will eat up half my savings but I may well go and do the deed.

The good or bad news today depending on how you look at it, is that it seems we foreign teachers won’t be required to perform at the Christmas concert this year. This news was greeted with relief by Kevin, who is not particularly at ease being centre stage unless he is reciting poetry. It’s not a precedent as we were surplus to requirements two years ago when they had a surfeit of student acts (and the last thing we want to do is deprive students of their chance to shine) but this time I am told the students organising it never included us in their plans. I reckon they are Kevin’s mob and he dropped unsubtle hints but it will be nice just to turn up and watch the show instead of spending half of it backstage or on it. In fact as this year the show isn’t that close to Christmas (I think that means it will be after new year) there is doubt whether I will be Santa and I will find out for sure this afternoon. I already have two appearances booked so at least the new costume will not have been bought in vain.

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Well the show is 16th December but apparently there will be no Santa this year. It was suggested I could lend the outfit to any student groups who did stage their own Christmas show but you can guess my answer to that! I am going to be the only person who wears that and I shall kepp it or take it with me if or when I leave here. I think I do a passable Ho Ho Ho and I don’t need a cushion or a pillow in front either.

Anna came and helped prepare the lasagne. God knows what it will taste like - it’s cooking now - but she had to leave to practise her dancing for some competition. I have told her to come back when she is finished so she can taste the fruit of her labours. I could get used to having someone do all the chopping for me. Although I have a cheap blender I do miss my all-singing food processor I left behind in the UK. Lazy I know, but grating cheese, slicing carrots, cucumbers etc is so much easier when you have one.

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Tucking into dinner. Tastes lovely!