Tuesday 21st February, 2017                     0430

This is potty.

I seriously need to adjust my body clock and I have one week including a weekend of late night rugby in which to find a solution or my new students on Monday will think zombies have taken over the classrooms.

On Sunday night I went for yet another chicken curry. It’s nothing special, a typical curry you might buy from a Chinese takeaway in the UK but it got me out of the house for a couple of hours. There’s only so much catch up TV you can take when you have no human contact. I would go to Buddy’s more often were it not for the prices - the curry only sets me back 16y and I take my own jing jo. They have really nice white beer but that is also priced the same as Buddy’s Guinness at 35y a bottle. Funny isn’t it? I would be over the moon if the prices were that level in Shanghai but I begrudge paying that much here.

Yesterday continued in the vein of surfacing in mid-afternoon and doubtless today will be no different. I eventually decided I couldn’t be bothered to cook but instead would go to Aila, the bakery where I discovered very nice croissants when I was trying to find the mythical spring roll place. As you know, I don’t eat much and I thought if I bought two or three of those then I could have them with butter and wash them down with wine. It would do me nicely.

Except at 2030 they were closed! I remembered there was another bakery the other end of the BRT stop so trudged back there, only to find they either don’t do croissants or they had run out. They didn’t even have decent doughnuts so I left. I could have walked on to one of the fried chicken outlets but instead bought some TUC biscuits and made do with vintage cheddar and black grapes.

However, as soon as I had left home wearing my down jacket (the temperature halved today as compared to yesterday when a light jacket was all that was required) I noticed the tick, tick, tick sound of what at first I thought was small hailstones hitting my coat. it couldn’t be rain because the roads were completely dry. Everyone does it and I am no different - I held my palms upward and extended my arms to try to see what it was but of course it was dark by that time and the street lamps are not exactly bright.

It took me a further five minutes to realise this was one of the sandstorms I had been told about when I first came. Well I don’t know about you but to me a sandstorm is something akin to Lawrence of Arabia wherein the hero has a cloth covering his face and the sand comes howling in horizontally. This though was not what I had expected. Although there was a chill breeze, it was almost as if someone was aloft and sprinkling salt from a cruet. I’m not even sure it will have coated the parked cars. Most odd.

So with a mere six days left I need to go to BHG at some point and I really want to fit in a lengthy outing to get to the cheese place before I start work again. Silly really, given that when I AM working next term it will only be two days a week! Must be psychological.

Of course, once back in the swing of things, it will be back to that old staple of teaching in China - worrying whether you will be asked to sign up for another year! I cannot say that I am happier here than I was in Chizhou because I am not. Sure, I have my own office and my own classroom but none of my own cloth to occasionally socialise with. That’s not so bad but very occasionally everyone needs to have fun with people who understand you properly.

On the other hand I am settled now, they appear to want me and they are getting the books I requested. If I have to move again so soon I will not be pleased, what with the upheaval and expense involved.

Some of you may remember the Belgian French teacher in Chizhou in my second year? Five schools in five years! The only one who couldn’t understand why he was never retained was him and yet even when it was pointed out he never changed his methods. He never went anywhere, drank or anything and so probably saved 80% of his salary and his entire worldly goods fitted inside a suitcase plus he was young but I suppose when you get older you start to put down roots, much as Kevin and I did in Chizhou, only to be cast aside by their policy which the last time I looked still had them with only one western English teacher.