Wednesday 5th March, 2014           2130

Western Wednesday went very well despite a bit of a panic at one point.

My guest was Yvonne and we ate in Ollivier’s place next door as I don’t have anything to eat off - and won’t splash out on anything either until I know my future is secure for another year. I did the planned dishes whilst Ollivier produced an apple cake and a huge plate of crepes. I am pretty certain none of us knew it was Shrove Tuesday and Ollie makes pancakes every few days to eat for breakfast, lunch or dinner anyway. Strange people these continentals

I had to try to come up with my food with two lessons in between so I prepared some in the morning and the plan was to come back after work and finish the job. When I got home I needed to have a little sit down to rest my legs after the class and taking Pepsi out but about five minutes afterwards we had a power cut. Great. I could still cook the cottage pie but not bake it and the soup would have been extremely lumpy because I needed to use Kevin’s electric blender. Not only that, I couldn’t get hot water to wash up the stuff from the morning that I needed to re-use. In fact I couldn’t really get water at all as it was a mere trickle because the campus water pumps had gone off as well. By the standards here it wasn’t such a long outage but it was a bit of a scramble to have everything ready for 1830. What was gratifying was that Yvonne, who had told me before the meal she wouldn’t like the soup (I found out later she didn’t like the carrot and lentil one) actually pronounced it delicious. She was also amazed to eat potatoes in two ways she never had before, in the soup and mashed. I think everyone enjoyed it, Kevin  certainly did for he snaffled the last of the cottage pie for his dinner tonight.

My free day was interrupted by a meeting of all the foreign teachers with Prof Fang, at which further changes were announced. Some of them are fine but one of them was a little awkward. We teach oral English yet we were now being asked to set homework. How can you mark oral homework? A solution was suggested by Prof Fang wherein we split the classes into permanent groups and each week they do it together but only one of the group (a different one from the group each week) gives a short talk on it and the group is graded as a whole. It’s something we can do but to be honest I am still not that certain about it. Other things were that we have to submit a self-evaluation each year, if we want to continue working here for another year we must fill in an application form (what??) and we have to have an annual medical. And it won’t just be the cursory once-over from the quack but the full gamut, x-rays, blood tests, ECG etc. time to get my wrist BP monitor from the spare room and start making sure mine is as good as it was a year ago methinks! Of course, if I am found to be in rude health then that can only help my problems in the “we don’t want you because you are going to croak it imminently“ department. If I am not that could be a problem but aside from generally being a  porker and of advancing years I feel fine so fingers crossed. All this for the inspection for the university application for promotion.

Lucy came to do the cleaning today so the place would be spick and span for Qing’s arrival tomorrow. Remember I said I wasn’t going to jump for joy until she was on the way? Good job. Always something comes up and it’s not as if I asked her to come, she called me and said she wanted to visit me. This time it is her friend Helen, who Qing has just found out has returned to Tongling and got back together with the bloke that was beating her up. She is upset, angry and a little fearful not only for her friend’s safety but also after her comments to Helen, that she may now think they are not friends any more so she is trying to see her tomorrow or Friday. She is now hoping she can come on Saturday, which would be terrific because I have made myself free for the weekend and I want to take her to the Sichuan restaurant to surprise her with the show. We shall see.

Anyway, here is the short video of Joanna taking part in the show last week - a little shaky but a fond memory for me. I hope you enjoy it.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eajdd1YMNcc