Sunday 18th September, 2016           1900

I know I have complained about the school bus always turning up late but today the driver excelled himself. He never turned up at all.

When it was about 25 minutes late Janet sent me a text to tell me to take a taxi. All well and good but who was going to pay for it (I’m certainly not if they are going to house me an hour away) and I don’t have the address in Chinese to show the taxi driver?

Apparently the bus driver was going to pay as he had forgotten today was a working day and I had to call Janet from the taxi so she could speak to the driver to let him know where to take me. Incredibly, despite the taxi not being driven as if possessed by demons as the bus always is, he got me there ten minutes early!

Before all this I managed to repay Joan the money for shipping my stuff (a guard in the bank helped me to do it via a machine) and when I got to school I repaid Janet 1200y for the original loan of 500y plus 80y she put on my phone online and 600y for the new oven she ordered for me last night. The 500y price shot up by a ton because the free delivery didn’t apply to us in the middle of nowhere (and not that far from the Gobi desert).

That has left me with just enough (if I am careful) to get me through to next payday. Certain things I still need will have to wait awhile. Oh, and my classes tomorrow are cancelled because I have to go with Brenda, presumably to present myself to apply for the foreign expert certificate, which will need to be issued PDQ as Friday is the deadline for the residence permit. Great, instead of getting up at five I can sleep until seven.

The class of sixty has now depleted to 32 and from what I could ascertain is in fact optional so aside from the fact they are in my classroom I have no disciplinary powers whatsoever apart from banishing them. That won’t be necessary I feel, for aside from the odd private conversation they behave themselves. The ones who came again clearly want to improve their English - in fact one girl today stopped me and asked if I could speak a little slower. Stunned, I was not annoyed, on the contrary I was delighted. It meant at least SHE wanted to understand what I was saying and wasn’t content to sit there letting it wash over the top of her head. Well done that girl. I was simply stunned because despite my exhorting students to do it for the past six years this was only the second occasion it has happened.

The classroom computer, whilst being on, had a problem with projecting onto the screen. While some of the kids were trying to get it to work I plugged in my USB ready for showing half a film. This is the second time it has happened, it happened once in Chizhou with a school computer. It wiped everything off the stick and unformatted it! Now that is damned annoying because it takes well over an hour to reformat it and then afterwards I have to load the films on it again. I reckon it will take two hours before it is all done. It’s never one of the smaller capacity sticks, always the big one. Luckily what I wanted to show them was on another USB anyway so nothing lost bar my time tonight.

Did the bus driver give me the 32y I paid for a taxi as I was promised when he came to take us all home after class? Not on your Nelly! Well, he will. I will make sure the school do something, especially as the practise here seems to be to get the teacher to pay for everything first and then reimburse a week later. I have to stump up 600y tomorrow for this application. Good job I actually have some money. Why they can’t give foreign affairs some petty cash up front I have no idea.

All day I have felt like I was in the closing scenes of an episode of Dads Army. Air raid sirens have been sporadically going off and I can only deduce this was to do with drills for the freshmen doing their military training. It reminded me of my hometown, where there was one such siren at the fire station to summon the volunteer firefighters.