Thursday 19th January, 2017                 0120

Not much happening here now and to be honest there’s not much likely to be before 27th February when I start work again with new students - none of whom will be English majors seeing as I am confined to giving lessons to wannabe Kindergarten teachers. But hell, it might be fun  and it pays for the smokes, drink and food. And this spring festival holiday is at least a fortnight longer than in Chizhou but I’m not complaining.

I suppose I could explore the city a little more (at 1y a bus ride it’s hardly going to break the bank) but that’s not really me. Goodness, were it not for Alice coming to visit I would probably never have seen the coloured mountains (or got some of the photos she took for me because she could scale the steps and I wasn‘t going to). Now give me a new city to visit alone and I might go but only if there are good hotels and probably more importantly, western restaurants and that’s where you will find me.

In fact I was looking yesterday and the city of Xining is close by. Well, about 90 minutes by fast train (the same one that goes to Zhangye and Urumqi) and it’s only 70y for a first class ticket each way. Plenty of hotels varying from 100-500y a night and two western restaurants I found on TripAdvisor. Whichever way I look at it, it will cost about 600y to go for one night and to be honest I need to spend less. I have eaten into the money I still owe and I do like to make my annual pilgrimage to Shanghai even if yet again I don’t return to the UK in the summer. I may weaken, after all, the mountains trip had me splashing out and for a few months I was paying out massive amounts for cigars and set-up stuff. We shall see!

Mosquitoes.

I have said before that they don’t bother me. By this I meant they very rarely have the audacity to actually bite me and that’s true. They DO bother me when I am in bed - when they buzz past my ear just as I am nodding off, prompting me to swat out and of course become alert again.

Unbelievably they are still around in temperatures that struggle to get above freezing even during the daytime. I can only blame the central heating for that because a couple seem to be reluctant to leave my bathroom.

Now in Chizhou they disappeared in the winter completely. The bathroom there had a tiled floor with the exception of where the waste pipe for the building went down in one corner and with typical Chinese workmanship they had left bare concrete around the pipe instead of cutting tiles to fit around the pipe. This caused a shallow water pool after every shower and it was some months before, for some reason. I turned the shower head onto the back of the pipe.

Hundreds of mosquito larvae suddenly got flushed out and down the drain.

This then saw me institute a summer regime of boiling a kettle every few days and pouring it there. Well, Chizhou does by and large have a temperate climate.

I have now discovered a similar problem here! In the dead of winter! You won’t believe this but they are laying their wrigglers in the joints at the back of the toilet seat! Now every time I take a shower I have to spray them out with the shower head and you wouldn’t believe how many new ones appear each day. At least I haven’t seen any snakes here yet although I am sure there are some.

I’m still seeing students dragging suitcases as they head home but I am hoping the buses will get less populated soon. Peili Square has been given the treatment for new year. Being the year of the rooster they have put up a display (I must take some pictures for you) of…well I don’t know how to describe it other than saying it is utter shit! It’s sort of white with bits of blue and what are supposed to be newly-hatched eggs and chicks. The trouble is, it isn’t redolent of either rooster or chicken when you have to look twice and know what year it is.

Never mind.