2/10/03

Am sitting here trying to speed up the drying of my clothes with extreme mental concentration. It’s Thursday afternoon, I’m heading into town to stay with Denise and Jen for the night so we can head off nice and early tomorrow morning. Denise called about half an hour ago to see if I’d come in to meet Les, Jen and her for dinner, but I edged on the side of not wearing damp, possibly mouldy clothes all weekend! There hasn’t been a whole lot of interest happening in the last couple of days, it being holidays, however I figured I’d better throw in a few words considering I’ll be gone till Sunday or possibly Monday.

Didn’t get up to too much yesterday. Ian, Shelley, Jenny, Chris, Echo, John (new journalism teacher), and John’s girlfriend were over on Nan au, so it was pretty much just Adam and I left. We went down to the ACC (Guest house) for breakfast/lunch at about midday, and sat around for a while. Unfortunately the staff discount (15%) has been removed, “now that SARS is no longer a problem”, gotta love that! So we really had to shell out the big bucks. I spent the afternoon cleaning, which took a couple of hours. The rubbish bag in my bin had split which made for a messy job, and a lot of swearing and cursing. Actually a fair bit of cursing was done throughout the cleaning process! It was accelerated at points, such as when I discovered my washing machine had decided to colour my plain white shirts with black marks.

The group got back from the island just before dinner, so Ian, Shelley, Jenny, Adam and I headed over to the east gate for some dinner. Took the camera, so there are a few photos of the feast. Was a good meal, highlighted by some liquid fire Shelley had ordered, leaving us all gasping for air for a good 10 minutes. Luckily we all survived, and are not looking forward to the occasion when this concoction decided to leave our systems (it hurts when it goes in, and hurts when it.....you get the idea!). I got back to the room and watched a bit of TV, wrote a few emails, then made tracks. My bed sheets had not dried yet, so I had the pleasure of condemning myself to the comforts of the couch.

TV here is quite the luxury, as I have said we are lucky enough to have two full English channels; CNN and ESPN. Both which repeat things over and over and over again. CNN the news, ESPN focuses on soccer. Adam and I were joking over lunch that we actually end up watching the English Premier League games from the weekend about 7 times. I’m pretty sure I could actually commentate for one of those matches, giving the commentary a minute in advance. Having recently heard that the rugby world cup is being fully covered on another foreign channel which we can actually get here, I set about trying to sort it out. My optimism was encouraging, in truth I would have had more luck tying my big toenails together. I got into a dialogue with Money which went something like this (by email):

ME: Money there is an English channel called STAR sports which is broadcast by ESPN, we can get it in Shantou, it is currently scrambled on my TV, how can we get it in the building?

MONEY: The channels we get are ESPN and CNN.

ME: We can get STAR, how can we go about doing that? I am willing to pay.

MONEY: I don’t know anything about STAR. The channels we get are ESPN and CNN.

ME: STAR is a channel, if you come by my apartment I can show you.

MONEY: I don’t know, I’m so sorry, I don’t know.

ME: Who should I talk to about this?

MONEY: I’m so sorry, I don’t know, I don’t know STAR.

ME: That’s okay, who is the best person to talk to?

MONEY: (tba)

We have hit a bit of a brick wall, this is pretty much a standard template you will encounter in China when it comes to getting things done. I followed much the same path when trying to get my toilet fixed. Money is a nice person, but she struggles as a superintendent. She doesn’t know a whole lot about actually getting anything done, I think she got the job because she speaks English. The problem is she doesn’t speak English all that well. I’m sure she’s quite a competent person in her native language, but when in comes to English she’s basically just a nice person. I’m pretty sure I will find out about the rugby a few months after the 2007 world cup has finished! The frustration of it all did give me good reason to have a beer, so it wasn’t all for a loss!

Well that’s about all the rubbish I can write for now, I think these clothes are almost dry. Hope everyone has a happy Chinese National Day holiday! Speaking of TV, I heard in Tianamen Square some guy burned (blank blank blank).... on CNN. Anyone hear what happened?

- Sam