11/11/03

It’s 12.30am on Monday night, and I’m sitting here watching ‘The Hot Chick’ (Rob Schneider flick) trying to figure out what to entertain you folks with. It’s been a fair while since I’ve written. Apologies to those who actually check the site quite often! It’s been a fairly good couple of weeks, not too much drama.

Well what should I start with. It was the 22nd annual celebration of my birth last week. Was a good day, fairly uneventful, caught up with everyone back home, kept myself out of trouble. I didn’t hear from anyone across the big lake to the east, thought I was going to last the day until at about 11.55pm when an email came in from Rosie. My Romanian pal downstairs actually gave me one of the best gifts, without even realizing it, when I heard from Ian that she was moving out! I’ll drink to that.... She was gone on Saturday, such a shame she didn’t actually let me know the exact day she was leaving, I would have thrown a hell of a leaving party! Almost like she did it on purpose...??! For the first time for a while Melbourne Cup day fell on my Birthday, would have been nice to have been there again! But had to settle for a long distance bet on Distinctly Secret, who failed miserably... ah well, always next year..

Teaching has been going well. I got through the first round of testing and will have finished reviewing by tomorrow morning. In general everyone did well, there were a few strugglers but nothing that can’t be helped. It’s getting a lot easier, it would be nice to have an actual curriculum to follow but it doesn’t look like that’s gonna become a reality anytime this year. We realigned the classes last week, a few students up, a few down, none of them were too enthusiastic about either. I’ve told them it would be a trial week, hopefully they will adjust.

Last weekend I met a couple more foreigners in town Alistair from Toronto, Carol from Melbourne and Cammy and Luci from Romania. They threw a bit of a Halloween bash which was a good night. Adam and I didn’t end up leaving until about 4am after which we discovered Shantou turned into a bit of a ghost town in the early hours of the morning. Thankfully we managed to grab a cab and made it back to the ranch all in one piece. We had a gathering of foreigners again the weekend just past down at the string of nightclubs. Brett (Canadian) had booked out a Karaoke room. Karaoke rooms are a huge thing here, I don’t really understand it, people book out rooms which fit about people, and then sing the night away. It’s all very interesting, but not really my think. If I’m gonna make a fool of myself in front of 10 people I know, you might as well throw in 100 people I don’t know as well. A private room doesn’t help the cause. We hung out there until about midnight and then hit up one of Shantou’s two main foreign attractions, the Go-Kart circuit (the other being the bowling alley). It was great fun, Adam, Carol and I went at if for about 25 minutes. It’s quite the place, a small indoor circuit with a bunch of cars that get up to quite a clip (which Adam’s neck discovered when Carol decided she’s use his car to stop hers, rather than her brakes). Attached is a bar. That’s right a bar. Only in China!

My only other endeavor has been to start learning the godforsaken language they speak here. The language itself is actually pretty straight forward. Well, it would be if not for the characters.... all 1’000’000 or so of them. I went to the university Chinese course this morning and understood very little it being the middle of the semester. I have got a private tutor however to teach me three times a week, so hopefully I’ll be up to speed before too long... see how I go!

This hasn’t been the most exciting of entries I imagine. I actually am full up with a cold and it being 1am am pretty tired. Thanks for all of the birthday emails, will try to get back to everyone as time goes by.....