Best interview ever!

Woke up and checked out early, taking the hour and a half bus across hungzhou, stopping at every stop in town! to change onto the bus to Anji. Another hour later and I had left the big city behind and was in fields and fields of bamboo! The biggest centre of bamboo construction and production in the world! with over 60,000 varieties, as I was soon to find out!

I was met at the bus station by Drew and a Alan, the VP of the school drew works at and driven to the school about a mile away. I left my stuff in drews room and we went and ate in the lunch area for staff, all the children in the school scream and run over to you and try to speak english, apparently me and drew look like brothers!
The school is years 1 to year 9 i think, with 1600 pupils! half of which live here.
Drew has a nice little apartment, lounge ,bedroom kitchen and bathroom, (with western toilet!) on the ground floor and it seems very nice.

After lunch drew showed me around the town a bit and I saw that it is quite small, 300,000 people make it tiny by chinese standards, barely more than a village! but it is a lot bigger than abingdon! went for a beer and saw the local sites a bit then went back to meet rosy (another english teacher,but chinese) who sorted a taxi to take us to the bamboo gardens where we walked through and looked at the bamboo, I took some photos, and then saw some giant pandas! Very cool. They had 4 pandas in an enclosure, it was very surreal and a lot of the features were very old, had a sort of ex cold war russia feel about the place that I hadn't noticed before. Dilapidated 1960s spaceship boats made an amazing picture, very odd things! but i didnt trust them enough for a ride!

we then headed back to the school and chilled out for a bit and around 5 were called to meet for dinner.
In the carpark I met the part owner of the school, Alan and Rosy and then drew and went with them to a local restaurant where we met the principal.
It turns out that Alan used to own the place and we got ushered into an upstairs room and we chose many different dishes including Squid, Fish soup, Beef, Pork, Bamboo, etc etc and it was all very lovely.
As the meal started the waitress came in with 35cl bottles of rice wine for all the men which you drink straight, continually, in lots of toasts. I managed 4/5ths of the bottle before backing down to beers whilst drew put away two, painful!

we finished the excellent meal and everyone was very happy, It was the strangest interview I've ever had! and drew and I wandered on to a pub for a few drinks more. We had a few beers in the only pub in town and then walked back to the school, drew a little worse for wear! and I not far behind.