Day 3 in Cangnan

Got woken up at 1am by an improtu fireworks display from the locals! About 20 meters up the road some locals set off some fireworks to welcome themselves into the neighbourhood, although that doesn't seem like the best way to me! I hate them already! although worryingly in the run up to the spring festival it is only going to get more common!

We really need to decide what we are going to do about the spring festival as travel is so difficult we will end up getting stuck wherever we happen to be! a difficult prospect! 

I am hoping we can drop off our things here now and get traveling again until the new term, which may be as late as the 17th of feb now!

This morning we arranged for Chris to come down at half 8 so he could shower and so i set my alarm earlier, after snoozing it at 8,8.10,8.20 and eventually turning it off at 8.30 I was woken up by hammering at the door at 9 (which i barely heard over the AC) and the head of the building was there to look at the problems that are still in the flat, he, of course, speaks no english! 

Still no sign of Chris so after pointing at a few things I retired back to bed again where it was nice and warm for the first time in days! 

I fell back to sleep until half an hour later I woke to more pounding on the door. This time it was Chris moving his stuff into my spare bedroom/office to make it a two bed flat. Turns out they finally switched on the water in his room this morning and every single pipe leaked, the kitchen, the shower, the toilet and the sink, so badly that they had to switch it straight back off again.

I left Chris moving all his things down the help of some maintenance guys and again went back to bed.

I was woken at 11.30 by Chris walking into my room, partly out of boredom and partly out of hunger and I decided it was probably time to get up. As i lay there working up the effort to get up my phone rang. The Principle of the school was calling to ask us out for lunch in a local restaurant. We accepted and had 10minutes to get ready, that made me get up!

10 minutes later after a quick shower we were met outside and driven to a local hotel, on the 5th floor we had a private dining room with its own balcony and around 10 staff sat around a table

What followed was a lovely chinese meal of all sorts of things (with a lot of seafood!) with lots of languages teachers and lots of the high level faculty walking in and out at random times. They didn't stay as they didn't speak much english but they did wander in and out a lot, possibly back to the school again as it was not far.

The meal included fresh water crabs (nice but a lot of work) all sorts of crustaceans (which I avoided) including oysters, but de shelled and sat on top of some sort of soup. A lovely local fresh water fish which was not salty at all and very nice and black chicken soup which is made from a chicken with jet black skin, which keeps its dark colour even when it is cooked. It looks very disgusting but tastes very nice! 

The best thing about the meal was that most of the food from the fruit and veg through the meat and the seafood was very local, some from the town itself, most from the province and all from within China! How often is that the case in the UK??

At the end of the meal we were each brought a small bowl containing what looked like a floating sea shell which turned out to be a local delicacy and one of the most expensive things on the menu! Chris thinks it was a sea anemone... but either way it was very nice!

We got back to the flat and relaxed for a bit before getting a phone call from some more students wanting to come over, we told them to come over now and so met Zack and Alex, two 18year old students studying for their final exams for university. 141 days left they said! 

They told us a lot about the old teachers and about what teaching is like, also they gave us the email address for the old teachers so I dropped them an email.

We chatted for an hour or so and eventually hinted enough that they left, we also texted Eamon our English speaking friend about the AC and within 5 minutes the building manager was back to fix it.

Turns out the main problem was that as soon as we turned on the big AC unit with anything else it blew all the circuit breakers, so after a clean they are working ok again as long as we only use one at once.

He also helped it by bodging two circuit breakers in side by side with a warning that if we use too many high power things the wires will set on fire.....not sure i'm too keen on the building standards of this country so we are going to have to be extra careful, especially with no smoke alarms!

All Chris's flat and my flat have been pushed together and can now nearly furnish one apartment, we have a dining table to go with my dining chairs (he didn't have any) and a few other bits and bobs.

We then got taken by another teacher to get out lunch card so we can now buy lunch in the school canteen. 
6kwai for lunch (60p) and 5kwai for dinner (50p), very cheap! We then got shown the bike we had at our disposal, an old an rusty one that a security guard kindly washed for us and will need some tuning up! There used to be two bikes but one was stolen at some point, damn! they said maybe they will buy another in a year or two!!

After that was sorted we wandered out to find a local supermarket and found quite a useful one right opposite the back gate, we bought a bucket, and loads of cleaning supplies and then made a start on the kitchen...

Two hours later and we had managed to do the cooker, the surfaces, two cupboards, the microwave and the fridge, but still more to go! One problem is that the sink has a massive slice in the bottom and so is basically unusable, luckily it has a second smaller sink next to it, but that has no plug! Excellent! We will tell Eamon tomorrow.

Famished from our cleaning we headed out to find dinner, we stopped off outside the gate to buy some street food. 

We picked up some random things on sticks which was gorgeous meatballs, quite nice meat circles, not very nice tofu type vegitables, and was we think was either skin or intestines which were not nice at all, very rubbery.

We also bought some crisps and popcorn and the final choice was a kind of pancake with egg and real crispy bacon in with sauce and some other gorgeous fillings all curled up, this was lovely! and about 60p, and quite filling too, we will definitely know for next time!

We sat in and watched a movie again and finished off our crate of beer much happier now that the flat is warm enough to sit in and not have to wear 10 layers!

Also got an email from Anji with another job offer! But I think now we are here we should stay, despite the guidebook hating this province! There is apparently the best beach in china only an hours bus ride away! So in the warm that will be great!

Gonna put up some more photos after this too, also going to set up the crappy PC they have given us as a wireless router so we will both be able to get online at the same time and maybe Chris can do some of his own blogging! In the meantime he says Hi to everyone he sent this out to.

We have also added our email addresses to the end of the page and the comment system should work so if you have any questions or want know more please get in touch!