KTV BBQ

Teaching on Saturday was difficult, 6 days of teaching started to take its toll! 

Saturday night two students invited us to go for a hotpot dinner and then go to KTV for the first time to sing! (KTV is chinese karaoke!). 

We went to hua gua for hotpot and then met a group of students to go to sing. Chen chen and her friend, christian, oceana, rabbit, and a few of rabbits friends as well as shelly and porridge.

Chris and I got stuck in the Roxanne before moving onto linkin park etc etc and had a surprisingly good time, in a private room with a big TV and a few MICs, some beers and lots of laughing, not sure what the chinese thought but it was very fun!

The next morning we woke up early and met some of my students as they had offered to take us to a nearby mountain for the day!

The students told us that despite heavy rain we would still be going and a bus would arrive to pick us up shortly. 20 minutes later it was obvious that no bus was coming, it turned out that because of the tomb sweeping festival the buses were all booked and so would have to make our way to the bus station and get a public bus from there!

The teachers jumped in a car and left all the students to make their own way across town, negotiate and pay for a bus, and then to find the place we were going, pretty cool, no school trip in england would do that! Into the bus we packed a couple of BBQs and some charcoal, lots of food and went off towards the mountain.
After a death defying high speed bus ride centimeters from a long mountainside drop we arrived at a small temple in the mountains near rice paddies and a much more rural atmosphere. unfortunately as we arrived the rains came down hard, I chucked my coat on and kept taking photos but the students who seem to rely much more on umbrellas got quite wet and I worried they would cancel everything!

We waited for 15 minutes looking around the area before the rest of the students arrived and finally the teachers too. Jenny with her sister and sisters young daughter (around 5?)

We put the stuff together and started to carry all the stuff up the mountain, before long I had carried the child, the heaviest bags and parcels and still gone exploring with some students and disappearing down tiny cracks between the huge rocks. The heaviest box by far was the Mangos, partly because (as we didn't realise until we hit the top) they had been weighed down by some cement rubble in the bottom of the box! 

At the top we set up a BBQ and Chris got to use some of his skills at firelighting and was shocked by the chinese attitude of heaping charcoal on and continually throwing on meths until something lights, and all the students were left cooking over the small open bbqs, and much tasty and occasionally under cooked food was eaten by all! Luckily the chicken was all precooked!

The students were impressed with some juggling of oranges, i'm teaching Chris to juggle at the moment and so hopefully we can get some passing on the go too soon!

Walking back down the hill the path travelled through the stones and under them through some quite long and very small caves, nothing like disabled accessible but awesome fun, and some potentially excellent scrambling if the weather was drier, we have marked it as a place to come back to later!

In the evening we decided to do something nice for Jenny as she has been so helpful and drop off the photos of michelle her sisters daughter so that she could take them home. As we quickly uploaded them onto her PC she found out we hand not yet eaten at the crazy late time of 8pm and insisted on cooking us some noodles in home made chinese wine and some rice wrapped in a leaf. It was very tasty and they are both lovely people.

The next day I had been invited to go to visit longgan the next town across towards the sea, a similar size to Lingxi but the home of quite a few of my students, by the time I had told a few people I was going and word had gotten around we had countless invitations to visit various people! In the end I accepted one and made my general excuses to the rest. Spent a lovely day with Cady one of my students, she showed us around the town, did a little shopping and got some tasty coffee before she helped us grab a taxi back to our town! 

Today we were invited over to a students house for a meal cooked by her mother, it was tasty and the language gap wasn't too bad with me and chris speaking english, her chinese and two students to talk in both. Got to prepare for lessons now, will upload some photos too when I can!