Summer is coming!

The weather is getting hotter with most days being around 30 and as it gets hotter the students outfits and getting more unsuitable! Some of them even wearing anime style outfits to class for some reason! They amount of time they spend preparing their outfit and makeup for the lesson is much longer than the time spent preparing the homework! 

Bribery in school!

One of my better students was using her phone in class and so I confiscated it, intending as always to return it after the lesson after some threatening to keep it forever, she however offered to buy hit back in exchange for sweets next week, I jokingly accepted but the next week she actually did bring a small packet of sweets! A lovely girl. :)

Django!

I had been waiting to see django unchained in the cinema for ages! First it was delayed for a few months because the chinese cinemas wanted to promote chinese films, then on release day it got pulled for a month and 'readjusted'' for chinese cinemas, by this point everyone had seen it illegally on the Internet anyway, I managed to avoid hearing anything about it and finally went to see if it in the tiny cinema I like near the university. 

While waiting for it to start I went to the games arcade next door, a huge room filled with 90s Japanese language video games! Including a street fighter section! Awesome!

When I got in there were 10 people in the cinema, we had a row each, and several of them were not prepared for the violence of the film, but I had a great time and really enjoyed it! 

If I get the chance I wouldn't mind seeing it again! 

Organizing the cultural training

I had a meeting in yinzhou district in ningbo, right over the other side near Nottingham university in preparation for teaching some lessons to students going abroad for an exchange in New Zealand. 

I got the bus over and met karen the company rep outside Nottingham uni and she drove the 2 minutes to the office, when we got there it then took another 10 minutes to find somewhere to park! 

We went into the office block and their office was up on a high floor, I met all the staff but the boss, who wanted to talk to me, was not in! 

I sat down with karen and went over what I had prepared, adding her suggestions and removing a few parts they didn't think we're needed. 

We finished and the boss still wasn't back but another guy in the office, Kim, started chatting with me in chinese about coffee, he also loves coffee and so we talked for half an hour about where to get a good coffee, and how to get Starbucks to make a cheap latte using their daily blend. 

After another half hour their boss finally came back and then sat down for a meeting with me, I expected karen and Kim, who could translate any words I don't know, to stay and help with the meeting but as soon as their boss came they told me she loves talking and can't speak much english, then ran away! Leaving me to a half hour business meeting with their boss in chinese! 

Luckily the boss was a lovely woman and after the start where she used a lot of 4 letter sayings from ancient china, all of which I didn't understand, and started speaking using simpler language we got on ok! A few words I had to translate and a few times she had to explain but she could explain most of them in simpler chinese or with a similar word that I knew already, a good chinese test! 

After the meeting karen and I went for dinner in Wanda plaza nearby and ate some tasty Hongkong food! 

The first lesson was planned for a week after, I better get preparing! 

Metro shopping trip

Every month there is a shopping trip to the big metro supermarket and yesterday was this months, I went along and picked up some wine for less than 3gbp each, impressive, and then found the meat section. I haven't had a nice steak in china, ever, chinese steaks are thin, small and tough, but in metro they had rump steak for 13gbp a kilo, I splurged a bit and bought a kilo and a half and it looks good. Chris gave me a hand cutting it up into some tasty looking steaks! I can't wait to try it! 

New coffee maker!

For my time in ningbo I've been using Chris's coffee maker, the press down type, that he bought from Starbucks but when his friend came to stay he needed the coffee maker back, leaving me coffeeless, not a good situation for me!  

I looked on taobao, the chinese eBay, and found lots of coffee makers for around 80rmb, 8gbp, but then I found a proper espresso maker that takes ground coffee and makes upto 4 cups of espresso for only 170, 17gbp! At this price I had to have one and so now can make espresso, iced coffee, latte and all the other kinds of coffee I can imagine for a fraction of the price of buying coffee in a chinese coffee shop, where you regularly need to pay 4gbp a cup, for not great filter coffee! 

The problem is my considerable supply of coffee imported from the uk has run out! I went online again and bought three bags of yunnan coffee from the west of china, I asked for ground but unfortunately when it came it was beans, and I don't have a grinder, so another trip to Starbucks to ask if they can grind it for me!

Picture of the lovely coffee maker attached!

New Cinema trip

Mina mentioned that she had found a new cinema quite near the university and so after teaching I came home and we got the bus 4 stops down the road towards zhenhai, (away from town), and when I got off the bus i was in the middle of nowhere, at a housing estate.

I asked a random guy if there was a cinema nearby and he led me around the corner and down the road, a 10 minute walk, to a nice sized cinema, cool!

It was late by this time, 10pm, and i wanted to see GI Joe 2, it was the last showing and the woman behind the counter was very friendly, she gave me a student rate even though I wasn't a student and the cinema was empty except for me. As soon as I sat down they started the movie, (5 minutes early) and the projectionist stuck his head in to check everything was ok. 

A very convenient and lovely little cinema, right near the university, perfect!

Mountain climbing with happy pictures

Job opportunity

A job came by my door (literally, two people came to my door speaking chinese and asking me to teach western culture)

I accepted and met with a representative of the company near the university, Karen, she seems nice and it seems we might well have some work to do together in the future teaching some students in preparation for going to New Zealand on a homestay!

Mountain climbing

I taught in the school that put my name up in lights again on a saturday and the woman who introduced me, happy, invited me and chris to go mountain climbing on the sunday, we accepted and so early in the morning two cars, one with another chinese speaking family in and one with happy, her husband and her child who all speak English.

I was in the chinese speaking families car, and they were lovely.

We chatted all the way to the mountain, an hour or so away, got out and climbed for an hour up the mountain beside a river and some small reservoirs.  The local story was that before the reservoir there was often huge draughts in the area, and one year they were so desperate they sacrificed a dog in front of the temple. 

After the sacrifice a huge flood came, and washed away all the houses except one.

Now they have reservoirs here, so the need to dog sacrificing is significantly reduced, and the dogs are much happier!

We stopped on the path at the crossing over a steam and they prepared some tasty noodles and nian gao rice cake over an open fire. 

It was fun playing around in the stream, (and getting wet socks and shoes in the process) and playing with bb, their son.

After that we climbed for another hour, for once without steps or a clear path, up to the top of the mountain and past a few more reservoirs. 

At the top they are building a huge road and observation station from which to 'observe the ferns' in their natural habitat. very odd.

The whole day the chinese people were obsessed with finding, collecting and eating wild raspberries, at one point spending nearly an hour foraging in random bushes for them! madness!

On the mountain top there were some cool tea fields, chris posed for a nice picture, i however couldn't resist the silly picture, (in waist high bushes).

We eventually climbed down in the evening, very tired and ready for an early bed!

Mayday on Mayday (nearly)

A band I had wanted to see for a long time was mayday, or wuyuetian, five month day! One of chris's student's recently showed me a website, damai.cn which lets you buy concert tickets, and I saw that they had a concert on April the 30th in Ningbo! cool! I booked tickets for me and chris and away we went.

We got a taxi there, and even showing the taxi driver he wasn't 100% sure that it was the right stadium, but luckily it was. We walked past a huge number of people and eventually found out seats, sat at the back of the stadium right at the top. There were so many police, every single entrance or exit had a line of policemen as protection, although as soon as they show started they mostly went in and found seats inside for a better view of the stage.

We were surrounded by chinese people and there was no warm up band or supporting act, just straight into the headline show.

The played a good 2 hour set, with many songs chris and I knew from our time in China and it was really good. 

The Chinese concert was a bit strange, they had luge LCD each side showing the lyrics for each song (as chinese people can't always understand by listening alone due to accent and regional pronunciation differences, and the fact they dont sing the tones) and so the concert becomes one giant KTV sing along!

It was a good gig though, and it was cool, they sold light poles with LEDs in that the audience were all waving but they were remotely controlled so they could change the colours remotely! so they changed them for different songs or had them cycling, it was cool!

Overall I'm glad I went, it was expensive, 500rmb a ticket for the second cheapest, especially with no supporting act, but was a great gig and nice to sing along with thousands of chinese people to songs I knew.

Ningbo's new station

A couple of pictures of Ningbo's new train station, one of 3, that they are currently building, it is huge, the size of a small English airport, and they are also building a subway at the same time, and this is happening all over China! 
I also went though Hangzhou's new station on the train, which dwarfs Ningbo's new station with 20+ platforms, and again, its only one of 4! amazing!