What's Crackin?

Time to celebrate Chinese New Year in style.

(Mental note:- check to make sure travel insurance is still valid)

Pauly

Sup?

Hey Noobs!

Today I’m going to do a big ol’ blog update for the more vocal members of our audience who have been requesting one for so long. I thought that perhaps, as we are moving ever so near to our intended departure date, you, the readers would no longer be interested in our everyday going ons. But I guess I was mistaken. A slap on the wrist for me!

So as it has been so long since the last update I’m going to have to sort through our digital photo album to job my memory on what has happened and what you have missed.

White Christmas

As many of you probably know by now, Caitlin and I were able to see snow for the first time EVER this Christmas. It snowed semi-heavily (I don’t know how to categorize the heaviness of snow as my sample size of ONE snow day is far too small to make any applicable or credible categorisations regarding snowfall volume) the Sunday before Christmas in Jinan. It was great to wake up in a well heated apartment and to see snow falling outside through our bedroom window. I have been told that this snow fall was only mild and tame but, to us, it looked like a blizzard spawned from bowels of Antarctica. Ok, maybe not that much, but it was certainly RAD! We went outside and played in the snow for a bit then walked out to the road and it was completely snow-ified. The cars were driving slow and with caution (for once) and I was able to do tremendous slides along the icy footpath with my gripless (some would say soulless) shoes.

Here are some photos to help you visualise what we got up to on that awesome day of days:

Dragon breath cannot be caught on film. It can only be experienced. Lesson learned.

Christmas eve – We went to a rad party at the foreign students building at Caitlin’s University and Santa was there!!!! Students from all different countries made dishes from their home lands and we had a glorious feast of Belgian pancakes, Italian pasta, American KFC, Russian salads, Mongolian something-or-rathers, and Australian Vegemite and cheese sandwiches! (That was me!). Caitlin also made a big vege salad and a big fruit salad but the sandwiches were the real show stoppers I think. We found out that Koreans really seem to enjoy vegemite as those things disappeared super fast. They were eating them with chopsticks. I laughed inside..and on the outside as well. Caitlin might tell you a bit more about this night as it is a blog post on its own.

Ok so, as I teach out in the mountains, it snowed MUCH heavier (as I am told and from what I can gather through my own keen observational skills) than in Jinan city. The snow lasted all week and by Christmas time, the school still had a thin layer of snowful joy lying around the area. Also, as it turned out, Christmas day was to be my last day of EXAMINATING my students and therefore would be my last day at the school. So Caitlin came to school to help me polish off the last 30 or so exams and we went out to a long ad-hoc Christmas lunch with some of my students who also happen to be our good friends now.

We went out to lunch at the student run teachers restaurant where the food is ABSOLUTLY DELICIOUS! I’ve probably eaten some of my favourite food in China in that restaurant and some of the dishes there will likely be the only Chinese food I miss when I am back in Australia! The food is, made and served by hospitality students and is also run by hospitality students and man, they really nail it. So we had a big feast, exchanged gifts and drank heaps of beer. The two boys (Frank and Lemon) and I decided to PK each other which basically means ‘versus’. Meaning, for the whole day, each person could not have more or less beer than the other two people. In China, you drink beer out of these small glasses in order to facilitate multiple toasting and skulling. It’s amazing how quickly you go through a tallie (pronounced taul-e) when drinking from these little devil glasses on a merry occasion such as Christmas!

So we smashed it at lunch time and then the students/workers had to attend class at about 3pm so we shuffle out of there and headed down to the student market to continue the festivities. It is also worth mentioning that these students (Emma ane Zoey were the other students, plus Jack and Nancy came later) have never really celebrated Christmas before so they were so happy and eternally grateful to us for letting them celebrate it with us. So yeh, we went to the market, kept eating, drinking, gumbai’ing (skulling after toasting), playing guitar, singing and generally putting the ‘Jesus Christ!’ back into Jesus Christmas.

Here are some photos of that mess:

New Years

We went to Beijing to celebrate New Years in style with our good friends Katie and Arne. We took an 8.5 hr sleeper train from Jinan at 12:30am on the 30th of December and arrived at Beijing on the morning of New Years Eve. We found our way to our awesome hostel (courtesy of Arne and Katie’s previous Beijing travel experience) and pretty much all fell asleep for a few hours (It’s hard to sleep on a hard sleeper!). The bar/restaurant at the hotel is really great and served good western food, has free wifi and when you buy breakfast in the morning, they give you a free beer ticket for the afternoon (YES SIR, THANKYOU SIR!). The hostel was also super close to Tiananmen square and other places of the like (I’m not much into sightseeing as you may or may not have gathered from this blog so far!). Caitlin and I are headed back to Beijing soon for 5 days or so, so we decided that the New Year’s trip would not so much be about sightseeing and more about relaxing and shopping etc.

So we chilled most of the day then went out to a bar called ‘Shooters’ which was PACKED. The place serves up hundreds of different shots and cocktails like a shot restaurant type thing. The menu was maaaaaasive. We had heaps of shots, did the countdown thing and had a very messy night over all. Caitlin and both lost our guts at different points in the evening! I’m gonna get in trouble for that sentence but I don’t even care! Freedom of speech man! Welcome to the blogosphere bitches! No, seriously…I’m sorry for all of that. That was a little too liberal for all of us I think.

So any way yeh, we just hung out, went to awesome restaurants, met up with other friends and had a good time in the ‘Jing. Caitlin also bought and awesome Ipod touch so she’s been addicted to that ever since. We bought a bunch of apps (monopoly included!!! Ok…I bought that…its super awesome). One app is called fring and allows Caity to use skype on the ipod touch, so I called my folks from the hostel bar (remember…free wifi…nice). It worked well. Glorious thing technology, ain’t it! Ok after re-reading this paragraph it sounds like I'M addidcted to the Ipod Touch...but i swear...she is too! She makes all sorts of to-do lists with it and stuff. Plus...you can listen to music on it too aparantly.

Other Stuff

Ok, well since then, stuff has happened but probably not too noteworthy. At one stage three repairmen finally came to fix our leaking bathroom (they had come three times before, looked at it and proclaimed…yes, it is leaking, it needs to be fixed). Apparently it had been flooding the apartment below us for 2 weeks or so! Anyway, they came an hour earlier than they said they were gonna come on a Saturday (9:00am) so we hadn’t showered or anything yet. So they came in, smashed up the bathroom and, as is Chinese tradition, dropped everything at 12:00 for lunch for 2 hours. So we were stuck in our apartment until they came back at 2 on the dot and fixed up the spurting, hissing, steaming pile of wreckage that was our bathroom (We had to stay home cuz we hadn’t showered and we didn’t know when they would come back, we had to let them in). But man, I will miss the two hour lunch break when I get back to Australia. And I will miss only having to do 18-20 hrs of work a week whilst living like a KING!

9:00am - Shiiiiit son!

Lunchtime 12:00 - 2:00 - WTF?

Finished - 3:30pm - and a bang up job I might add!

Caitlin is doing her final exams at the moment so she should be all finished by Friday. That’ll be rad. I’ve been a bit of a couch rat for the last week or so as she’s been studying all day and all my students have gone back to their respective towns/cities/villages.

Also, as Katie and Arne have gone off to Thailand for their holidays, I might be taking over Katie's Jinan job of helping promote this wine company in Jinan. Apparantly, all I’ll have to do is, be white, speak English and be able to drink alcohol at their conferences. I think it is a prestige thing of having a foreigner in your company or something. I hear it pays quite well so I’m excited. How often do you get paid to go and drink with a bunch of businessmen (Robbie, you can probably answer this one).

So how are all of you guys and gals doing????

Here are our plans for the remainder of our trip…

We will stay in Jinan until the 30th of Jan (we are celebrating Chinese new year with a friend of mine from Jinan on Australia day).

Then we will stay in Beijing until the 5th (We will do the obligatory Great Wall trip and all that other junk)

Then we will head to Hong Kong by either plane or a combination of plane and train and leave from Hong Kong airport to the land of sunburnt planes on the 7th at 9:30pm. Will make a transfer in Sydney and should be home by the 8th around lunchtime methinks (Then, in this summer weather of yours, I will become a sunburnt plain).

Robbie…Matto…start that teaser campaign…Sunday touch must return. I need the exercise!!!!!

Also you two, download Peggle Deluxe. It is awesomely addictive. It's like...snood addictive...but better. You can get it off bit torrent/mininova etc. I paid for it though. Look for a mac version or run it through Windows you Mac noobs ;)

Ok that’s all for now.

I might do some blog posts when we get some free wifi in Beijing. Hopefully Caitlin will post a blog about her school experiences before we leave Jinan aswell. Oh and maybe we’ll tell you how Chinese New Year goes too. Until then!

Cyaz

Pauly

P.s So long Haydos. There is no such thing as goodbye...only see ya later!

P.p.s SCREW BLOGGER! It keeps automatically reformatting my post without paragraph breaks after I publish it! Trust me...it was much more beautiful and clear befor it was published! Screw blogger to hell I says!

Last class before exams!

Hey,

I told you I'd be double posting today didn't I! But I guess, seeing as these posts are in reverse chronological order, this won't mean too much to you at all. Just know this...there is another post below. However, if you are diligent enough to scroll down the page everytime you come to this blog to see if you have missed anything and read all new posts in chronological order, you will know EXACTLY what I'm talking about! Right on!

Ok, so this week was my last week of proper classes before exams, so I decided to just have fun. In all my lessons we just practiced conversational english (talked a bunch of crap!), played English and Chinese songs on the guitar (sung a bunch of crap!) and did some revision for the exam in the form of a game of Jeopardy (played a bunch of crappy games!). But this week has been really fun and I think the students have really enjoyed it. Also, because this will be the last week I will have full classes (exams are split into two weeks and the classes are split into two halves), I took the opportunity to take some photos and videos which I would like to share with you!

Ok so, mainly I just took photos and videos of my most advanced class because today was the only day I brought the camera. Don't judge me...or my disorganised manner!