Bout that time eh?

Hey everyone.

Wow. It's been a long time hey? Time's starting to fly by so quickly over here. I only have 4 weeks left of teaching before I set my exams. Also, this week I have my students doing oral presentations so that should be fun. One part of the presentation is for them to write and perform a song using slang in the lyrics. I gave them my e-mail so they could send me rough drafts and, no joke, about 3/4 of them are blatantly just copied and pasted off the internet. Plagarism and piracy is such a non-issue in China. I swear, everyone downloads all their software and movies and mp3s for free (I know we do this too, but here it is just expected of everyone and no one can actually see any wrong in it). I feel like saying...."you wouldn't steal a handbag..." d ne now now ne, d now now ne, d now now ne (music from the ad..duh).

Anyway, other than that, classes are going fine. I'm running a lil dry on ideas for classes but everything usually works out ok. Now I have a good little library of lesson plans that I can use if I ever decide to come back to China or If Caitlin ever does ESL teaching in Australia.

Here are some more photos of my school and some students I dine with from time to time.

The girl next to me is Emma. She is a very funny little girl who loves learning english. She desperately wants to be Steve and my little sister haha. She is really cool.

This guy 'Frank' has really good English and is a good friend of mine now. He and Lemon along with Steve, Jenny and I have lunch together on Tuesdays and after that we play pool. tis fun.

We had Steve (the other foreign teacher at my school) and his girlfriend Jenny over to cook dumplings the other day. Jenny is Chinese so she showed us the ropes but us, being foreigners, wanted to tweak the ancient recipe a lil to see if we could make it appeal a bit more to our western tastebudes. So we made dumplings with mashed potato, cheese, chives and also bolognaise dumplings aswell. They were all quite tasty but Jenny nailed the Chinese dumplings. In the end we had hang our heads and admit defeat.

Also, the other day a couple of students (Lemon, Monica, Cindy), Steve, Jenny, Caitlin, Arne, Kaity and I stayed at the marketplace near my school and had a great game of texas hold em. (Gambling is illegal in China but apparantly we were far enough out of town for it to be ok). We didn't really gamble anyway and we didn't let the chinese students pay as they don't have much cashola. But yeh it was great. We ended up going to this little coffee shop/bar that was pretty empty and just asked if we could buy the bottle of bacardi from the owner and asked him to keep bringing ice and coke all night. It was very cheap, maybe 140 kwai all up at the end of the night (about $30 now that the Aussie dollar has become China's bitch...) but we also took a bottle of Bai Jiu that only the boys...no...MEN were drinking. This is chinese alcohol that has a similar taste and alcohol percentage as...well nail polish remover. So the loser of any big hand had to shot etc... So yeh that was really fun. After that we hit up Lang Kwai Fang again and did the usual tequila, dancing and talking crap with foreigners etc...

Ok so, what else. I made an AWESOME veggie tangine the other day with mashed potatoes and toast. It's cold here so I wanted to make a dish that would warm us up and, as I can't make devilled sausages here, this was the next best thing. I think we'll have some peeps over and ill make a huge batch for everyone. I thinks on tuesday the low will be at -3 degrees so this might be a good day to have em over.

I've been hanging out with this american fella named brad and we have been playing guitar together, along with his Canadian friend Dave. It's awesome though because when I go over to his place (he is also a teacher but he works at Caitlin's university), he cooks awesome awesome food. He used to be a chef or a cook or something and he has just nailed chinese food for westerners. He make all vegetarian chinese food from all organic ingredients and it simply amazes me because I find it so hard to cook anything with the ingredients that are on offer. But alas, the other day he made Caitlin and I a three course meal with vegie wraps as a starter, creamy spinach soup and french bread as an entree and two indescribale mains using tofu, wood ears, colliflower, chick peas, tomatos. onions and some sauces and spices that I cannot name. It is so good to finally eat delicious chinese food that is not oily! So I wanna have him over but I'm afraid my cooking might not live up to his standard lol. If only it were Australia and I could cook up a big lamb roast or a super awesome gourmet pizza!

The heating got turned on yesterday but you can hardly tell. The heating is hust hot water being pumped through drains and heaters in the apartment. I guess it will have an accumulated heating effect over time, but at the moment, this seem dubious.

I thought I was putting on weight here in China but I weighed myself at a mates place the other day and I've lost like 8 kilos! (I came here at 83 kg and now im 75!!) This is not so great for me as I connot afford to lose to much weight, especiallyduring this winter! I think that maybe any muscle I may of had when I came here might have actually just transformed into fat lol because I really do not have much chance to do any exercise over here. I'm keen to get back into touch and maybe some more running when I get back home tho. Maybe I'll walk gizmo around the block everyday. lol.

Oh, , I'm now wearing long johns. Hooray!

Also, i finally got to try some Beijing Duck (more like Jinan Duck tho) and it was nice, but I've been told it is 1000 times better in Beijing so I'll try that in January eh? Nice.

And finally, I finish teaching on the 26th of December and we will be home on the 8th of Feb, 2009. The plane tix have been rebooked and they are locked in and paid for. See y'all then hey!

Ok, catchya all round like delicious, australian, meaty tender 'melt-in-you-mind' rissole!.... with tomato sauce, mashed potato, veggies....mmm

Pauly