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!

Oy!

Hey everyone,

Time for another blog update. Man these things are few and far between these days eh? Oh well, not much longer here now. Caitlin will prolly do a better blog update than me as I don't really have any photos or anything truly interesting to blog about today. But she went to an orphanage yesterday and played with the kids all day so I'm sure she'll post about that.

I know we only have about 6 or 7 people visiting this blog but I really want you to look into signing this petition regarding the Rudd government's proposed Internet filtering plan.

It really is a stupid, ineffective, and uneducated plan where they want to impose MANDATORY filters at the ISP level (Internet service provider level). So instead of installing a stand alone filter on your computer they want to filter your data before it gets to your house. This has been proven to not only be ineffective in filtering the bad stuff they don't want people looking at, it can also slow down national Internet speeds by UPTO 87%!!!!! It's so ridiculous that the government can expect that they can implement this infrastructure that TOTALLY contradicts their campaign promise of implementing a world class broadband network in Australia. Really, the Internet filtering plan will leave our Internet crippled and, furthermore, will give the government the opportunity to filter whatever they want. This is catastrophic in today's information economy. I can tell you from living in China where similar filters are in place, that we definitely DO NOT want this filtering plan to go ahead. Even if you have super broadband your Internet speeds are crippled.

The only thing that still works fast is p2p sharing, but this is absurd because p2p sharing accounts for nearly 60% of high Internet traffic and is also the number one vehicle of child pornography and other nasty things. So this filtering plan will not stop anything...except for the development of Australia's broadband infrastructure and, furthermore, it will throw Australia further down the ladder in average global Internet speeds and infrastructure. This is something that we as a nation cannot afford. The digital divide between Australia and the rest of the first world countries is about to expand exponentially and I believe it is out duty to try and stop this obscene attack on the freedom of our information. I still like the Rudd government, but I do think that this may be one of the biggest mistakes they could make.

I have embedded a petition form into this post so, if you want to, you can sign quickly and painlessly. This is not like other Internet petitions though, this campaign is run by Getup.com (an Australian based online activist website - they helped get David Hicks back to AUS). The campaign is receiving heap of press and already has close to 85,000 signatures. They will also be running a targeted online campaign soon but donations are needed (they have raised $35,000 so far i think). Sign this petition and tell your friends, the future of our Internet really depends on it.

Pauly

And presto...

Hey noobs Pauly here,

^^^Look what I made^^^. In Australia, sure, you could easily whip up one of these for nice lil snack at lunch time. However, here in China, well I could woo any westerner with these babies. I would be considered a culinary maverick. Nice.

Featuring: Bread, Mayo, Tomato, Smoked Ham, cheese and a touch of pepper.

Please note: we ran out of margarine before this batch and I woulda made something with avocado but it costs AUD $10 for 2 avocados!

We have also been making some nice sandwiches with iceberg lettuce.

Hardest ingredients to find...ham and cheese.

ALSO:

Nationalities: Olivia (Australian), Claire (French), Brad (American), Katie (Canadian), Eugenia (Italian), Oko (Mongolian I'm pretty sure) and not in the photo - Arne (Belgian). Plus Caitlin and I of course, we are also Australian so we do not count. We were doubles in this collection.

We hosted a dinner party on Saturday night and it went really well. I cooked a sorta veggie tangine and Olivia (the girl on the left with short black/brown hair, she's from Sydney) cooked an awesome roasted capsicum and eggplant dish with coriander and lemon as a dressing. I also cooked a massive batch of mashed potato as a side and we had bread to dip as well. Along with a few beers and wine, a good night was had by all. All eaten and drunk to the soothing melodies of the Gin Club and the Decemberists. Nice. Finally, Olivia cooked up an awesome dessert that consisted of fried banana, ice cream, crushed wafers and a rum flavoured toffee sauce to top off the dessert with pure decadence. It was a really good night and I've been mackin' on the leftovers ever since. Nice.

Only 3 more weeks of teaching and then 2 weeks of exams and I'm done!

Catchyaz!

Pauly

Our mini holiday

Hey everyone, Pauly here...

We arrived home from our little mini holiday in Qingdao yesterday. We had a really great week in the little seaside city and would love to go back there if we ever get another chance.

We stayed at this placed called the YHA Old Observatory and was absolutely fan-bloody-tastic. I highly recommend it to anyone planning to visit the area. It is run by a Chinese family but the guy in charge (AJ) went to high school in the Sunshine Coast and did his university in Boston so his English was really good. His best attribute though (other than being super friendly and a great fella all round) was that he knew what westerners wanted even if the westerners didn't know what they wanted. After being in China for a while, you forget about a lot of little things that you miss and, at this hostel, they had everything from equal sugar and masterfoods tomato sauce to western toilets and great showers, western music/tv/films, soft beds and AMAZING home made pizzas!


But the absolute best thing about this hostel was, by far, the mamahuhu lounge. The hostel is a refurbished observatory as the name suggests and on the top floor there was this great dining/lounging/drinking area that had a fantastically awesome view of Qingdao. It had a basic western restaurant (with great food like real grilled cheese sandwiches and fries, currys, aforementioned home made pizzas, proper steak and chicken burgers with fries etc), a bunch of tables and big lounge chairs, a pool table, great lighting and a tv/dvd projector that projected onto the side of the actual observatory. Another cool thing was that, not only was the bar open until the wee hours of the night, but also the western food wasn't ridiculously priced as it usually is in China.



It was great hanging out up there for a western breakfast, going into town during the day and then coming home and chatting with the friends we made at the hostel and drinking Qingdao beer fresh from the Qingdao brewery.

A special shout out goes out to Snow, Evie, Tim, Bobby and Mike, some awesome American teachers + 1 awesome Chinese girl we hung out with most of the time we were in Qingdao. (Sorry, I just realised we didn't get any photos of you guys and gals!)

EDIT: I found a photo of the group on Snow's facebook. Thankyou web 2.0 and social networking!

The bar also provided a communal acoustic guitar for those late night drinking sessions ;)

When we arrived at the hostel, like the stupid westerners we are, we just assumed we could book a room when we arrived....the day before one of the biggest national holidays of the year in China. So, lo and behold, there were no rooms available at the inn. Luckily, after talking to AJ for a little bit and declining the offer to book a room in a "sauna" down the road, we asked if we could hire one of their tents (they have tents for hire in the summer). He insisted that it would be to cold and said we could sleep a tiny little room that was soon to be refurbished into a massage room. They set up a nice bed for us in there and everything. After that first night, we were able to book the next 3 nights in a perfect little private room with a shower and western toilet, espn and air conditioning. This was much better than what our friends got as they had a few to a room and had to shower in the basement showers....if i remember correctly.

So yeh we went to annual Qingdao beer festival and ate some great meat kebabs (shou cou i think its called), met a dead deer and drank a bunch of beer.

Caitlin and I also did a tour of the Qingdao beer factory.....and then drank a bunch of beer.


LoL - the nutritional values of tsingtao beer. Nice


Every night we would come home and relax upstairs...and attempt to drink a bunch more beer. It was awesometown.

So yeah, if you ever come to China, i definitely recommend the old observatory and Qingdao. Less smog, nice weather, great people, good times.

Oh and the website is soooo much better than any other Chinese accommodation website we have seen so far. We found out that the reason for this is because there is French-Canadian who has been living at the hostel for about a year now who is super talented at web design and Internet promotion. We also met this fellow as his bedroom is linked with the massage room so he got a huge fright when he woke up in the morning to go to the toilet as he has to go through our room first (we were passed out stone cold after the beer festival!). Nice.

So, if you want a taste of our little adventure I suggest u pop down to your local liquor store and pick up a couple of tsingtao/qingdao tallies and imagine yourself in this little piece of paradise.



OK well that is about all for now. I've added a skype button to the site and am automatically sending out e-mails to like 10 email addresses I could remember whenever a new post goes up, k? K.

Argh. have to start teaching again for 12 weeks straight now. Stupid teaching. lol. See yaz.


Pauly

Winter? Already???

Hey, Pauly here, just a quick update.

Two days ago it was Autumn. Yesterday, without any warning, it became Winter. It was crazy. The seasons in China, (and Jinan more specifically) are so distinct. Very different to Australia.

I walked outside in my normal t-shirt and shorts (with trusty mexico belt we all know and love) and everyone was wearing jackets and jumpers and trousers. Then the cool breeze pierced my flimsy clothing. It was so weird cuz everyone was saying to me all day, "why aren't you wearing a jumper" and "aren't you cold???" and I'm like, well I wore clothes like this yesterday, how was I to know the temperature would drop like 5 or 6 degrees to a steady new temperature overnight. I dunno, i think it's gonna keep dropping till dec-jan when the average temp is about -6 to -8. So anyways, i went out bought some trendy new winter clothes today (Robbie, you will be impressed with my new style). Maybe we will post some pics when its gets a little colder. These are super warm clothes so they may not yet be applicable for the current weather, a hoodie should be ok for now. No, these new clothes are for tackling the real cold days ahead. I just got them before the price jumps (apparantly up to 5 x the cost they are now). That's the Goldston in me, always thinking bout things like that. Nice.

So the weather now is pretty much on par with what it was like when we left Australia...the end of our winter. So yeh, our winter clothes we brought with us are holding strong for now. Although our Canadian friends were shocked to hear that we were actually wearing our Australian winter clothes lol.

Ok then, catch up with you in another post someday eh?

Oh and don't worry, we've stopped eating or drinking milk products made in China. Dodged a bullet there eh? Not really though.

Pauly

p.s we do read all of your comments and appreciate them greatly, but we don't always reply cuz we are lazy and we usually read them in our e-mail inboxes and not on the blog. But keep em coming, if you have facebook we'll try to reply there or if u are family, we'll talk to ya on skype or sumthing. BTW, here are the shows we're watching every week (cuz Chinese tv is sooo bad):

Leeching:

Heroes

Sarah Connor Chronicles

Entourage

Eureka

House

How I Met Your Mother

and we just got:

30 Rock Season 1

MAD MEN season 1

Pushing Daisys Season 1

Streaming: NRL finals (and hopefully the world cup but doubtful)

Have already watched Firefly and Serenity too, v good, we recommend!

K, Zaijian!!!

P.P.S here is an awesome painting I found on Digg.com that I want to get blown up and framed when I go back to Australia. So good....