Updates

Hey,

Just letting you know I added a Weather gadget showing the temp in Jinan down the bottom of the blog. Also added a few other little bits and pieces to the blog including jinan time, hit counter and a followers thing (u should sign up as a follower of this blog so we can see who is reading).

We are on holidays now so we are gonna try and hit up Qingdao (Beijing was booked out and way too busy, we'll check it out later on).

Ok Catchyaz later.

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....

Big Weekend.

Hey all,

I'm drinking too much beer in China.

Sorry for the late post again. The hassel of plugging the camera in and trying to remember what has happened over the last week sometimes outweighs the benefits of having a fresh blog post...but once I do get around to it, it is oh so rewarding.

Yeh so, we had a really big weekend this weekend past. We went out to this bar called lang gui fang which is a notorious foreigner spot and we smashed it. We went with a huge bunch of foreign students from Caitlin's uni and didnt get home till 6 am (after having a noodles at an all night taiwanese place). Had a really good time but man, i felt it the next day. Lucky I had the rugby league to soothe my pain....(only to be left emotionally battered and bruised in what was to be the last 10 seconds of the Broncos season......people don't forgets Simms, people dont forget.)

Aaaaanyway, for some reason I was drinking tequila with some american guy and beering it up on the dance floor. It was a messy night. Caitlin had fun too, i think.

I met this dude who is going to give me like 20 lesson plans. I had a guitar jam with him earlier in the night and he wants me to come and and play with his acoustic guitar trio who all sing and apparantly do some harmonies too so that should be fun. He then tried to convince me to come to some mountain and do martial arts every week. I wasn't so sure about that though.

We didnt take too many pictures and the videos Caitlin took of me trying to speak drunken Chinese are just plain wrong. I would have put them up except:

1) I swear at the end of the good one and;

2) what if i want to go for prime minister one day? These videos would ruin me.

OK so ill just put up some photos of some of our friends, the place where we spent the mid autumn festival and a picture of Caitlin....

The restaurant...

My friend Arne....

The restaurant again.... You could ride in the pedal powered boats like at natureworld (who will be the first to say "nature world isn't open any more!" I wonder....)

Me and some of the other foriegn students...

Caitlin telling a terrible terrible joke....

Ok, that is all for now. I think Caitlin wants to blog about her trip to Qufu, the home of Confucious, later on....mmm

See ya!

Pauly

OH! and p.s, I have like 10 days off next week because it is the national day holiday (Yeh that's right, in China, they get 5 days off for their version of Australia day, but considering the weekends and the fact i dont work on mondays, it adds up to 10 for me, (a s m t w h f a s m).

So kt and I are gonna try and get to Beijing for a couple o days and see what all the fuss is about.

Also, and this is what im super super excited about, we've decided that at the end of our semesters and before we come home (around jan 20thish) we are gonna go to Japan for two weeks or so before we go to Australia via Hong Kong. Nice. Im very much looking forward to this as Japan is the home of:

1 - average internet speeds of around 70 - 100mbs per second

2 - Sony (Tv's, playstation, and all sorts of other rad electronics)

3 - Japanimation and naruto (nice ill buy some cosplay stuff maybe lol, maybe a manga or two for funs sake)

4 - rad food

5 - rad gaming and arcade scene

6 -trendy clothes and trendy people

7 and a bunch of other cool stuff.

So Im v excited about this decision. We'll have to fly over korea to get there but thatll be ok....wont it?? lol

Ok catchyaz later

Pauly

Mid Autumn Festival

Mag...num????

Hey all,

This weekend is the mid-autumn festival (a long weekend for everyone in China). They celebrate the middle of Autumn and the fact that we will see the brightest full moon of the year next week. Everyone goes home to see family and they all eat moon cakes (a weird sweet cake that are only eaten once a year at the mid-autumn festival). So yeh, it is a long weekend and it was rideiculous trying to get home from work on friday as all of the students who live at the school were catching the same bus as me.

Shit. I accidently deleted half my post. Drat.

Ok so anyway, my boss hosted a massive lunch on Friday for all of the foreign teachers and the other chinese teachers in my department...it was delicious. After the lunch he gave us all two big boxes of moon cakes for the holiday so that was nice of him.

This is an example of a mooncake. There are heaps of different flavours though, none of which I am able to name.

I played guitar for my students on friday to fill some time at the end of the lessons. I looked up and saw like 15 people filming me with their camera phones. It was weird. They all seemed to enjoy the western music however, even though they couldn't understand what I was saying/singing...

Caitlin bought us a badmington set as heaps of people play badmington at night time. It should be good under this crazy full moon. In China, everyone comes out at night. As people all live in these little apartments and dorms, everyone comes out at night and talk, dance, play badmington or hackey sack, eat, drink, listen to music or buy stuff from the side of the street etc. I can liken the atmosphere to club nights at swimming club, except without all the swimming. It's warm and friendly. I can only speculate that, if this is what is like every night of the week, then Sunday night's celebrations are going to be awesome town.

Here is a lil video of what a normal weeknight is like across the road from out apartment building:

Anyway, Caitlin starts uni next week so we'll see how that goes eh?

Oh yeh, and here are some photos of our awesome cooking so far with our limited western grocery resources.

Nice.

Pauly

LOL P.S -Caitlin sleeps with one eye open. ;)

曲阜 Qufu (pronounced: Chew-foo)

Knocking on Confucious' door...

Hey all,

Here is the long awaited blog about my trip to Qufu! I haven't gotten around to posting it because I have been too busy to sit in front of the computer!! I've been a good girl and have been studying hard! I've just been bumped up into a higher level now too, which means not only does my reading class have twice as many new words as the last one...I now have to take a writing class too. I haven't been to it yet, but it sounds pretty interesting. It's about the break down of individual characters etc. Chinese history is woven into each of the characters and what they're made up of...once you know the break down, it makes it easier to remember too. I'll tell you all about that stuff another time though! This blog is going to be long enough as it is!! :)

This is mostly a post that I wrote just after I got back...I'll do a little editing to make it more up to date, but I'll leave most of it... [also note, this all took place before the semester started..]

We (some of the other students and I...Paul was working!) decided to go on a day trip..and so left early the next day...in peak hour of course! Trying to organise 13 people who don't really know each other (or the city) was difficult to say the least! After debating whether it was worth trying to find 4 taxi's to take us all to the long distance bus station...we caught the bus...

This is the packed bus...it took about 30mins to get to the station! And they just kept letting people on!!

Once we got to the station, it was a 2 hour bus to Qufu. This one wasn't as crowded however, and it had air-con. Most of us weren't used to being up before the sun is in the middle of the sky, so we all had a nap!

Some scenery on the way...we chose a nice day! A little smoggy, but we've seen a lot worse!

They've just harvested the corn...and they leave it to dry on the road!! In other areas, it's on roofs or actually on the road leading off the highway in a checker pattern...people just drive around it.

Entrance to 孔庙和孔府 (Confucious' Mansions and Temple). Look at the old twisted Pines!

Finally, we arrived at Qufu. The first thing we did was find a toilet. I think it's always a sign in China that if you have to pay for it....DON'T USE IT!!!!! As you can imagine, almost all of the girls needed to go, so we all paid our cash (it was only 0.5rmb, but still..) and lined up. These were definitely the worst toilets I have seen so far...in my whole life. It was a trough that ran about 30 cms deep under 4 stalls, with no running water (everything just sat there in the trench) and the doors on the front of the stalls were not only too short (anyone walking past could see you trying to pull up your pants..) but they also just swung open. Once you were behind these swinging doors...there were no partitions between the stalls! It was a little off putting! Extremely dirty! Perhaps the man collecting money was a scam...these hadn't been cleaned or looked after for a very long time!!

Ok so, after toilets, and then some lunch, we had to decide what we'd all do next. After another long debate (note to self: don't travel in a big group!) we split up and bought tickets only to the places we wanted to go. Qufu is divided into 3 parts (well the touristy bit is): Confucious Forest, Confucious Mansions and Confucious Temple. I decided that I'd save some cash and only see the forest and the mansions.

This is the Bell Tower which is on the was from the Forest to the Mansions. The 3 facing the camera are (r-l) Florie and Francois (they're both French) and Anna (she's German).

First I went to the Confucious Mansions. When Confucious was around, he was relatively poor and did not become famous until after he died. His descendents were lucky...and lived like kings. They had the most amazing aristocratic lodgings in all of China! The Mansions have some 450 halls, rooms, buildings, and side passages - needless to say I didn't get to see them all!! The Kong family's (Conficious' real name was 孔子 Kongzi - family name Kong) mansions and surrounding area was even an autonomous state at one stage!! They had powers of taxation and execution! They ended up building a wall around the mansions (and later the forest too)...of course it was to keep those pesky rabbits out. Those who lived in the city were all servants etc of the family. In case they decided to rebel...the Kong family built a nifty hideout they called the "Tower of Refuge"! It has an iron-clad ceiling on the ground floor and a staircase that could be yanked up into the inside and lots of room for food etc so they could stay there till it calmed down outside!!

Here's some pics of what I saw:

One of the many passages through buildings.

The big character here means 'longevity'. It was a gift from the Qing empress Cixi. (The Kong family were so well known that they received gifts from the emperors etc!

While everyone is watching something...I'm taking photo's of the ceiling! It's so beautiful though! They don't make 'em like this any more...now we're lucky to get a ceiling at all! Sometimes it's just pipes!

A bit of creative photography...I am a noob in China.

A handwritten series of Confucian analects

It's the little things....

After wandering around the mansions for a while, I started towards the Forest. The street between the Mansions/Temple and the Forest, is lined with vendors. After a while in China you get used to ignoring them and always looking indifferent, which helps to get a good bargain! In the end I bought a large silk scroll painting of bamboo with some Confucian writings (...that I can't read coz they're in calligraphy - but it looks beautiful!). I also bought some slip on 'inside-the-house' shoes that are made entirely from some sort of reed/bamboo, a poster of Chairman Mao when he's about 20something, and lots of other little trinket things that tourists love! I like tourist shopping!! :) I'm a sucker!

Now the forest! It's the largest artificial park and best preserved cemetary in China. The Kong family have been buried here for over 2000 years. Pretty cool huh! You can even see the writing change from 'seal' script, to traditional characters, and now to simplified (Mao simplified the writing when he was in charge...to make it accessible to the workers, farmers, etc). I was wandering around with Arne, who learnt only traditional characters in both Belgium and Taiwan before coming to Jinan. He helped translate a little of what we saw.

A tomb in the Forest!

Arne and I

A view of some of the tombs.

The tranquil scenery!

Some of this one is in seal script!

The guards....

This little guy left his own mark! (Note to Dad: I was showing Arne how to look for the little things when we found him!! teehee)

After the forest, we all met up and waited for the bus. The driver had said that the last bus left at 6.30pm so we waited for 40 somthing mins...and no one came. We called the number that the driver had given us and were informed that the last bus was already back in Jinan (remember...it's a 2 hour trip!) So we jumped in the pedicabs and they took us to the nearest bus station...and we eventually got home! It wasn't so bad though...the pedicabs were one of the best things during the whole trip!!! The guy starts pedalling and then we get onto the highway and he switches to electicity and we zoom along! It was awesome!

Liz and Tegan in the pedicab.

We also rode in one of these too (just for the fun of it!!) We took it from the Mansions to the Forest...it's a whole 20min walk!

Ok...that's all from me for now...an update on school will be coming really soon! I promise!

xox

Over and out.

She had a rough childhood...

This is what happens when children get shipped from foster home to foster home....they have no grounding in society...they don't know who to trust...and they are just plain scared and scarred for life. So...inevitably...they rebel. Don't judge us...

I'm Back too!!

This is our lunch at the Taiwanese shop across the road from our house. It's open 24 hours and it's awesome!

So! Paul has covered most of the last week...that's for all of you who have requested that Paul make some of my stories interesting!! But I've got some more anyway...so you still have to read them!! :)

I now have a chinese bank account! But still need to work out how to transfer cash via the internet as it's an international transaction. If I can do that...it will cut out the $20AUD worth of fees each time I get cash out of an ATM!! My card also has a cute mouse on it too!!

I have met the other aussie girls from UQ, Liz and Tegan - we are the only aussies on campus. They are in the same class at UQ and have both been to Taiwan too. Liz also has a friend, Arne, who she studied with in Taiwan, he's Belgian and it's pronounced Arna.

It was Liz's 25th last tues, so we went out on the town. I met them at the dorms and we went downstairs and sat out the front and waited for others. The dorm experience is amazing! (Although this part is the only part I'm sad I'm missing out on!) As we sat downstairs, there were 5 or 6 middle-eastern boys listening to traditional sounding music and smoking shisha (no mum, they weren't 'drugging' hehehe, it's just flavoured tobacco) The shisha pipe looks pretty cool though, they use hot coals at the top and 2 or 3 people can smoke from them at once. It smelled a little nicer than stinky cigarettes too!

While we were waiting I met lots of people from Germany, England, France, Iran, Tanzania, Congo...the list goes on! Most of the Germans and English are on this 3 week intense study thing. They haven't learnt any chinese before and have to classes every day and then go on tours and get taken out to lunch and banquets etc. It sounds awesome, and everyone is really lovely...but they're leaving soon!!! That sucks...most of the people I met this night are all on this trip.

(((((HEY! THIS IS PAUL! Just to let you know I am silently interjecting into Caitlin's blog and correcting some suff...but more importantly, let it be known that I am drinking rum with coke and ice and it's awesome....as am I))))))

I did learn some German though, on the drunken taxi ride home (German accent: "Oh, I have had too much party!") OK, that wasn't what I learnt!! It's (please accent awful spelling) "Liber marken" and this is the explanation I got from Michael (the German guy) "Liber Marken: to make love. Hmm...Love. I do not like it in relationships. Making...yes, this is very good." hehehe He could also speak Bavarian and so taught me something that he said is very popular at Oktoberfest: "Eine bier, Schnakseln" which means something along the lines of "a beer and then sex" lol.

There is also a shop on the lower floor of the dorms that sells everything a corner shop does, as well as burgers, noodles, dumplings, french fries etc. Every night there is someone out the front having a drink. You can buy tallies (no one else knows what we mean when we say this!!) of TsingTao for 4RMB each, I think they run out of cold ones every night! Although the Germans complain when their beer is cold!! Crazy. A whole tallie of hot beer is a little hard to drink!
As there are people sitting drinking there every night, there is a bottle man (probably homeless) who sits near them and collects the bottles to redeem them for cash. He must do pretty well compared to the others that look through bins etc round town! He gets to sit there and we all give him the bottles! He really tries to blend into the background though! He doesn't speak to anyone and keeps disappearing behind the building if there are too many people.

That's China. As I type, there are heaps of students on the oval (well patch of dirt and concrete) that are doing their 2 weeks of military training. They are all lined up and I can hear them all yelling "left, right, 1,2,3" etc. They are all the first year uni and college students. We live at the arts college part of Paul's uni. It sounds pretty cool. I'll try and get some photo's...don't know if I'll get arrested or something though!

This is one of the many ways I can get to school. It's a little motorbike-car! It only has 3 wheels! This is my mate, driver. He was lovely and tried to talk to me in my bad chinese! He did charge me a lot though!! A whole 10RMB, I usually pay 7.50 in the taxi! I think I'm supposed to work out a price with him before I get in...

It has handle bars!! It was soo slow though! And every bump (and there are many!) I hit my head on the low roof!! It kept backfiring too. It was great!!

Hey!! I also got a bike!! It's fun. Although everyone laughs at me - literally! ((((Paul again....thats normal though kt...bike or no bike HAHAHAHAH)))))) Usually they stare, and some have pointed....but this time, full buses of people were laughing at me!! It's fun though! But my bum hurts soo much!! I haven't ridden a bike for soo long! (maybe that's while they were laughing...I was a little tiny bit wobbly hehe)

Ok, I've typed a lot, and it's stream-of-conscience...

but! I'm really excited about this one...I am having complete conversations in Chinese. I am listening, speaking, reading, understanding..and even sms'ing in Chinese!!!!!!!!!!!! I bought a hairdryer yesterday and we even made jokes and I understood every single word the lady said. Even stuff like, heat settings, wattage, 'wind' settings. It's awesome! It's good that somethings happening in my brain now, I'm looking forward to class! It's all going to be in Chinese.

OK, that's all from me for now.
If you've read this far, you deserve a little present!!

(((((((THIS IS PAUL AGAIN.....ok now caitlins post is the newest but don't forget that I had two new post below this so comment on mine and not hers! She always steals the glory by typing a massive post after mine and making everyone forget what I blogged about...bitch. lol just joking. P.s its our 6 year anniversary today :), KT's Dad messaged us to remind us....we forgot again....oh well...bu bye))))))))) (RUM)

ok, I think you'll have to click on this image to make it bigger. Read the english writing at the top. This is bathroom cleaner that I bought the other day...It's hilarious. Paul refuses to use it!!!!!!

Haircut

Hey,

Short blog post. I've been dreading getting a haircut here in Choi-na (China for those noobs who can't understand boganish) as i didnt know if they could do western cuts or whatever. But kt and i made an a4 poster today with some photos of me earlier in the trip and caitlin wrote something like - hi there, can u cut my hair like it is in the photos please - in chinese characters.

I went in and they nailed it. I got a full head massage and hair washed. Hair cut. Another head massage and hair wash and then they blow dried it and sorta messed it around a bit. I was impressed. I went to pay them and gave them 100 rmb (bout $18) and the laughed and gave me 90 back. (Therefore my haircut cost 10 rmb or about $1.80!) That's pretty good for the best haircut I've had in a long time.

The only downside was that all the girls in the salon just watched and giggled and stared at me the whole time I was having the haircut...it was a little awkward :S

P.s you probably think it looks like I havn't even had a haircut. This is because we didn't take any photos of me with scraggily long hair. It was pretty crap. LoL. Zaijian!

I'm Back

Hey Noobleys,

Sorry about the lack of updates lately, the teaching timetable has been pretty taxing so far. Not that I have to do many hours (only 18 per week), but writing 2 hour lesson plans for three different levels of english is taking its toll on me and my psycosis! Also, although I only have to work tuesday to friday, I have to travel 40 minutes to school via the teachers bus and 1.45 hrs home via public transport (1 bus and 1 taxi) so by the time I get home I'm usually pretty tiiiiiiired. Anyway, other than all of that, all is well.

It's fun teaching the chinese students, they are all around 20-21 years old and are all very excited to have me as their teacher (a young white foreigner). I did a class this week on Australia and Australian culture and I taught them some slang and informal contractions (wanna, gonna, dunno, watcha, doin', d'you, woulda, shoulda, coulda, g'day etc). The better classes really enjoyed it but some of the classes with v. poor english struggled to grasp some of the words/concepts. (By the way, for all of those thinking, what the hell is he doing teaching them improper english and slang! Most of these students are doing a 3 year business course preparing them to come and do further studies in Melbourne, so the chinese teachers assured me that teaching slang is great because they need to be able to understand the Australians when they go overseas). Yeah so that's going ok. My semester is 17 weeks and I have to set 100% of each classes assessment so that's also gonna (going to) be tough.

My School...bad photo...everyone was looking at me.

Caitlin has found a bunch of Australian and German friends at her uni who are all doing the same Chinese thingy as her. They had to do a profeciency exam yesterday to decide what level chinese they have and what classes they would be in and, although Caitlin only went ok on the written section (90 minute test completely in chinese.....screw that for a joke!), Caitlin absolutley smashed the spoken and listening part of her exam...100%. It's funny because she was stressing out so much about it and she went better than most. There were people there who hadn't learnt any chinese before so it was a very broad mix of students. She'll prolly tell you about this in much more detail but that's the gist of it.

I havn't taken too many photos lately although I should take some photos of some of my classes seeing as they all take photos/videos of me on their mobiles during our lessons.

Also, one of Caitlin's friends got a guitar for her birthday so I think I will be giving her guitar lessons every now and then. I hear she's a quick learner and already plays the cello so it shouldn't be too difficult.

Oh and one more thing! Caitlin and that same friend got asked to do modelling in a shopping center (standing next to some luxury cars) for $200 Aus per day with a personal driver all meals included for 3 days. They turned it down though....noobs.

This is Caitlin and her friend Liz. They bought chinese bicycles and promptly got laughed at by every Chinese person they rode past. One man was hunched over on the ground he was laughing so hard. But they are more shocked than anything. It is strange for them to see white foreigners in Jinan, let alone seeing them try to blend into the culture. The girls don't care though and are still riding their bikes as much as possible. Caitlin rides to Uni (let's see her do that in 2-3 months when the average daily temperature drops to around -5 degrees...she'll have to pop some chains on the wheels and about 15 layers of clothing on her back!)

That's all for now.

See ya later!

Pauly

P.s o yeh, we found a great western food import shop (called u mart) and bought blue cheese, cheddar cheese, corn chips, salsa, guacamole, cereal, hersheys fudge topping (mmmm), and some Captain Morgans Black Label RUM! nice. We had nachos for dinner last night...can life get any better? I submit that it cannot.