my weblog

Oh I can see that this is one of those weeks!

Oh yes the internet is still sluggish and that makes checking e-mails and replying hard and frustrating as it can take a couple of hours to read the few e-mails I have and then reply! Even trying to fun things can be annoying, for instance I have a game on my palm pilot and it fun. I have been trying for two days now to connect to the site and buy the full version. I have been trying on and off to connect to paypal so I can pay for my website. Trouble is I just can’t connect to it, it goes so far and stalls! Ironically, I have been able to connect to SWG and play some. However, some days even that is not accessible.

Still all of this I know is of a temporary nature, the net will get fixed and it will get better, though by the time it gets back to normal I will be out of the country and in the UK for a few months!

My family posted me some packages last year, three of them are now late, and another one might make it. Though right now I am beginning to wonder if there is any chance of that happening! Last year as well I went to CDWOW and brought a CD by Annie Lennox, her last album Bare which really is a great album. The thing is it never arrived, I contacted CDWOW who replaced it straight away and that copy made it.

Now on top of that three more packages have just never turned up, I know it is not down to bad address because my family have my address printed out in Chinese and it is correct!
So finally, today someone speaks to the post office. This after I pointed out that last year looking at packages mailed and packages received I received I believe 30% and 70% never made it! 70% never made it that to me seems to be a lot, worse I know that I am not the only one who lost stuff here!

What did the post office say, that I should tell my family to register all future letters and packages! No interest in trying to find out where said packages have gone, no interest in the fact that stuff is being stolen. Instead they push the problem back on to the victim and say well you solve it!

To be honest I am just so annoyed right now that I would just like to go and shout at a china postal worker and tell them they should get their act together! I know it won’t do anything and I guess there is a very small chance that the missing packages may well be very late and still turn up. I just do not feel that is likely though and now I need to consider what to do in the future!

Today I went downtown, I need bread and fruit and a few other things that I can get in Yan’an. It was cold out but again on real surprise there, the wind was the worst part, it is that biting wind. Anyway enough about the weather, I was not planning on writing a blog about that! I was at my final port of call, one of the few supermarkets in town, I went there last, only because it has become a habit to go there last! I dropped off my bags off shopping from my previous two stops at the front of the shop. A lot if not most supermarkets and stores where goods are easily accessible make you drop bags off at the front of the store. This includes shopping from other places and handbags if they think that they are two large! It is an attempt to stop shoplifting, not really sure if it works, though they still have one more security check when you check out and have to have a security officer stamp or mark your ticket in some way. No idea why they do that, I just know that in some place with an itemized list they often take a glance at what I have brought. I don’t see how it really stops shoplifting, but it does provide work, and make shopping a little bit of a pain at times!
Anyway my shopping was done and all I had to do was collect my bags and head out. When I got to the counter there was a quite an event with one annoyed woman shouting at the top of her voice and one irate security guard shouting back at her. As well as four now sullen and annoyed workers behind the counter while she shouted at the top of her voice that something worth a fair bit of money had been stolen from her bag. You see you hand your bag over they put it in an available slot and give you a tag; however the slot is just an open box, everyone can see it and in theory anyone of the staff behind the counter could steal something. In this case every time I hand something other, knowing that I am not trusted to steal, I have to trust that the staff taking my bag can be trusted! I have never had a problem, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. How the whole thing turned out I don’t know, I didn’t stay around once I had got my stuff. I knew that probably things would get more heated and the crowd would get larger as folks tried to stop and listen. Who knows maybe even join in the fight if they felt they had a point to make, safer for me to get away from there!
Still shopping at times is not much fun out here, most places have so many staff that they follow you around the store watching your every move. It can be very suffocating and unnerving to be followed around like that. Still at least they do it everyone, someone today was backing up while watching a customer, trouble was she was not paying attention to what was behind her and ended up backing straight into me.

Ah well that is just the way life is sometimes!

Ah well,

Another rambling blog from me in cold Yan’an, yes it is cold, though right now the sun is shining and I have the curtains open so that I can make the most of the heat provided by the sun! However this morning I woke up and really didn’t want to climb out of bed and when I peeked through the curtains I could see a thin layer of ice on the inside of the window. This is a fairly normal happening here in the winter time!!

Still I know I can hide inside most of the day till I have to head out tonight to a banquet, this a goodbye banquet for one of the teachers who then heads to Xian tomorrow before heading home. She is in the midst of saying goodbyes, finishing outstanding work and make sure she is packed!

Last night a fairly large group of us went downtown to a hotel to eat, we the three foreigners choose the hotel because not only does it have a Chinese restaurant but a western restaurant as well. The good thing is you can order from both menus and end up with a mix of western and chinese food. The other good thing is that the Chinese restaurant side has large private rooms and they do not charge you extra for the use of said rooms. So with twelve of us in the party we were able to get a private room, which allowed us to be noisy and smoke free. It meant as well that we were not disturbed by other dinners. Eating here is never a quiet affair, in fact if the place was quiet well it would suggest it was not that good! So if you want a quiet meal here, then it is best to find a hotel that is foreign run and eat in their western restaurant. Otherwise expect a lot of noise coming from other tables for the most part!

We made the teacher who was leaving sit at the head of the table, that is in the chair facing the door, on a round table that is the top, the bottom is the chair with its back to the door, only really works if you are in a private room. Then after that all the Chinese were trying to get other people to sit in the next two important seats on either side of the host in this case the teacher who was leaving. That was easily solved by me telling people to sit there!

We then ordered a mixture of Chinese and western food, pizza and french fries and then a whole range of chinese dishes!! We ordered too much, I always end up ordering too much food at a chinese place. The rule of thumb is one dish per person plus one extra dish, that should include several cold dishes and several hot dishes, fish and soup to finish. I managed to forget that we had ordered western food and was trying to order the correct amount of Chinese dishes!! I still ordered less than the required 13 dishes, but we still ended up with too much food! Still we had a blast and actually ate up a fair portion of the food ordered, and the rest went home in bags!!

The funny thing is we were teasing one of our friends about eating more pizza, this because on my birthday she had come to the same place to eat western food with us and had demolished a whole pizza, so we had some fun just teasing her about that as she clearly enjoyed eating it! Still it was funny at the end because there was some pizza left over and she was quick to speak up and grab the pizza.

One of our friends now works in the media and it came up how as a result of his job he is receives threatening calls. He does more of an investigative type of work for a TV company. He just about put us all off ever eating Hotpot again. He did a program on their hmm underhand methods of saving money. I won’t go into it, but I doubt that many people will be able to convince me to go and eat hotpot anytime soon!

Anyway by the end of the evening the staff were glad to go, though it was not really that late, only about 9:20 we were still the last people in the place!! They didn’t ask us to leave, but various people kept sticking their heads around the door, subtle hints that they really wanted us to leave so they could clean up!

Tonight it is the more formal goodbye banquet, how serious it is depends on who is there! I guess we will see, though right now I have no idea what time this meal is happening!!

Well

Yan’an is still cold, it is winter so no surprise there, but we are going through a very cold period. Yesterday we had biting winds, the kind that cut though what ever you are wearing and makes you huddle down into your jacket, not that it makes any difference!

I have to say that it last week was intersting. Tuesday I went out to eat with one of the teachers, we headed downtown to grab some food it was good. Wednesday I went for a back massage, just down the road from me a very short walk if I want to go back. It was a good massage, but a little weird at the end when they placed a cloth on my back and set fire to it. Then left it burning until I indicated that it was too hot. This they did not once but twice, so it was hmm interesting!

The rest of last week for me was quiet, I struggled with my internet connection to check and reply to e-mails. I guess like most people I have gotten used to the almost instant communication that exists now! It is hard when that communication is slowed down, ironically from what I read and hear it seems that some people do better than others as far as connection goes!

Exams started this week for students and the other two teachers have been finishing up their exams this week. They have had some interesting experiences with one person coming up with an interesting way of cheating. The student wrote down notes on tape and then placed the tape on their desk, this was discovered before the exam and they fail the class and have to retake it!

This week is still cold, and if you go out to eat you tend to think of where is the warmest place to eat. Having stayed home the first two days I called the other two teachers and we went downtown. We went to one of our favourite places, a xinjiang restaurant, they make great noodles, kebabs and bread. It was freezing inside the place and we bumped into some students, one of them is from Xinjiang so a taste of home for her. The food was great, I ordered too much, but that meat I had some stuff to take home to eat tomorrow. When paying the bill I was able to pay for the students as well, they did try to stop me, but they were on the other side of the room and well sometimes it is just good to be able to do that!

We stopped to shop some, I picked up grapes at my favourite fruit store, I have brought so much fruit from them that I get a discount and free fruit now. They do have some great imported fruits which are more expensive but so good! I figure that it is worth paying the extra money because I eat the fruit! Local fruit is often picked too early and tends to be sour, except for the apples. We have great apples up here, a friend from washing to state who considered themselves a connoisseur of apples liked them. I have known other friends who in other parts of China check to make sure that they are from here.

The interent feels worse, at least I can post here!

Well it is January the first here and it is quiet, the internet is still sluggish and that makes it a pain to get anywhere on the web. I still can’t get in Star Wars Galaxies, though I can check e-mail, and browse some of my favourite sites on the web. It just happens to be slow, really slow.

Still on the bright side my living room is looking a less chaotic, I finished looking over my DVD’s and placing them in folders, I attempted for some unknown reason to try and place them in genre specific folders. Now when I am away and others are borrowing them I have no idea how long that will last! I will ask people to put the DVD’s back where they find them.

I have taken down the Christmas decorations and put them away, my mum would say I have done that too early, but I just wanted them gone. At the moment I am trying to decide what project to tackle next. My office was semi – sorted out when I ended up sick and tired so it was left in a half done state. I know what I want to do, I want to go through all the books and make sure that they are grouped alphabetically by author! Makes books easier to find, doing so allows me to decide if there are books I should give away as in I doubt I would ever reread them, or are they books I would want to keep.
I have a quite a few books now, and it is good to go through them and sort them out.

As well as that I just have stuff that I need to decide if I want to keep it or throw it away.
As I tried to fall asleep last night I started to over in my mind just what I was really attached to and needed to keep! I guess it would be fun to actually get rid of that much and just have a few things. Though I am not sure how many books I could really get rid of, even if I am sure I am never going to reread them, I have always wanted to have a lot of books around me.

Still I think it would be a good thing to do!

Then of course there are the CD’s to go through and work out what I need to keep and what I can give away. I guess the more of them I can put on my computer the more I could get rid off.

Not today though, today I feel like being lazy and watching TV and doing very little.

As for the weather, well it is cold and icy, I went out to through away some of the rubbish I have created from my clean up. The road was mostly snow clear, but icy, I walked up to the market at the gate in the search of eggs, no eggs for sale, which is unusual, makes me wonder why. I will wait and look again tomorrow and see what I find.

Oh yeah this for me is the last day of 2006, it is cold outside and inside well it is warm enough but my living room and office are in chaos. Last week there was an earthquake, which damaged underwater telecommunication cables, making the internet in China very slow. It is a little better now, but still slow. In fact I am writing a blog and I am not even sure if I will be able to post it, but I am going to try!

Anyway 2006 was a mixed year for me, I moved the café to its new location, and had a good opening. However, after that travel, being sick and other factors meant that operating was patchy.

The summer was sent in repainting the bars, a fun project, the only thing I was worried about was having to try and paint the top of the bars. That worked out as other people did that part for me. So far the new paint, applied much thicker than the original sprayed on coat is holding well. The acid test will be how it stands up against the sandstorms that start in the Spring. They sandblasted the first coat back to the primer, I am hoping that this coat stands up better this spring.

Now I am looking at a month and then I am heading to Xian and after that Thailand and then back to the UK. This should be a three month trip, but unlike trips in the past I plan on getting a job, not sure in what to be honest, but just something that would give me a break from the work I have been doing.

I want a break from what I do normally so I can think about the future, a different temporary job just seems like the kind of thing that will help me do that.

I wonder if someone who has been working in education, in setting up and running projects for the last 11 years can speak Chinese and wants to so something different can even find a job!

Hmm,

Okay so I am lazy when it comes to updating my blog, I admit it. To be honest I am not sure if there is that much to say really!

At the beginning of October I realised that I had reached a stage where work went I was worn down and need a break. I had been on the go from the moment I got back to China and during May and through the Summer I had managed some weeks of 90 plus hours as well at times just not taking any days off at all. So presently I am taking a semi break from work that is I am still working just not doing as much as I would do normally and avoiding any extra work.

Still there are a few things going on that I need to keep an eye on or be involved in, one of them is the café! I am still in the process of moving the café, the new room will be much larger than the old one!

As well as that I had a team come through for one day that was a really busy day, everyone was cold, despite the fact that I had passed on that it was cold in the morning and at night the message never made it to the team. I had to dig out as much neutral stuff as I could find. First I had to avoid the obviously worn by a woman (the team was all male except for one person) and then it had to be semi neutral nation wise, they were all American and didn’t want to wear my union jack rugby shirt or for that matter my Cleavland Indian jacket, wrong state!

Never mind it was a good but very busy day and I had a good time the people they met loved them and mobbed them and I hope they had a good day.

I keep you informed as to the progress of the café!

Isn’t Autumn beautiful!

Hmm,

I know so slow to write anything on my blog, not that I am convinced that anyone ever reads it!

Anyway I am back home and busy, that has to be the story of my life! I took some holiday in August but I ended up working every day and I did enough during my holiday that I actually ended up not having any holiday instead I just had a quiet work week in a different city!

Anyway my big project of this semester was to move the english cafe form a classroom into a way bigger room. I had the plans drawn up and they were pretty cool plans I have to say! Then because I wanted to make someother changes we had to ask folks higher up in the university!

They didn’t know and when they did know they said no! I was pretty shocked and well wondered what on earth do I do now! They did tell me I could look at the new rooms under the stadium and so the next day I went down to take a look!!

I liked what I saw and asked for certain rooms, though knowing what happened with the last room and knowing that other people would be wanting some of these rooms I pushed for an official answer and so the day after that we went back with the relevant people. They didn’t agree with my first choice, I had semi expected that, but they did offer me a room bigger than one I was asking for! I took it of course, and now I am waiting for them to finish building the stadium which should be next month, we will see!

The school has promised that they will install school Internet cable, TV cable and water with drainage! Then I plan to (depending on money) upgrade my computer system and make the new cafe a wi-fi zone, which if it works will I believe be the first such facility here! I need to speak to some people to make sure it will work, but since I am saving money as far as not needing major building, painting or new glass I can spend money elsewhere!

Watch this space for more!

Okay

I admit I keep forgetting to write anything, then again if no one ever reads it what is the point of writing?

I guess if only because then I get the need to write out of my system?

I am in Xian it is hot, 42 or 43 degrees C outside, I have had a headache for the last two days and well work is not helping much.

It seems that right now I am trying to sort out little things that are nit important to me, though important to others! Worse I am supposed to try and solve problems that I do not know how to solve?

I would like to be able to focus on my main job which right now is trying to set up places for people to live when they come and study here. It shouldn’t be that hard, but in fact it is a pain in the neck, if only because of the fairly serious talk about who lives where and why they should or shouldn’t live there. Some of it is little things like, well it needs a lot of work done to it before it is going to work and we don’t know if we can make the changes or not.

Still though I moan now in the end it will all get done and that will be good, more than that I can then focus on what I consider to be most important, and that is redoing the café up in Yan’an. Well not redoing as in fact it will be a new room, much larger, but having a facelift to make it more comfortable and I hope a place people want to come and chat in English and hang out, and oh drink real coffee!

One problem I face is getting the money from where it is to here, that and of course no knows quite what will happen with the Yuan, will the Chinese change it? There are rumours aplenty but so far no hard facts.

Oh yeah I had a good trip up to the north a while back it was hard work but in the end fun! Yes people loved to come and stare, in the end I just had to start taking pictures!

Amazing site, salt still gathered using a method that is over two thousand years old.

I am just having a couple of days where everything that can go wrong does go wrong.

First off my e-mail gets messed up, well I think that’s okay it will sort itself out no big deal.

Then I am driving up to Tunbridge Wells when I start to feel ill, throat hurts, head hurts, back aches. If it had started when I was at my sisters, I would have gone back to bed!

Thursday I had spent hours putting together a presentation and it was looking okay, just needed less text and more pictures and so today I settle down to change things around get to where I like it so that I am all ready to use it! What happens it doesn’t like the changes and freezes the computer on the last page! No matter what I do it, it happens, including on one occasion a blue screen of death!

It looks like that tomorrow I am going to have to sit down and re do the whole thing, lets hope that I can before I resort to throwing my computer at the nearest wall!

Never mind on the bright side I am getting together with friends and we are all going to go eat Chinese! Though since normally I dislike Anglo-Chinese food I have to wonder why I suggested this restaurant! I guess I must be getting desperate for Chinese food!

Well perhaps I can manage to get a see some of the films that I want to see over the next couple of days!

Hong

Okay

This is I hope a rare rant from me, but I just have to ask what is up with the British Government?

First of they are finally forced into releasing people who had been held without any charges being made against them, thereby ignoring the concept of innocent until proven guilty!

So what do they do they do, they decide to go for house arrest! Right now it seems that the government is attempting to push through a law that will enable the Home Secretary or maybe a judge to place people under house arrest.

How can they even consider placing people under house arrest but seemingly without any plans to prosecute them? Why are they not trying to build a criminal case against these people? When I hear house arrest, well it reminds me of countries with limited freedoms and who are not considered to be democratic, perhaps we need to place ourselves on that list!

Maybe it is just me, but it seems that we are allowing our freedoms to be taken away from us, and that worries me. It just seems that things are slowly being taken away and worse that the majority of people seem to be allowing it!

Maybe the government has a wonderful explanation for their plan, however they are failing to communicate it to me, and I am guessing to others as well.

Okay on a different note, I just want to say good luck to the Brit who is planning to travel the U.S.A and as he travels breaking different State laws in I think 40 States.

That is I believe he is planning on Whale hunting in Utah, falling asleep in a cheese factory in South Dakota etc etc. I hope that he is successful in completing his somewhat different trip!

Life is strange for me at the moment, I am back in the United Kingdom, but right now for me it is strange. Of course I except that this is all very normal since I have been in China for such a long time and my life there is normal. China is my home and though I am British and come from here, this is now the foreign place for me.

It takes about 6 months for someone to adjust to a different culture and about the same for someone to go through reverse culture shock. Reverse culture shock is when someone has to go back into a culture that they had left. This is where I am now, going through reverse culture shock, a bit of pain really as I will go back to China in May, just enough time to readjust before I have to readjust yet again. For me the big thing I struggle with is the amount of choices people have! Just looking at the selection of coffee in a typical supermarket can be pretty overwhelming. Or of course when friends and families forget that you have been away for a few years and assume that you are on the same page as them, you rarely are and that can be disorientating.

Of course I am now in the position of having to remember what is acceptable here and follow British cultural rules. That can be hard, Brits like to queue up for the most part and because of the privacy bubble that people here have there are always these large gaps between people. Me I have to fight the temptation to jump to the front of any queue, which is okay to do in China most of the time! That and I have to remember that people have a privacy bubble, which is much larger than the one I am now used to. My privacy bubble is almost nil, which means that if I am not thinking I may well end up chasing people around rooms as I keep invading their space and they keep backing off. If you are not sure what I am talking about try talking to someone and keep getting closer to them, they will start to back off as soon as they feel uncomfortable, this space varies from culture to culture. To my mind I am not because I have gotten used to something different! I have to ensure as well that I don’t get used to the space that Brits like, because when I get back to China I will be the one backing off from people and that of course sends the wrong message to people as well!

I am also trying to catch up on trends, music, TV films, changes in Language, mainly because as I go back to China I need to know what my own culture is like so that as I teach on culture or answer questions about culture what I am talking about is up to date.

Still it is good to be back in the UK because I do get to see family and friends and that is a good thing. I get to see films in English in the Cinema, I can in China, though where I am they do tend to be in Chinese and well for some films that is a pain in the neck. I get to eat food that I can’t eat in China (I avoid Chinese in the UK as it is just too different to what I am used to). I get to see snowdrops, bluebells daffodils and other things that I do not get to see. All of these are positives and I am glad to be able to experience them.

Hello world! Now if I can figure out what to write…………….