I have not posted recently but this is partly due to the fact my days have been spent doing revision. Or rather anything but. I have mopped the floor, planned my holiday, written letters, plotted career paths and forced my computer to read foreign DVDs. And then watched those DVDs.
And now I'm writing this blog :D
New Year's was spent in a typical Western fashion with Becka, Koreans and I indulging in what the Daily Mail calls "binge drinking". I took this opportunity to try out not only 白酒, baijiu-the national liquor and FOUL, but also a shot called "brain haemorrhage" (I spelt that right first time hah!), and absinthe. Also foul. Which after an afternoon of working through some Qingdao beer whilst singing along to Rihanna led to Saturday being spent in bed listening to radio 4 on my ipod. I love that thing. It means I never have to leave bed again! All the world is at my fingertips... It does mean that now I spend 15 minutes before getting up perusing the weather forecast, newspaper headlines of the Guardian and the Daily Mail, and if I really don't want to get up, El Pais and Le Monde.
We had our last lessons of B 班 last week. Sad moment. I'll miss our Reading teacher as she rather kicked ass. The scary heights of C 班 await in two months time...
What to do for the next two months? Well Becka and I are flying to Hanoi on Thursday with the aim of also spending a few days in Ha Long Bay. Then about two days of continuous travelling to a small town in Yunnan province in the south of China. We shall spend the next two weeks travelling around there before spending New Year (the lunar one) in Kunming, where Sara will join us. I've instructed her not to leave the airport if I'm not there to pick her up. Otherwise we'll never see her again. Then Becka flies home to see her dog, boyfriend and family, the order there is significant, and Sara and I are whizzing through Northern Laos, Northern Thailand and a sneaky day trip to Burma. After a day in Bangkok and a couple of hours snatched between flights in Hong Kong, Sara flies to Spain and then I have two weeks to wander up China's east coast to Qingdao.
Jealous? :D
It is snowing here! Somehow it doesn't really suit Qingdao. It feels like Nature is trying to sneak into our land of Concrete and Steel but will soon leave after an awkward interlude of not really fitting in...
I have ransacked iTunes's app store for free language apps and have learnt some Korean to try on my flatmates. They love it. Particularly as my phrases consist of "don't shoot!" "you have a beautiful smile" and "those drugs aren't mine". I'm tempted to get them to teach me Korean properly in return for English. Might as well eh?
I am also planning to travel home on the train in July through Russia and I suspect Russian would come in very handy there so might get one of the Russians hanging around in class to teach me...
I love being a native English speaker. Especially when I ring up airline companies for Boram to check her flights are booked because the hotlines are Chinese/English only. Especially when I can swap it for other language/erhu lessons. Or lots of money.
To be born an Englishman, is to win the lottery in life...
I have now spent 4 months and one day in China.
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