Hey Hey and a Big G'Day toya,

Whilst on the subject of International Food Festivals, it’s been very much that here in Shangzhou city over the past week.

After not having seen a single foreigner here for over a year here I have now set a record by having had dinner with three of them in five days and it has been such a wonderful experience. Last week I was having dinner at DICO’s (Chinese KFC type thing) with my beautiful friend Alisa (Zhang Liang) and I spied what I thought was a very foreign looking Chinese lady who’s face I couldn’t quiet see as she had it buried in a book. Luckily on our way out we stopped to talk to two of Alisa’s students and there I met Laima, a Lithuanian who is here for a month teaching in the Teachers Collage. She spent last year in Africa as a VSO and will be here in Shaanxi for a year as a VSO. We organized to meet for dinner and last Sunday I joined her and her Wee Scottish friend Kirsten (also a VSO in a town an hour away) for lunch.

We spent a wonderfully warm afternoon on Jingquan Shan Mountain ever so happily talking freely (without having to explain things) and not once did any of us give or receive a blank stare. During the afternoon I found out there was another foreigner here in Shangzhou who has been here since the beginning of September yet during all of my city walks and rides I had not come across him in nearly two months.

I also found out that for the past year there actually was an English couple here teaching at the Teachers Collage and what they did in their spare time remains a mystery to me.

As I have explained in a past blogs this is a very small city with only one main road and I walk and ride this road countless times each week and to not have ran into them either upon it or in the supermarket is very much unexplainable as we are not talking about a few weeks or even a few months but an entire year! I also found out that in a month there will be a Dutch guy coming to teach at the Teachers Collage who was was previously in the south of China for three years.

Awesomely for me he is supposed to love a beer or six but that will either be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what following day is.

The past few weeks I have been spending a heap of time with Alisa who is the new Teachers Assistant here in my Primary School. We both have a huge love for Audrey Hepburn and are slowly making our way through her entire collection which I found in its entirety on a Blue Ray two disk set. Some nights I head out to help her with her after hours tutoring job during which she tutors several of my students Math, Chinese and English. I don’t’ think she will last too long and neither would I as by that time of night the students are well over school work and will do anything to play. They are so noisy and some nights they are totally uncontrollable.

They are at school before seven each morning and get home after nine. Not so bad for an adult but these are Primary School students ranging from Grade three to Grade six.

Several nights a week Alisa and I take a walk up Pagoda Hill (or should I say I spend half the time dragging her up the hill) to check out the newly built pagoda at the top. Construction began about seven months ago and they have almost finished the inside after which a new hill top park will be developed. If they want it completed before the first snows fall they had better hurry and I would like it completed prior just in case I move on to a new province and school at the end of this school term. That of course depends on if or when the highly expected new or next out break of Swine Flu hits the world and if schools without a foreign teacher are willing to accept one. Oh those pesky pharmaceutical companies must be making a bumper crop of cash on vaccines!

I also don’t think one needs to be a Conspiracy Theory believer to figure out who started this entire mess!

Last Thursday was our first International Feast and I finally got to meet the other Foreign Teacher, Dan from the Philippines. Lithuanian Laima and a Chinese English Teacher joined us and after a relaxing walk up Pagoda Hill we all kicked back at a fish restaurant and got to know each other over a spicy fish delight. This weekend Alisa and I were supposed to head to Xian City with one main purpose in mind, to finally buy me a new computer. Sadly upon awakening this morning it was pelting down with rain and my warm bed was much too inviting to leave so for one more week I will have to make do with this computer and the turtle that runs it.

My regular readers will know that for the past half a year my beautiful wiz bang HP laptop has spent more time in Computer Hospital than it has with my fingers actually tap tap tapping upon its keys.

After a new motherboard, hard drive, fan and what ever else they replaced this week the NVIDIA graphics card went. I have no idea what language it is now speaking or what drugs my laptop is taking but it is really freaking me out. The screen goes all fuzzy, then Ragan from The Exorcist drops in for a cameo appearance and things then get even weirder as it then flashes on and off for a while, turns off and on a few times and it then dies for a short time to then turn on again.

Needless to say, I’ve pretty much had enough of it and losing recent work and photos.

I’ve narrowed it down to either a 13 inch DELL Studio XPS or a 15 inch Toshiba QOSMIO with an awesome Harman Kardon speaker system with a sub woofer and an extra bass speaker to give it more of an extra kick. Last weekend I gave my Tiny Traveller to Luo Wei so I am now stuck with the schools turtle of a computer that while it ponders doing what I request I can go out and make a coffee, do a couple of loads of washing, bake some bread to return to find out that it has either decided to do as I ask or wants me to try again.

A single man has only so much washing to do and I have no hair to wash! I also don’t know how to bake bread or scones.
Beers N Noodles toya…..shane

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The soundtrack to this entry was by the mighty Machine Head
The album was 'Hell Alive’
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