Ginsters

Can’t believe it’s May already! This means we’re really nearing the end of our year in China, with less than a couple of months left. I’m literally counting down the days left of teaching now and can safely say I probably won’t miss the job, but it’s still a really easy of living in China and it’s been a great experience anyway. Really scraping the barrel now when it comes to ideas of what to teach though.

My mini-break of 5 days off has been great – Thursday and Friday were both really relaxed, then I went into Shanghai on Saturday to meet Stu for a bit of shopping. Travel was unbelievably rammed – this Labour Day holiday is one of the main ones in China where everybody travels somewhere else to spend some time with relatives. Buying tickets was a pain – I used the automatic ticket machines to avoid the enormous queues at the ticket desks, but still got stuck behind an entire queue of people who’d obviously never used the touch screen machines before and had no idea what was going on. After five minutes of trying and failing to buy a ticket I expected the guy at the front of the queue to give up, but no: instead he called a friend to see if he knew how to use it, then called his Mum, then his neighbour, then his old school teacher or something…. who knows. Anyway, this being China he continued to guard the machine vigorously with his elbows the whole time he was on the phone, despite the fact he wasn’t doing anything. Infuriating.

I eventually got a ticket for a train in just under an hour’s time and sat around waiting for them to announce it, only to glance back at the board half an hour later and see that it had been sneakily delayed by 45 minutes.

Anyway, I eventually got to Shanghai and met Stu and his Chinese friend Leslie at the fabric market, where Stu got measured up for a suit and I got measured for a tuxedo – not because there’s much likelihood I’ll ever need one, just because I want one.

After a trip to the fakes market we headed back to Jiaxing, delighted to find that the travel rush had calmed down, so we had plenty of time to meet Em for an espresso or two at my local coffee shop before the three of us went for dinner. After me and Stu headed out to a club for another night of random Chinese discotheque, making it back to bed at about 3 in the morning, but not before Stu had fallen in a hedge on the way back through my school campus.

I’m currently polishing off the last of the Ginsters Cornish pasties that my family brought out with them as a pre-gym snack – if chicken nuggets work for Usain Bolt then pasties probably will do the job for me. Surely?