To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first - William Shakespeare

It was time to get back into the swing of teaching, lessons all planned and ready to go. The news that we had 2 more days off as the kids had exams was SOO GOOD. I can't even remember what we did, sat in and got very bored on our laptops. I discovered a website where i can watch all gossip girl series 1 - 6 at ease, to say the least me and Catherine rarely socialise anymore, headphones in, laptop on. Returning back to the classes and the children screaming 'we missed you' was lovely and even my naughty class 7 seemed happy to see me again. The weekend we planned to go and suprise Rob as it was his birthday on the past Monday but we were all teaching so could not visit him. Me and Catherine planned with his partner Dan to turn up Saturday morning, hide on a few floors above their flat and wait for them to leave to go for breakfast. Then Dan would leave the key in the door, allowing us to get in and decorate the place with decorations. But of course, me keeping the secret for this long wasn't going to happen, on skype to Dan one day i never thought that Rob could be sitting next to him so when i blurted out 'CANT WAIT TO SEE YOU GUYS TOMORROW' i think Rob saw, getting slightly suspicious but keeping quiet to be polite. Nonetheless the plans went forward, the night before me and Catherine going on a shopping spree, obtaining a fake gun, poppers, a dart board, skipping rope and ribbons, all ready to decorate the house and for presents. We went home and deocrated a huge banner for him (taking an hour or so i may add!) and began cutting out paper ready for paper chain making at the boys house.

In the morning we travelled down to Yihuang on the lovely bumpy bus, squashed into the back seats and armed with a large wrapped up dartboard (see my video for evidence of the bumpyness). We went into stealth mode on arrival, scanning the area for any chances of Rob around, telling Dan of our where abouts and sneaking off to the boys apartment. We arrived, and held in our laughter as we passed their door and up to the 5th floor to hide out. As the boys left, we got the cough signal from Dan that they were leaving and after a few minutes we headed down. As we got in we set up straight away, Catherine on balloon duties and me paper chains. It took us nearly an hour but by the end we had perfected our singing for when he arrived, the place looked messy/decorated and we dolled ourselves up. When we recieved a knock on the door we panciked, we weren't quite ready yet, we hadn't got the poppers out the bag and Catherine was still doing the last baloons. We scrambled around, quickly trying to organise ourselves and opened the door for the boys. A slightly shocked looking Rob stood at the door as we popped balloons in his face, sang happy birthday, waved our ribbons about and fired the fake gun at him. He seemed to love it, and his dart board for that matter!!! He even pretended to me that he didn't know anything about it.. later revealing to me that he did, but was still suprised that we came early in the morning. Even Dan was impressed with the effort we had gone to on the apartment in deocrating it for Rob, with random pieces of tinsel lieing about.. you know, to add to the birthday atmosphere.

For the day the boys took us to their school to play sports but the weather was still hitting the mid 20's so it was difficult to play one round of table tennis without sweating buckets. We ended up retreating early and heading to a noodle bar near them where you got to pick all your ingrediants you wanted to chuck into your bowl of noodles.. was actually slightly cool apart from birthday boy not enjoying it, defeating the point a bit.. but i did offer to pay (the boys paying though.. GENTLEMEN!) In the afternoon they took us to a pagoda near their house. Walking up the many steps to get to the top we arrived at a stunning view. One side showing the town of Yihuang and the other the countryside. You could of easily mistaken it for a beautiful part of the countryside in England. The view stretched for miles, stopping at the green hills. You could see the much poorer area of Yihuang, with the small wooden houses and the people farming on the land. The poor pagoda didn't get much attention from us and it was more the view. We headed back and decided that our hard work climbing the mountain/it was Rob's birthday we should all go to get fast food. After what advertised as a cheeseburger and ended up being a horrible meat thing i got an icecream and chips for my dinner and we headed back to the apartment to get our drink on. We brought some vodka from nanchang so put this to good use playing ring of fire, ride the bus and a game we invented involving drawing a picutre of one of our faces and sticking it to the dartboard. You then had 2 darts, if you hit someones face they had to drink, yours or missed then you had to drink. A game to get Beth easily drunk it seemed. The boys had good aim so aimed for me most of the time and my efforts to get them back ended with the dart in my picture or on the floor. Overall it was pretty fun but we were all tired and headed to bed around midnight (so early for us :P). On the Sunday we had a very chilled morning, playing darts and music until we headed back home on that lovely bumpy bus. I was shattered but couldn't get an ounce of sleep as we were always jumping everywhere. Arriving home we just relaxed, took a nap, skyped our families and planned our lessons for the forthcoming week.

The weekend didn't involve much travelling or sightseeing in China but was pretty fun, my next blog will be about my mountain climb i did this weekend, that was pretty gap yeary

<3