Ok so I have been bad. The last few weeks have been a mixture of business, sickness and laziness so please forgive me for my absence. Sooooo what have I been doing I hear you ask and the response is a resounding.... not much actually.

After the initial flurry of excitement I had at moving to China and settling in I have predominantly focussed on settling in and making myself comfortable. For starters I bought a 360, I tried to resist and couldn't, I then bought a sofa because hard wooden chairs are too much for my bottom and then finally I bought a HD monitor for the 360 because the CRT TV simply wasn't doing it for me! So in short I am now completely set up in my flat and my nesting instincts are complete.

I have also bought a bike (have I mentioned this already) and spent a substantial amount of time playing chicken with buses in Jiujiang and divebombing pedestrians on the pavement when the road simply becomes too lethal! Chinese traffic is best described absolutely f***ing ridiculous (sorry Grandparents but no other adjectives cut it) I mean there are literally no rules..... none. Green light means go red light means go and orange light just confuses people.

And zebra crossings..... dont get me started!

The only grace of the chinese driver is that they drive so damn slowly. Seriously sooo slowly. The stereotype of asian drivers being slow is correct and can be explained by evolution. If chinese drivers drove as quickly as we do they would all be dead. The ones that don't drive would be killed in the resulting explosion of several hundred million cars spinning of the road or hurtling into one another.

But that is fine, there is something amusing about being able to beat most cars from A to B on my bike!

OH yes I also met the mayor/principal of Jiujiang the other day and got absolutely minced with her, her posse of bureaucrats and "the foreign experts of Jiujiang" of which I am counted. The reason was that a special dinner was held for all the foreign experts of Jiujiang where we got fed, made speeches and got very, very drunk.

You know what the best thing was. This all happened in the hotel I live in. So All I had to do was walk from the hotel bar to the lift and to my room! Now that's convenience.

I also met three very cute waitresses that night so life is looking up!

On a vain note, after playing badminton every day for the last few months and eating chinese food which has practically no fat in it I have lost about a stone in weight and am looking like a lean mean badmintoning machine!