In terms of escaping Jiujiang (escaping might be a slightly dramatic word for it, but we get very bored in Jiujiang), April was quite a busy month for Nicole and I. After our weekend in Wuyuan at the beginning of the month, we responded to an SOS we're-dying-of-boredom text from Beth and Cat and went to Chongren for the weekend, and we spent the days off we had for mid-term exams visiting Ned and Matt in Zixi. Having now visited 3 out of the 4 PT projects in Jiangxi, I can now rank them in several areas of importance:

Comfortable beds: Jiujiang 1st, Zixi 2nd, Chongren 3rd
Showers: Chongren 1st, Jiujiang 2nd, Zixi 3rd*
Kitchen (not that any of us them often): Chongren & Jiujiang joint 1st, Zixi 3rd
How much people at the projects likecare/are interested in volunteers: Chongren 1st (by miles), Jiujiang and Zixi joint last
General attractiveness of the town/city: Jiujiang 1st, Zixi 2nd, Chongren 3rd

We arrived in Chongren on Saturday evening and went for dinner with the girls and their waiban, Mrs Mung. Mrs Mung adores the girls... and the Yihuang boys, who she's met several times. One time she even turned up, unannounced and 'accidentally', at the boys' school and in Rob's lesson. Part-way through dinner she disappeared, reappearing later with a hefty folder of photos she has of Beth, Cat, Rob, Dan and herself, plenty of which the girls had never known existed. After looking through this and the other five albums documenting various parts of her life that she whipped out later, we made our excuses and went back to the girls' flat. We'd been back about half an hour when a student knocked on the door to invite us all out to go for a walk with herself and Mrs Mung. When the girls refused the invitation she mock-cried and told them they made her very sad - a revelation for Nicole and I, who have never experienced anything like this at our own project!

Sunday was a busy day for us: we spent the morning in the sun, eating ice-creams and pineapple, and trying to have stickers made of our own faces at the photo-shop. I was planning to send these home as a thoughtful gift, but unfortunately they turned out just to be wallet-sized photos and not actual stickers, which I'm sure you're all very disappointed by. For lunch, we shared a cake with one of the girls' students and his friends, who later took us to wander around a half-finished park on the outskirts of Chongren... In the afternoon, we cycled to a sports hall in town to play badminton with the girls' Chinese teachers. (I was appalling at this and Nicole was even worse.) and in the evening we stayed up plotting, and getting excited about, our summer travelling.

When the time came to visit Zixi, Nicole and I screwed up and missed our train, which meant we had to lurk about in McDonald's for four and a half hours, ordering a McFlurry between us every hour and a half to justify our staying there. Zixi, as promised, was even smaller than Chongren, although what there was of it was neater, cleaner and more modern. Also as promised, there was absolutely nothing to do. I say there's nothing to do in Jiujiang (because there isn't), but Zixi is another level of nothing-ness. On our first day, we ventured out only for lunch, dinner and snacks and spent the rest of the day closeted in the boys apartment, playing whist and poker. Matt was teaching on our second day so, after showing us the river, Ned took us up to the school to meet him and participate in a tug-of-war they'd been told about that morning. Their school is brand new, absolutely enormous and just a tiny bit depressing - all the buildings are grey and plain, and there are no trees or garden-y bits like there are at our school in Jiujiang. The tug-of-war was to be a big competition between all the various teaching departments in the school and all four of us were invited to join the headteacher's team. Everyone was taking it very seriously, which we later found out was because there was a 100Y-per-team-member prize for the winning team, and, after learning about the prize money, we were no exception. We had about six matches, and I had no idea what was going on in any of them, except that the tiny woman next to me was very angry. Even after we won, I wasn't quite sure what was going on and, as the prize-giving ceremony wasn't until the next day, after Nicole and I would've left, we never saw our prize money. We're pretty sure the boys claimed it on our behalf, and that they've spent it all on a fancy ashtray to replace the one Nicole had broken earlier.

That's all there is to report really - they were both very brief trips, but it's always good to get out of Jiujiang for a while.

*the water stopped halfway through my shower and I had to finish washing my hair in the sink. Me = unimpressed.