2 weeks into living in Kuitun, it's about time i wrote a little about it. Right now, the very short NW China autumn appears to be starting, meaning I have maybe a month of warm weather now before the dramatic change to snow and extreme negative degrees C temperatures.

Kuitun, despite being in the middle of a desert, is a much greener city than I expected. the average street is lined with trees on both sides - which is great news as up until recently, the weather has been incredibly hot and any shade is welcome.

The city is only 50 years old. I assume that it is one of these new cities designed to urbanise rural areas. They apparently pop up everywhere in China - cities of 2-300'000 people which they build in around 5 years from scratch. In Kuitun however, it seems that building the city at great speed would have been pointless. One thing characteristic of Kuitun is that the skyline is dominated by cranes. The building of new and demolition of 'old' never stops. I have been woken up a number of times by what sounds like a firing squad. It's probably actually demolition work. Likewise, across the road from our flat is a building that looks like it has been derilict for 10 years. Truth is, according to our supervisor, that the buildng is only a few years old but it was decided it wasn't needed very soon after being built. And while the plans for brand new shiny apartments and fashionable shopping centres go up, many of the pavements are crumbling and forgotten about apartments fall into disrepair.

Anyway, enough on the building site that is Kuitun. Generally it's a nice city. As everyone lives in apartment blocks, the city is amazingly compact for a city with a 300'000 population. Being built on a grid system, it must be the easiest place in the world to navigate. Especially given that there is a clear uphill side of town and a clear downhill side. Personally, I kind of like that fact that downtown literally is the part of town that is down...but then maybe i'm just easily entertained.

And now i'm writing something i've already written - as this website decided it would be a good idea to delete half the blog by pressing the 'save and publish' button instead of saving and publishing...

As for what has happened to us in Kuitun since me and Marcus arrived. We've been invited to two banquets already, both of which have been fantastic, if a little awkward and embarrassing. On both occasions we were given the seats of honour, facing the door to the room - even at the banquet that was thrown by one of our supervisors, to say thanks to anyone who helped at her wedding. We didn't. Despite that, we were the guests of honour. And of course there is the whole fact that our Chinese isn't very good, so our main reply to any question directed at us was a look of blank ignorance. Or maybe a 'duibuqi' "sorry". problem with that is that the Chinese find it a little odd if you say thank you and sorry a lot. The food was all incredible, but I was a little shocked at the hotpot banquet to find a turtle in my pot. It turned out that the hotpot at this place was a turtle soup. The thing that cannot be avoided at banquets however, is the one thing that you want to avoid completely. The toasts. The endless toasts. At a Chinese banquet, everyone likes toasting everyone else, and at each one, everyone must down their glass of stupidly strong alcohol. We, for example, have a small bottle of 70% alcohol sat in the fridge from one of the banquets. I don't think we will be opening it.

I should perhaps talk about early teaching experiences, as that is the main reason why I am here. We have now been teaching for nearly 2 weeks. In that time, it has certainly got a lot better. The first few lessons were nightmarish until I worked out a style that worked. PT said I would be teaching roughly 50-60 students in each class, but in reality there is only one class near to 60, and the rest are between 40-50 students. I would say that makes a difference when it comes to management of the class. I am still trying to work out exactly at what sort of standard I should be teaching at, but it is clear they are very much taught from the text book. They know words such as 'outgoing' and 'hard-working' (they are in the text book), but one or two students in the not so good classes did not know the word 'big'. Most of the students do seem to speak better English than they think though, and one challenge is going to be to persuade them that they are good at English. At the moment, only those that think they are good are performing very well, but there are plenty that clearly know more than they think. More on teaching in a later blog. For now, I'm going to go take a few more photos of Kuitun to load up onto here. Until next time!