(day 6 didn't post properly, so here it is again)

Let's start with what I missed in the last post. Yesterday Marcus introduced me to his friend in senior 3, whose English name is kelvin.

Kelvin speaks particularly good English in comparison to many of the other students, so it's nice to have a good English speaker of the same age as us around. he doesn't get much free time at all, being in senior 3. In China, competition for university places is so high that students go to school seven days a week, and have longer hours than most students. It seems however that one or two of these lessons are voluntary, so Kelvin made use of an extended lunch break to have lunch with me and Marcus.

I found out something I didn't know about the Chinese school system from him yesterday. Apparently there is some choice to what senior students get to study - Students choose between sciences or arts. The flexibility is certainly a little lacking in comparison to the A level system, but it was still interesting to find out. It makes me wonder though - what does a student do if they are interested in studying some arts and some sciences? The system here seems to push students into a discipline even sooner than the UK system, and with all the efficiency of the Chinese system, i'm not sure if such early specialisation is a good idea. But then, considering how packed full senior student's timetables are, there probably is no way a more flexible choice could work...

So how about the place we went for lunch? Talking about lunch is a fabulous excuse to talk about food, an important aspect of living in a new country! Most noodles in our part of China, if not local dishes, are served as noodle soup. Noodle soup is not my favourite dish in the world, but it's popular over here and it usually tastes fairly good. One of the difficulties of a noodle soup, is that the noodles are obviously going to be wet...making using chopsticks even harder work.

The exact noodle soup we had was 酸菜牛肉面, suan cai niu rou mian,or sour vegetable beef noodles. In China, the name of dishes basically just tells you exactly what you are going to get. No Risottos, shepherd's pies or the like. It will tell you in the dishes name that it's rice, with chicken in a spicy sauce.Names of meals are basically just an accurate description of what you will get served up to you. Which is nice, because if you know what a word means, you don't need to ask 'what's in this dish?' because the name already tells you.