Aiya..(oh dear), I missed a day again. Sorry!

As it happens, yesterday was just cleaning up, Chinese learning and paperwork for PT, so there was little to say anyway. The first and the last of those three were being done in preparation for the PT visit next week. Tom and Ingrid from PT are currently on their way to China, and will be arriving in Kuitun at the weekend. They are only here for a day before they move onto another project, so It's important, I feel at least, to make a good impression - especially considering that they won't be able to judge how i'm doing on my teaching, as they are here on a saturday. Marcus' school is open as usual, because of the seven day week of senior 3, so I assume we'll be visiting No1 high in the morning.

As for today, I had a fair bit of fun continuing my war against classes that never stop talking. Today, I burst into my only class (the morning lesson was cancelled, and the students were cleaning the school during my two afternoon lessons) with a very loud "ONCE!"...waited a moment for the class to turn in shock..."a midnight dreary, while I pondered...weak and weary..." I have a feeling my students didn't expect me to walk into the class reciting Allen Poe's 'The Raven' at the top of my voice.

I stopped after the first stanza so they didn't lose interest again. It does take almost 10 minutes to read aloud after all. I explained that I walked in shouting poetry at them because today we would have a go at writing short stories in English. That's only partly true. The other side, and the main reason was to give them a shock into paying attention for the rest of the lesson. To a small extent it even worked.

The stories themselves were fairly impressive grammar wise, but my students certainly lost points on creativity. Also, as usual, a large number of students simply didn't do anything.

I have a theory now for why my students are so lazy in my class, but I'll leave my little theory off the blog until i've mentioned it to Tom and Ingrid - I want a second opinion on it before I plaster it across my blog.

On a side note, I just understood something on the Chinese radio i'm listening to! yay! (they speak fast on the radio, with far too much zhe ge... and na ge... (this, and that - Chinese equivalent of ummm and errr))

Now, how about a mention of public transport in Kuitun, as my bike will soon become useless until the end of the winter. I took the bus to work today for the first time. Back in the UK (for some reason writing that has brought 'back in the ussr' into my head...), I used to think that the cost of Edinburgh buses was wonderful. Being able to get a day return for around 3 pounds (noooo, my Chinese laptop has no pound symbol) was pretty magical in comparison to the horrific 6 pounds to get in Cambridge from St Ives. So how about 1 yuan?

In other words, I could use the Kuitun bus 60 times for the price of the bus into Cambridge. Not too bad at all!

The taxis are rather nice too. You can get get to most of Kuitun for the not so steep price of 5 yuan. To add to the deal, Kuitun taxi drivers aren't anywhere near as mad as the Beijing taxis.

There really is not major downside to public transport here. Perhaps when the temperature really drops, the buses may end up like the beijing buses. Beijing buses at rush hour can only be described like this. You know when you try and pack away a sleeping, and the storage bag never has enough space? So you keep on pushing more and more of the sleeping bag in, until it feels like the stuff bag will rip into two pieces? That is pretty much a Beijing bus, except that the sleeping bag is replaced with people.

I'll leave it at that today -if nothing particularly exciting happens tomorrow, i'll probably end up talking about learning Chinese in the next blog.