Sorry!
For the lack of posts. Skating every night is leaving me exhausted, so perhaps I will have to start blogging in the morning? I don't know, but i'll figure something out.
Saturday 14th
Saturday was an 7:00am wake-up for an 8:00am start to the teaching day, with classes until 5:15pm. The day went quite well, I think I'm starting to fit into the grove of teaching now. Predictably I went skating in the evening. At the weekend there are lots of people skating, I met some new people and saw some faces I hadn't seen since the previous weekend.
Sunday 15th
Sunday was another early morning, but this time finishing at 3:00pm. In the afternoon myself and Tim walked around town. 'Dwayne' was teaching lil' kids how to skate, so I hung around there for a little while, the kids are sooooooo cute. Snapped some pics.
^ Synchronised slalom skating - Looks better in movement!
^ More of the above
^ Hahaha, good to see even the pros falling on their ass!
^ You see quite a few people walking down the road in what look like Japanese karate Gis. Given the history of Karate Vs. Kung Fu in China, I find this strange. Although maybe they just wear Japanese-looking Gis for Kung Fu.
^ This little girl was awesomely better than me, and made sure I knew it. Whatever I'd try to perform, she'd do the same....backwards. In the evening however, Myself, Dwayne and Her had a race... I came first. Never too old to say "ner ner nerr nerrrrr ner!"
In the evening we went to a Korean BBQ place. OMG is was outta this world. Myself, Tim and Aya must have consumed about 2kgs of meat, hahaha. It was delicious!
^ BBQ heating up.
^ We were the only ones in the restaurant. It was a pretty clean / classy place for Weinan.
^ MMmmmmm.... Yes, it was as good as it looks.
^ Nom nom nom nom!
In the evening, I went skating :-)
Monday 16th
Monday was a 6:45am start, to grab a cab at 7:30 over to Beitang. Classes of 20 on a Monday, the same kids who I teach on a Thursday. I found out how absaloutely retarded my classes are. Basically the teacher before me (who walked out half way through his contract) was the worst teacher ever, and didn't teach the kids anything. Half of them don't even know their English names when you call out the register, and just look at you blankly when you say "What's your name?" Argh! A pretty frustrating day. Ended up getting through to a few of them though, so all was not lost. At lunch we infiltrated the kid's sports field and ended up having a 100meter race. Myself, Dumi and Tim. I won, Dumi finished second, and Tim came up last... but in the eyes of the kids, we were all Usain Bolt, seeing 3 westerners running down their track was probably the craziest thing they'd ever seen. When we left at the end of the day, a whole load of kids (too many for my camera phone to capture) were doing their end-of-day warm-down:
After this we had another 100meter race, Although some little kid wondered onto the track, I ploughed into him, and then into Dumi. I was gonna stop to check if the kids was okay, but Dumi was still high-tailing to the finished line, I tried to catch him, but couldn't. :( Myself and Dumi then had a 1-lap race ( it seems about 300meters ) Dumi won... :(
After that we headed back to Aston, and met up with Jenny to go play some ping pong. Dumi had been saying all week he was gonna whoop her at ping pong, despite having never played ping pong in his life. Predictably, Jenny kicked his ass, and mine.
^ The ping pong table made of slab, and a metal net. Nice!
^ Jenny tries to teach Dumi how to hold the bat
^ Random old guy laughing at the foreigner trying to play ping pong
^ Jenny kicking my ass
^ Dumi with the eye of the tiger
^ That little orange ball is the new annoyance of my life
^ More people walking past and being amused
^ Jenny using the force to levitate the ball
^ All the kids from the school that we were playing at were going to the windows to watch us play. All but a few scatered when I aimed my camera at the window, but at one point there were 10 kids peering out of each window :-p
^ Action-shot
^ Dumi bowing to Jenny's superior ping pong skills
^ Myself and Dumi had dumb-ass looks of concentration throughout, Jenny however just smiled her way through the games
In the evening... I skated! :-p
Tuesday 17th
Which brings us up to today! No school today, woke up at 10:00am. One of the Chinese teachers, Fangfang came around to use my washing machine, she doesn't have one, and I thought I'd pluck her brain of how to actually use the thing, washing my undies in the sink was getting very tedious. Me and fangfang headed out for lunch, 'Dwayne' phoned me and said he wanted to go shopping. We were eating just down the road from his shop, so we walked there and I had fangfang translate. He wanted to go shopping there and then, but fangfang had about an hours more washing to do, so I left her in my place, and told her to close the door behind her. She said she was going to steal all my things :-( ... I didn't laugh.
Me and Dwayne went shopping. I bought some combat trousers so I could fit in with the cool kids when I skate. It was a really cool US-themed army surplus store, Dwayne is pretty good friends with the owner, so we were talking in there for a while. Then we headed to Popland where he treated me to.... some wierd slush-puppy-gel-sweet-thing. Really hard to describe... imagine jelly-baby-like sweets mixed in with Slush Puppy and served in a bowl with a tiny spoon. Very wierd, but pretty tasty. In the afternoon I met one of Dwayne's friends at the university, we walked through town for a while and grabbed some food. In the evening, more skating then came here, home.
Oh, and my house hadn't been robbed. That made me happy.
Cool!You went to my school to play ping-pong!You even don't know I'm not bad at it.(Don't think too much about it,just "not bad".haha...)