Haiyatt Garden Hotel (Houjie) Dongguan

... in Starbucks and a delightful Toffee Nut Latte, which is part of their &#8220;get ready for Christmas!&#8221; range. They even have trees and ornaments up. Well... Hallowe&#8217;en is done and dusted now... Anyway, my bag storage cost as much as the massage (I suppose it lasted longer...), and its size FINALLY came in useful when I walloped a few queue jumpers in the face with it. HAHAHAHAHA! Revenge is so sweet. <br><br>Passport pages 3 and 4 now have eleven and a ...

... of any school. Apart from the principal and assistant head teacher, there are only four full &#8211; time teachers and a few others who drift in on odd days. The full &#8211; time teachers are; Math&#8217;s, Science, English and some other thing that seems a little ill &#8211;defined. It doesn&#8217;t make for a very lively staff room, you&#8217;re all on to find someone to chat with. Other people come in part &#8211; time to teach Music, P.E., Art, Chinese ...

... and &#8216;Face tube&#8217; and a myriad of other things with equally silly names that seemed to do things for the sake of doing them. All designed to titillate the vacuous minds of a generation brought up on a diet of mobile phones and electronic, alien invasions. I wrote down some web addresses and tried to look impressed. Unfortunately, the only thing I saw was an easy escape from real knowledge, a world of flashing lights designed to disguise the mediocrity of the ...

These lovely pictures are of the South China Normal University in Guangzhou, the capital of the Guangdong province. Guangzhou is 1.5 hours by bus from my town Qingyuan. It is a very large city of about 15 million people, but I have yet to feel overwhelmed or crowded by the people. It is very easy to travel around even with very weak Chinese as almost all public signs are in both English and Chinese and most young people speak at least a little English. I ...

... and I can say without doubt that I had the best tea I have ever drunk that night. We drank several different<br>types, some aged up 30 years and costing over $1000/kilo. Connie told me that Axu spends all of his money on tea. She is not a fanatic like he is so he was super happy to have someone to share his tea with. Throughout the evening after my delight and interest was expressed in<br>Pu-erh, Axu proceeded to give me a bunch of his super expensive tea with a tea pot and 3 cups ...

... massage and badmitton at this place. Mike and I played badmitton and her dominated me. It is a much harder sport than I was expecting and I need to do a lot more training. To help with our swimming, we got a pair of swim goggles. They really let us know just how dirty the pool was * Almost every day we will see some large amount of food, livestock, styrofoam, propane bottles ...

Sunday was our day to get to Hong Kong which involved a flight to Shenzhen then a ferry ride across to Hong Kong. Although Hong Kong is part of China it is effectively like going into another country. You exit immigration in Shenzhen then go through it again in Hong Kong. I had my most joyous experience in Shezhen airport with ATMs. The ferry crowd would only accept cash and we'd run ours down in order to ensure we ...

... years, but I think, it is very difficult!' Suddenly I felt a pang go through my heart. The idea of simply being unable to pursue your dreams had never occurred to me before. I have always been conscious of the fact that my life has been handed to me on a silver platter, but I never realised that my current conundrum, 'What am I going to do with my life?', was actually a privilege. Unlike most people in China, I can at least choose my life. Wendy, and the other teachers I am getting ...

... Kent, Nancheng, Western Europe, China, Daohuacun, Ashford, London, Guangdong, England... and mean every one, yet not believe it matters. It sounds very simple to do, but it's not easy to believe. In saying all that, I still feel a strong sense of personal identity with my British roots in that I'll instinctively defend criticism of that country and culture more ...