Jackson Oriental Hotel Xianning

... and I can use my American License to drive. He is working on how to get me a Chinese License, though!!

It is very different driving in China. The person in the front has the right away- this means if I pull out in front of you while you are going 60mph, I have the right away. They are crazy. When you have a generation of new drivers,this is what you get. Most of the drivers ...

... br>
- Speaking of inconsolable... Sorry about your luck Rider fans.

- We have to give open lessons in the next couple weeks. Basically, this means we teach a lesson in front of the class of our choice, as well as the English department of our school, and whoever else might want to come and watch foreigners make asses of themselves. My lesson will definitely feature more tic-tac-toe.


That's all for now.

Mike

... older teachers just needed a chuckle, but a LOT of work went in to this show. There were drummers in unisex red pleather halter tops, "traditional" dancers, the shiniest school band you've ever seen and a 6 year old boy singing a solo in front of 1000 students and teachers because he simply loves to sing. And because there was a technical malfunction with a drum kit. Oh, and make-up. So much make-up.

Wuhan, Hubei, China mikeandjill

... places so get to see a different side of Wuhan and Chinese people. Also Wuhan and the University are very different now the students are here (which they weren't when here last time). Apparently Wuhan has 157 higher education establishment and City College where Erica is a small one but still has 20,000 students so image how many students there are in total. I will update more information later when i find a job and settle in.

... until 2 in the morning was a welcome relief. Hangzhou, too, looks beautiful. Any city that sports a gigantic lake in the middle can't go wrong. Marco Polo called Hangzhou the most splendid city in the world. Well, that's New Orleans, but Hangzhou ain't bad. On Tuesday while passing through Ningbo, I got my visa extended another 30 days. Even though I knew it should be OK I still felt elated when I made it ...

Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) I had to ditch Heather for this one. The words "climbing" and "mountain" should never be put together in her book. So midnight Thursday I set out with Bella and Mary (Aussie and Amercian teachers from our school) on an overnight train to Huangshan, in Anhui Province. The pollution's been pretty bad in Changzhou so we were delighted to big breathes of crisp "invisible" air hopping of the train in ...

... I'm not going to write much here for the internet connection I have is very expensive ($1 per five minutes) but highly reliable. I'd prefer to share my photos. We spent the day visiting 2 villages, an ink factory and Hagnshuan... a very friendly place... before boarding our overnight train to Shanghai. Departed at 10:30pm and arrived in amazing Shanghai 11 hours later. More about Shanghai later.

... really masked my opinion of China as of late. The mountain has a very clever cable car taking passengers from one level to the next on the mountain... took about 20 minutes. This tour has a physical rating of 2 (hardly anything) but today was hard - good preparation for my next tour which has a physical rating of 4!!!! Up, down, up, down mountain slopes. We walked and walked... about 15km all up... so today was a very good fitness work out for all of us. Much needed after ...

... flowers everywhere. See the photos! Bryan is amazing... on arrival at one of our transfer points, he had the audacity to lose it at our leader, Ciao for not having our transfer bus parked no more than 2 metres from our pick up van... the bus was parked about 5 metres away... he complained quite violently... we tend to think that he has been in the army, despite his assurances that his working life was spent in adult education. I just had to look away for I felt quite ...

... that important (see our descriptions of toilets in our Dali blog). We went on one of these tours and whilst the tour itself around some temples wasn't that interesting, it was an experience being part of a mass of Chinese tourists pushing past each other to get off the boat first and following the tour guide with a yellow flag everywhere. There's no English translations and we were starting to appreciate how lucky we were with our foreigner-oriented ...