Bits n Bobs (Marcus)

Well there's not a lot really to say this week, I guess things are feeling so normal in a lot of ways it slowly becomes harder to describe what was previously so completely abnormal to our way of normality! Yes I meant to over-use the word normal thanks very much!

Today at our campus we were woken up to the familiar sound that can only be mass kids. I didn't know what was going on, but it completely destroyed my sleep-in. Courtney said there were heaps of kids outside, all doing running type things. And sure enough, there were masses of kids doing what looked like running time trials or something. I do not know if they have houses in their schools here, like I used to have at my school, it wouldn't appear so, yet they do quite a lot of physical education here.

We found out later in the day that they were in fact students from other local schools, using Tian Yi's facilities to conduct fitness examinations. Fitness examinations! Apparently in order to get into high school you have to pass them. I feel sorry for the chubby kid with the tucked in tracksuit pants that were pulled too high who was obviously not real into fitness. Then again, there's a few fatties in a few of my classes.

You don't see many fat Chinese, but there's definitely chubby ones. When we ask the kids to describe each other, they outright say, "He's very fat!" "He look like a pig!" and things like that. No-one ever takes offense though, it's weird. Firstly, we assume that being overweight is actually a sign of prosperity - being able to afford to eat a lot of food and what not. And secondly, looking like a pig inst such a bad thing, as the Chinese love them. You see Pig character things everywhere, Pig toys etc etc. They look like pigs alright, and I can't see them as anything other than ugly pigs, but the Chinese, they like em.

I went into the office of one of the men from our wedding table today as I promised I would. I actually skirted past the row of offices the other day but couldn't locate them. For my record it's office 204. And further for my record, his English name is Jack. His Chinese name is Zhang - pronounced sort of like saying Jong or actually, Jung. I went in there to say hello, and he super enthusiastically jumped to his feet, remembering that I had expressed interest in playing table tennis with him(yeah after umpteen rice wines at the wedding). What the hell I thought, I like table tennis. So off we trekked, with me asking after his daughter who I remembered was studying in Sydney, etc etc.

So we got there and the table tennis rooms were being used for the fitness trials, so we post-poned the date until Thursday afternoon once we've finished class.

We also ran into Mr Pan on the way back from dinner tonight and told him we'd like to take him out to dinner soon as a thank-you for all his help, so that should be good too.

Tonight we tried out a new place which we suspect was Sichuan going by 1. the copious amounts of chillies in our meals and 2. the fact there were about 100 plastic chillies hanging in the doorway that we noticed on our way OUT.

Sichuan if you didn't know is a province of China, but it's also one of the (i think) four main types of Chinese cuisine. It is famous for its Hot Pot(dipping thin strips of meat and so on into a boiling hot pot of water/noodles), but moreso it is famous for being super spicy. Our meals weren't too bad. They were spicy to a degree, but we didn't dare eat any of the small dried out red chillies, which Courtney tells me would have been nuclear.

The menu had a few pictures but most chinese characters, so as usual, we just took a punt and ordered a beef, pork and vegetable dish. The vegetable dish was bloody fantastic. It was basically a plate of green beans covered in copious amounts of red chillies. They were dried out somehow, and super salty and almost tasted like chips. Absolutely superb. Likewise the pork dish had this dried almost charcoaled meat which was similar to just eating bacon, served with larger deep fried chillies. And the beef dish was again served amongst huge chunks of garlic, ginger, chillies and onion and was damned tasty. We may have lost our favourite korean BBQ place(which potentially is being renovated - we can't tell), but I think we might have found a new favourite. Looking around the place there were oodles of other dishes that looked superb.

Oh and one other thing we saw tonight that was disgustingly amusing - in the restaurant were quite a few babies with their mothers. One of them is carried past us, and as usual, there's the bare ass hanging out the back - Courtney copped an eyeful of willy, bonus! Anyhow as they sat back down, I looked down on the floor and there was a discarded nappy. Beside the disgarded nappy was a - yes ladies and gentleman, a piece of poo.

The Chinese will not hesitate to leave this kind of mess anywhere for as soon as that poo hit the floor, it became someone elses problem. The hotel owner wont touch it. Nor will the serving staff - who just mill around doing nothing most of the time. It's the poor cleaner who probably comes in after hours who will get to enjoy this little baby.

Ah as I've said many times, this country cracks me up.