Yay Friday (Marcus)

Best day of the week, fact. It's been a quick week with a few ups and downs but thank god we're here. Tomorrow we're up first thing and off to Shanghai. Courtney found a really cheap self-contained apartment(Only around 40 AUD a night). It's on the 18th floor and supposedly has an awesome view of the Bund. The Bund if you're not up with Shanghai is a famous strip of European buildings along the main river in Shanghai whose name escapes me. And I have a feeling I have already explained what the Bund is this week..hmm.

So anyway we're off to Shanghai and really looking forward to it. We're not headed there for any real reason(well secretly to get the haircuts - and yes now I do recall I definitely have said all this before) - but it's great just being there.

The city itself is just huge, exciting and interesting all at once. Particularly as it's just about to hit night-time and the lights start to appear. The buildings are all lit up to the extreme and it really does look like you're in some kind of futuristic movie - well a low budget one anyway - there aint no spaceships..(yet!).

Nothing really much else to report. Mum is over in England visiting Nick and they're off to Italy shortly. Sounds great really. The classes this week went pretty well. Courtney didn't teach on Thursday as she was feeling a bit 'over' China and Chinese people. It goes up and down like that. I have been feeling pretty good for quite a while, but there are days where you're just over everything Chinese.

China while feeling familiar now is still so so so completely different to back home. The people in particular. When you rock up to the photo shop to pick up a roll of film; as Courtney did, and the chick behind the counter is practically yawning in your face with disinterest, while a handful of other chicks just hang behind the counter doing their nails and the like, it gets to you. Particularly when walking home you then cop the usual - hellooooooooo's, and laowai(foreigner) - all of course moreso as she's by herself and not with me so they're bolder - and to top it off, some old guy spits at her feet. Oh joyous day.

We have noticed many of the older Chinese will purposely hock up and spit when you pass them - we think it's an anti-foreigner thing. Who the hell knows. I do know that 99.9% of them think we're American. Kind of a good reason to get an Australian flag tattooed onto our foreheads.

So by the time she got home, she was hot and bothered and feeling shitty at China in general. And I don't blame her. I've been there myself and days like that just really suck. Of course she's back to normal and excited about going to Shanghai, so fear not in that department.

When I first got to China I thought that these people are amazingly hard workers. They work insanely long hours and you see even the oldies tottering around pulling huge cartloads of rubbish and other salvageable items. The students are in class from practically 6am till 9pm - and likewise the Chinese teachers are in their offices or teaching through those hours. The hours these people work are a shocker I thought..as I first got here.

It has become increasingly apparent that this is really not the case. Well it is and it isn't. It's a mixed bag and I don't feel comfortable making an outright judgment either way but i will definitely at least say, that while they work..no, while they are AT work for a very long time, there's not a lot of actual work being done.

The poor students who are stuck in class are buried in homework - they are doing things. The teachers spend most of their day just browsing the internet or mucking around. They teach around 2 classes a week. When we told them we taught 15+ they were actually quite surprised. They really don't do a lot.

The stores around here are all open till around 10pm. Long long hours - but each store has around 10 times as many staff as it actually needs, and at least 90% of them are doing jackshit, all day.

Storeworkers in the smaller stores spend most of their time sitting in the store - but it's not work. They're watching TV, they're eating noodles or playing with their kids.

I wouldn't go so far to call the Chinese lazy, that's a blanket statement and also partially a stereotype but I will definitely say the more I see of them, the less I see them do. My opinion is changing the longer I am here. Of course, this doesn't cover all Chinese, just those I have seen myself.

So as to the photo store where Courtney dropped her 35mm film for processing? Well she dropped them in on Tuesday and was told they would be done 'the day after tomorrow'. So that was when she returned and was told that no, they weren't done, they'd now be done tomorrow(which was today, Friday). So we didn't bother going to collect them today, we'll head back likely on Monday. If they're not done on Monday, I will not be surprised. If this was Australia I would have yanked my film back off them and told them to stick it up their arse. Over here? There's really no point. They couldn't care either way - we're still monkey's in their eyes, and if we took it to another store? Expect a repeat of the above.

What it does make me think of is the photo shops back home. Here they undoubtedly have about this much business when it comes to photo-processing (fuck-all), yet in Australia, the business is non-stop. You drop your films in and get them back in an hour. Here you drop one film in and it's too much of an effort to even be done within two days - when the shop is filled with staff just sitting around.

I'm not going to call them lazy pricks(oh but they are), I'm going to say they are culturally different to what I am used to, and leave it at that.