This just in: Man with WuXI's largest feet finds shoes! (Marcus)

As the title suggests, correct! I have stumbled upon a pair of Adidas sneakers which are actually my size, 11.5. We went to Metro today with Mr Pan to buy a few odds and ends and I thought I'd take a quick look at their shoes. At the bottom of a pile on sale, my eyes popped out of my head when I saw the size, and seemingly the only pair in the whole damned city. Actually that's not true - i found a second pair, but they looked feral. These at least, while not glass ballroom shoes still don't look too bad. One thing I have discovered about the Chinese is their fashion sense is, well it's shithouse.

These make me very happy. The two pairs of regular shoes I brought with me are wearing out big-time due to wearing them every single day. I kiss you Metro.

Ok now the above photo was taken in Metro. Metro is like the size of Bunnings - and actually looks very similar to Bunnings and has basically everything. Down one end are various electrical goods, TV's, clothing, stationary, all kinds of appliances, crockery etc etc. And down the other, a supermarket, complete with a few aisles of nothing but imported goods(woohoo!). Down the very end is the fresh meat section, fresh fruit, a bakery and finally a section which is basically like an aquarium except - nope, they aint pet's honey, dem's fer dinna! So this guy above is one of the school's drivers. He's been out of action for a little while as he broke his right hand - he was hit on his bicycle by a car. Actually on the way to Metro we saw our first accident where it looked like someone was hurt quite badly - an ambulance rushed by us to the scene where someone was lying on the road(except we couldnt see them as they had a huge crowd around them). The road's here as we have said are shockers - we also found out Mr Pan's wife, Yulan was in a car accident last year sometime - and i've heard of others - so i guess there are more accidents than we thought(and we are aware that there's a 55+ deaths a day road toll in China - which I guess for a population of 1.3 billion, really isn't too bad).

Back to the story - which by this point will probably be a let-down. So that's one of the school's drivers - lovely guy, always smiling, and like most other people around the school, cant speak english. We decided to have a looksee at all the live fish - actually Mr Pan called us over there to show us a huge live crab which apparently was from Australia. There was a lovely tank full of yum yum frogs, eels, these weird small headed turtle things. Mr Driver thinks it'd be cool to pick up one of the eels, and does so, but you know, eels bein' eels, it's slippery as hell and he drops it on the ground. With big smiles he picks it up and drops it again, this time into the turtle tank. Then it's all the fun of the fair as he stands there watching it hoping the turtle will have a bite at it or something. Ahh Chinese people.

Prison Food!

Here is Courtney and I enjoying our daily pris er canteen meal. Mmmh mmm. Would be an even bigger Mmmh mmm if the type of food served was ever different.

Today to our complete surprise we discovered the entire middle part of the school; a massive area, is in fact one huge fountain! What the hell?!!? We've walked through this area so many damned times and never noticed ANYTHING that remotely resembles a fountain. Yet today as we're walking back from picking up our wages, I hear water, we go and have a look, and ya blammo a massive fountain! It was actually pretty awesome too, with water patterns that changed constantly.

We found out it was because students and teachers from other school's were at our campus today for an english exam. Apparently these other school's don't have the facilities to hold exams but Tian Yi, the 'Chosen School' with it's unlimited gold/money certainly does. Hell did you see the mega fountain?!? In typical Chinese fashion, such visible representations of wealth are only turned on or exhibited if someone of note visits. We had the fountains at the front of the school and beneath the golden apple on for when we first arrived..well so Mr Pan could photograph us in front of them. Never the big fountain though :( I bet they'd have put that on if we were American :(

On a different note - the fog you see is not smog - it's actually fog(well actually it probably is smog too). Today was colder and drizzly - of course, because it's our weekend! Slightly cynical? Yes!

Here is the building of Senior 1 where we teach all of our lovely teens. It's actually a great way to find out how fit you are, tamping up 5 flights of stairs to get to the top. On Friday afternoon I have class 16 which is on level 5, to which I always arrive buggered, then have to go straight down to the ground floor for class 1. There's several rows of these buildings - 3 in fact. One for Senior 1, Senior 2 and Senior 3 - the equivilant of year 10, 11 and 12 in Australia. We have to walk past Senior 2 and 3's buildings to get to Senior 1. The students in those buildings have never been taught by us, so we're a constant novelty. As we walk by, there's always some kid yelling, HELLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. We put up with it for the moment, but it's only a matter of time before they're introduced to the western finger.

And last but not least, a ninja photograph of the menu at the 'Coffee' shop restaurant we go to just down the road. I was too full for Rice with Flesh, but the Rice with Frog had me drooling.