The Maramouseathon or 'Avoiding The Rat Race'!

Not a day goes by without something exciting or exceptional happening out here!

Yesterday opened with the ‘doughnut incident’ and closed with the Maramouseathon!

The doughnut while being my most alarming culinary experience for a long time, lead to my consuming a number of delicious bananas to get the taste and the memory of the taste out of my mouth and the bananas provided me with a daylong energy boost.  This banana overload combined with a delicious evening meal with the Directors of Assessment and Examinations for the Provincial Department of Education, to discuss the potential of a Centre to Prepare Students for Study in Swansea University, established any energy reserve worthy of powering my evening run along the river bank.

I set off at 21.00, feeling great and ready for a workout, up the busy high street much to the amusement of the local shopkeepers and residents.  Negotiating the chaotic traffic to cross the 6 lane main carriageway was a challenge in itself but once, safely, on the riverside pathway I set my pace and settled in to a comfortable(ish) rhythm. After a half kilometre or so I started to notice what looked like a lot of fallen leaves blowing in various directions across the track just ahead of me.  This seemed odd as there was little or no breeze, I didn’t think much more about it......until I neared the ‘leafy’ conflagration.  They weren’t leaves but a horde of quite large mice, not big enough to be rats, but big enough to be BIG mice, they didn’t seem too concerned about my approach either and there must have been about 50 of the critters, scurrying hither and thither! By the time I reached them, most scuttled off in to the long grass either side of the track, some didn’t and they seemed intent on getting under my feet! This affected my comfortable pace as I had to avoid stamping on them, to a casual observer it would have appeared that I was practicing for a sprint hopscotch competition! I cleared the obstruction and carried on, getting back into my stride easily, the mice seemed to take my persistence as a challenge, because the further I ran away from the centre of town the more appeared, the area was swarming with them.  They certainly took my attention away from the task of putting one foot in front of another and by the time I started concentrating again I had covered about 4km, I usually aim to run 5-6km so I was now into unchartered running territory for me as I still had the return journey to attempt. I turned round and headed back continuously having to avoid rodentocide as I went.

In total I covered close to 9Km thanks to my furry little friends, avoided squashing a single one and have been aching like my, long departed, arthritic Granddad all day, not comfortable especially  when to get anywhere in the Yandi Institute requires the climbing of numerous, never ending staircases!

This afternoon has been spent presenting to 100 local Secondary and High school English language teachers on the wonders of Swansea University and the unknown (to them) conventions and expectations of UK Higher Educational culture.

Another meeting and dinner with local education directors is on the cards for tonight and definitely no rodent related runs, the way my thighs are feeling I may never run or walk properly again!!

When is a doughnut not.........

Day 10, the time is flying by out here but the jet lag and the time difference make judging the passing of time really difficult, I sometimes have conversations about a meeting or a presentation I gave the day previously only to be corrected that it was that morning, or someone asks how long I’ve been here and I have to count on my fingers. A shift in the time space continuum, time goes fast but seems slow or vice versa?

I had my first encounter with unsavoury (huh there may be a pun in that) food stuff today and nothing like the exotic varieties of animal parts or bits of plants we’d throw away at home, all which have been very very edible to the point of delicious, so far. No, no private parts of a donkey or such like...no where even close.

Picture the scene, I’m staying in a local private institute eating and living  with the staff and students (sharing an apartment with an old friend not the staff or students!) There are 60 high school Chinese English teachers here at the moment on a teacher training workshop. 3 meals a day in the refectory, prepared or cooked by the in house staff, who are beautiful people. Anyway, breakfast is a meagre but not unpleasant affair, usually a boiled egg, a spicy sausage a slice of white bread and that’s about it, NOT TODAY OH NO! Today as I walked up the 3000 steps to the refectory I could smell something that suggested warm fresh doughnuts, my table was laid out with the egg and the sausage but on the serving table was a huge bowl full of.....YES...freshly made doughnuts!  I haven’t had a sniff of something sweet in 10days, great for the diet rubbish for my sweet tooth sugar addiction, so I started salivating, scoffed my egg and sausage with considerable gusto and made for the doughnuts.

Returning to my table I savoured the warmth of this tempting sugary snack, contemplating the calorific and energy giving values it would contribute to my evening run, pick it up off the plate in two hands, it was of considerable girth, and took a whopper of Desperate Dan sized bite right out of the side gnawing the thing almost in half. I tore the bigger than should have been mouth out and munched down......the first thing I thought of a few of my life’s mantras - ‘never judge a book by its cover’, ‘looks can be deceiving’ and ‘never assume’!

Never has been more truth and clarity of meaning been conveyed in that initial significant bite! The outside was exactly what ‘it had said on the box’ sickly sweet, sugar covered, doughy delight the centre, however.....well........just wasn’t! My taste buds all zinging and singing with joy from the sweetness were instantly assaulted, abused and shocked by the warm, spicy, over salted sour gravy and meaty interior. My mouth was filled, almost to capacity due to my gluttonous attack, with a thick stodgy mix of the thicker than it should be super sweet doughnut dough and the centre that I can only describe as gagging thick chilli gravy Winalot!

I gagged, I managed to not evacuate the contents over my mate and the surrounding students, I leapt to my feet jumped across the canteen and swiped a large quantity of serviettes from the dispenser and discreetly and politely managed to dispose of the offending concoction! It was close, and put a bit of a spoiler on my morning’s start, the day has got much better since though.

I love this country, full of contrasts to be found, even in one example of breakfast food!

Not long now!

The grand plan is falling into place, all visas have arrived for my family, all travel arrangements complete. It looks as though I'll be meeting them at the airport in Changsha 18.00 this Sunday evening. I can't wait, a local junior school has asked for us to visit them to meet my son, which will be amazing for him, what 10 year old boy doesn't like being the centre of attention? And what an opportunity for him to see how the kids here study. I've found a shop that sells Ugg boots for £10 so that'll make my wife's holiday complete too! Trip to the Great Wall has been organised too plus friends in Beijing ready to show us around there, it has the potential to be AWESOME.

Thoughts on China

The more I visit this...'continent' the more I fall in love with the place! I called it a continent because coming from Wales everything here is just too big a scale to call a country, everything about is massive;  the geography, the population, the ambition, the infrastructure , the stark contrasts between wealth and poverty and climate, the humility and generosity of the people, the variety of food. It all boggles the mind!

For example I'm in a small city, Zhuzhou City in Hunan Province, it's small but still bigger than the population of Wales; Chongqing last week 28,000,000 almost ten times the size of Wales, 50% as big as the UK......one city! Herfei where I visited last year, about 11,000,000, and in the last two years the local government there has completed a building project to erect enough housing and commercial accommodation to double the population of the city, another 11,000,000 people can now live in the city!!! Boggling or what?

I can't say it's a picturesque country from my experience so far, I know there are mind blowingly beautiful parts outside of the cities, what I have seen, so far,  is mostly ugly heavily industrialised, grime covered metropolis or examples of the futuristic world of 'Blade Runner' and surrounding suburbs, but the overriding joy of being here is the people.  The Chinese are incredibly warm, generous (almost unconditionally so) and have a brilliant sense of humour, welcoming to strangers and really interested in finding out more about them (nosy) I see a lot of similarities between the Welsh and the Chinese!!

Moving on.

I Had an excellent night in Changsha yesterday, was taken out for a lovely meal by an ex student and now colleague Mr Ronlad Peng and Dr Wu from CSUST. A restaurant serving authentic food typical of the region, very spicy and quite hot nothing like the Chinese food we get in the UK, and such a variety of dishes from tofu and green beans, an entire broiled chicken ( the only thing missing was the feathers!) to tiny little deep fried and beautifully crispy frogs (trciicky to pick up with chopsticks!) and a glass or.....ahem........two of local beer. Up before the crack of dawn, the jet lag is wrecking me this time, I am waking up at 04.30 on the dot everyday and am wide awake (08.00 UK ) then off for breakfast meetings with colleagues in Changsha University of Science and Technology, it was more like speed dating really, as everyone was scheduled for other (more) important meetings after their time with me. It wasnt because I was getting on their nerves as I feared at one point, I know this because they all met up with me again later to host a stunning lunch at a local traditional restaurant. 14.00 picked up by driver to shuttle me off to Zhuzhou City where I' ll spend the rest of this week, working with the organisation here and meeting the Party Education Department. I was welcomed warmly and taken to dinner, where we tucked into spicy Pigs Lips and Green Beans, a fish that looked like a carp and tasted like it was made of sweet mud (not that I have any experience of what sweet or savoury mud tastes like mind you!), a delicious consommé of some kind of pea and gloopy tofu and some stunning lotus root dumplings to mention only few of the dishes, all topped of with a number toasts and a few "campais" (Manadrin for Down your neck)of the local moonshine 'Mao Tao'. It is absolutely perishing here and a good long walk along the river in the frigid night air took the edge of the 'Mao Tao' assault on my frontal lobe and has positioned me well for what I hope may be my first night's proper sleep in the last seven days! Night night xx

Images so far

Chongqing skyline just a tiny bit of it!

Me boring some poor students to death!

Where the less well off live in the middle of the opulence, £300 designer shirts on one corner 50p poor copies on the other.

The new shopping centre of Chongqing the clock tower in the distance is an authentic Rolex clock.

Dreaming I was near that beach in the background!

Back in touch with the outside world!

I've been out here best part of a week now and pretty much out of contact due to the blocking of any site that is not considered politically correct. I've managed to find a good bit of software that hides the connections I want to make and so I am back.....

I won't recount the entire week's activities but the majority of it has been made up of meetings and presentations at various Universities, I had a really warm welcome from colleagues at Chongqing University of Technology who really really want a combined Swansea and Chongqing University's English Language Centre on their campus here.

I had a hilarious time at the Medical University where I was to give a presentation on Swansea University's School of Health Science and specifically the Nursing related degrees on offer there. I worked on the presentation to make it less  text heavy than the original I'd been sent, added some more images etc and felt pretty confident that the 250 students would receive something comprehensible and specific to their interest. Anyway I received a huge warm welcome and some big introduction from the Vice President and got up to set up the powerpoint........disaster the PC they had was corrupted with a virus which immediately wiped my USB drive clean, not only leaving me without the presentation for that evening but also a alrge amount of material I needed for the rest of my trip. My Chinese colleague an agent of Swansea University offered me his presentation to guide me as it was quite clear I was still expected to deliver, the virus was dealt with and we inserted his USB, no problem it loaded fine..................well a slight problem it was entirely in Mandarin and as I bumbled my way though it became clear that he had decided that Swansea's main selling point was not the quality of the student experience nor the quality of the research and teaching environments nor  the mix of old and new architecture on campus, or images of happy students but rather image after image (covered in Mandarin text I suppose describing all I refer to above) the surrounding Gower coastline, by slide 8 and beach image 9 I had a fit of the giggles and was soon joined by the entire audience! Reaching the final slide with tumultuous applause!! 

The next evening I watched a production of Under Milk Wood by students from Coleg Morganwg and some Chinese students, met up with a load of Welsh people for drinks that went on into the early hours and bumped into the ex-girlfriend of a very good friend of mine from Cardiff and a little later a guy that used to live with the very same friend!!! You couldn't make this up if you tried could you, here I am in a city of 24 million people and meet two people who know the same friend of mine!!

I left Chongqing early this morning and am now in Changsha, jet lag has been quite horrible this trip so am off for a kip before being taken out for a meal tonight.

It's good to be back in touch.