Lovely day, and it's not over yet!

It's been a cracking day today, my first day off for 10 days! The sun was shinning the sky was blue, I slept until 10am, don't think I've done that for 9 years ( there are some benefits to not having my family with me!) Went for a long long walk into and around the city, saw some brilliant sights, the Chinese at work and shopping two things they put a lot of graft into! The city was buzzing, thousands of people milling around enjoying their fee time. Took loads of great pics, industrial scenes, people flying kites on the beach, fishermen on the river bank (I hope the fish I've been eating don't come from this river!). We stopped for a coffee and sat on the steps outside Mac Donalds and were surrounded by a large group of young children all wanting to practice their English and take photos with us, this attracted an even bigger crowd, all shouting "hello" and laughing, beautiful experience. The Chinese people's face light up when they smile and the genuine warmth they give off is enchanting. Settling in now to Watch "the BOYS" take on the Italians, c'mon WALES! My family are at Heathrow waiting for boarding, only 18 hours til I get to see them coming through arrivals in Changsha, getting quite emotional just thinking about it. Woohoooo!

Great Work Opportunity

Currently I'm based in the Zhuzhou Yandi Institute it’s a great central base for getting to meetings etc locally and only 1 hour from Changsha, Hunan Province Capital.  The Institute is a centre for education development focusing on the improvement of English language provision and English language teacher development in the province.  It is a very forward thinking, pretty much pioneering project for China.

I work as an External Verifier for the Institute and this role came about as a result of teaching the President’s son, now a PhD Alumni of Swansea University, a number of years ago.

The Yandi Institute is currently looking for two qualified, preferably Swansea University, CELTA trained teachers, must be native British English speaker and hold a first degree. For a starter contract of 10 weeks to deliver English classes, primarily, to two local middle schools approx 15 minute walk from the institute and 30 min bus ride.

The main aim of the roles are, working under the direction of the DoS and senior teacher both native English speakers,  to encourage communication, via topic based input, in large groups in the middle schools and generally contribute to the day to day running and development of Yandi’s English Language centre.

This is a brilliant opportunity to experience China in a city, that I believe, offers an excellent introduction to this country as it is small, safe and has large open areas.  The people of Zhuzhou City are super friendly, warm, generous and welcoming.  The staff in the institute, from the cleaners to the President, are simply lovely people who will go out of their way to help even if they do not speak English.

The package on offer is:

• 10 Week Contract (starting as soon as you can get here)
• Visas paid for
• Return flights to the UK
• Free Accommodation – You’ll live in the Yandi Institute in these really well appointed 3 bedroom apartments. Free Wifi, Air Conditioning, 40” inch flat screen TV, leather 3 piece suite, large double beds, desk in each bedroom etc.
• 3 meals a day - served in the dining room, all prepared by the kitchen staff and all very tasty.
• Take home salary of 4000 RMB per month = £100 per week which is almost double that of local teachers and offers a great standard of living as accommodation and food is covered. Example of cost of living+ Bus fares 10p, 1hour taxi ride £20, shorter trips £1, beer 35p per litre, a decent meal for two in a good restaurant £7-10. 

There are plenty of Western outlets if / when you miss home - MacDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut etc but the food is so good here you shouldn't!

What is required of you?

• The main thing is flexibility, China seems to operate chaotically on a day to day basis, this week for example all Western goods were banned in one supermarket and taken off the shelves, then the ban was lifted and shelves restocked! Be prepared for change of duties at a moment’s notice etc!
• Prepared to work harder than you’d expect at times, as in all roles this is a prerequisite these days.
• Dedicated to offering an excellent experience to your students and to maintain the professional standards required of a quality English language teacher. 

There is realistic potential of kick starting or further developing a real career with this opportunity as Yandi is forging ahead with real groundbreaking plans.

If you have read any of this blog you'll see that I've fallen in love with China, I haven't lived here but have good friends that have and wish they'd come here when they were younger.

Here are some pictures:

Bedroom

Chinese staff Office

Classroom

Courtyard Seating Area

Dining Room

ELC Staff Office

ELC Staff Office

ELC Staff Office

Extra Office

Courtyard view to Street

Courtyard and Car Parking

Flat Kitchen Area

Kitchen for Dining Room

Lecture Theatre

Flat Living Room

Living Room

Bedroom

Swansea Students' Visit

Wet-room / Toilet

Western Restaurant

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