Times, they are a changing
Spring is in the air and the Chinese New Year is certainly over. Tonight is the first time we have spent together at home, with out guests or without going out in what seems like a very long time. Nice to be able to chill.
Had four classes at my high school this morning, have been back at work for 3 days now. It feels nice to be back at work after such a long holiday - almost 2 months - the kids are very friendly and energetic. We are looking at game design (thanks to bitshifter for his advice). Most of them seem to enjoy it, and a lot of kids who don’t normally participate much in class have been speaking out which is rewarding.
After class David, our boss, came over to the school and we went out to a little Chinese Muslim restaurant near the school. Actually I think yesterday the school cafeteria was closed and so 3000 odd students descended on the 20 or so little “restaurants”, noodle shops and the like near the school. They were all packed out so I followed some of my kids around the corner (a long way in Korla) to a restaurant down a little alleyway. There are also a couple of nice and friendly naan makers down there. A wonderful new discovery.
So we had lunch and talked our way around Delezue and Descartes, Bach , Scriabin and Schnittke, making friends with people from other cultures. Nice and relaxed. After that we headed back into Korla to met up with Chooch. Our mission: to buy a big Uighyr knife to send to a friend in Japan. And we met the young woman in the picture above. Amazing hair! We got our knife too, pretty cheap - they had some there they tried to sell in American dollars - a first for us in China.
After that we went to the post office to try to send the knife. Sadly, they wouldn’t let us, apparently they have to check anything metal being sent by air. They were very polite, but no dice. A couple of weeks ago I tried to help one of the Chinese teachers here send some VCD’s (Video CD’S) to a former teacher in England, but that too wasn’t possible - at least not without a permit from the Culture ministry. So we are now the proud owners of a very big knife.
On the way home from the Post Office, Chooch noticed that “The Red Lantern” had closed down and was being gutted. Restaurants here seem to have a habit of doing this. Late last year the good old foreigner standby known as “Fat Boy” also closed down. And then we noticed, a little further on that another restaurant we go to had closed down.
On the blog front, we have just updated the blogging software. We use a package called b2evolution which is the best solution out there for multi-lingual, multi-user blogs. For individual blogs wordpress is probably the best option, but b2evolution meets our needs. So apologies in advance if there are any problems due to the upgrade. We should also have a new blog design up by the end of the weekend.
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