While the Tiger's Away the Monkey is King

Caroline, the boss, has gone away to Beijing this week & from there is going to London for about 3 weeks. The girls in the office are all quite excited & keep saying, "while the tiger's away the monkey is king" which basically means, "while the cat's away the mouse will play".

We also learnt another new Chinese idiom this week:

"Ni che wo dofu!" - you eat my tofu!

This translates as meaning that a man takes advantage of a woman as tofu has a similar, how can I put this so that it won't sound crude... feel to a woman's breasts. We find this one highly amusing & so we've been shouting throughout the appartment all week, "Ni che wo dofu!!"

Party on Down at A5

A5 is the appartment off site where a bunch of the others live & they had a party last Tuesday with all of us & a bunch from the University. It was a really good laugh actually & at around 3:30am 7 of us decided it would be a good idea to go to the 24hr Maccy D's on the way home to get burgers as we were hungry. We sat around chatting in there - & having our photos taken by the staff - tilla round 5am when they started making breakfast so we ordered pancakes then as well! Was a good day. Got home about 6am & slept.

Was refreshing though as the guys from the Uni down our road have all been here at least 6 moths - a year & so can speak pretty damn good Chinese so I basically said to them, I want that one & they ordered for me! Herah! For once none of this dilly daddling around while we attempt to make people understand us!

Us in Maccy D's at around 4am - the staff wanted photos so I took one too!

There's a good reason I didn't take GCSE Art!

On the Wednesday, Caroline has organised a Chinese Brush Painting lesson for us at the 'old people's' vocational college. Though I have no artistic talent what so ever, decided to go for the 'cultural experience' & also thought it would be a laugh.

Only 7 of us made (though Neil left after about 30mins to go play football at the Uni) it as the others were all to hung over from the night before & the brush painting was actually really hard! I was useless & the instructor seemed to give up on me actually as he stopped attempting to give me advice on how to hold the brush & 'stroke' the page...

That being said, it was an interesting afternoon & at the end of the lesson, all the usual students insisted on giving us their paintings they had done throughout the term so we each got 2 free paintings! They're actually very good. Though one of mine I have since noticed has a blank ink smudge on it.

Escape from Wuhu Number Two!

9 of us went to Shanghai on Friday for the weekend as there was a Drum & Base Party in a club there on Friday & in the day I thought there would be better shopping!

After a very long train journey which just became a nightmare really as we left Wuhu at 3:45pm & didn't arrive in Shanghai untill 11:30pm (depsite the fact the train should only take 5 or 6 hours!) we finally arrived at teh train station. We then had to check into a hotel, but couldn't actually find it in the end & so after another hour (as you can imagine, I was getting quite annoyed by this point) we finally rang Katie & Spela who had gone up the day before & asked them where they were staying & wen there instead.

Finally, at 2am, we got to the club & it was a really good night. The DJ wasn't actually that good, however, when you've been clubbing in Wuhu for nearly 3months, anything would have sounded good! Also, the beer was free if you gave them back your empty bottle so really, no one was complaining! ;)

We got chatting to some people who showed us another bar around 5am & so we all trooped off there & around 7am we all got hungry (seeing a running theme here!?) so went to City Diner with them for a full English Breakfast. Bacon has never taisted so good!! We were in there till around 10am we finally decided to head back to the hotel. By this time there was only Neil, me & 2 guys we'd met in the club left & I wanted to get some shopping in on the Saturday so needed to head off.

I only had an hour & a half's sleep that day. I lived off regular caffine boosts from Starbucks & Costa Coffee. It was a happy day to see coffee shops!

There was a 7 story mall which made me happy just looking at it though in reality when you got inside there wasn't all that much to buy sadly as it was still all Chinese fashion. *sigh* I did manage to find one top though which was good - I've been having withdrawal symptoms from the lack of clothes shopping . I do miss browsing the shops.

Despite the fact that last time I wrote about Shanghai after our trip during Golden Week I didn't really warm to the place, I've decided after this trip that I actually quite like Shanghai. Perhaps it was the clubbing, the fact that I blended in quite happily & could have been in London when I was in coffee shops or bars or maybe it was simply the fact that it's a fun place to be! It's quite easy to navigate (had I had longer than a few hours to do so on more than 1 hour's sleep!) & it was just a nice place to be. I really liked it this time.

It's funny really; you spend your hole life trying to think of ways to make yourself 'stand out' if that makes sense but in reality, I was so happy to blend in this weekend!! Ironic!

Nanjing

On Monday, Jenny, Habby & I planned to go to Nanjing - the old capital of China which is only 2 hours away from us by bus. As it's a bit bigger, we thought the shopping may be better & also, it's just nice to get out of Wuhu for the day sometimes.

Nanjing was the capital of China untill Chairman Mao's revolution in the 1950's & he moved it to Beijing. 'Nan' means south & 'Bei' means north so they literally translate as 'South Capital' & 'North Capital'. Very original thought process for the names there!

Sadly, however, Nanjing isn't quite big enough to have the compitent transportation systems of Shanghai or Beijing or the easy navigatory systems. That being sad, it's not quite small enough, like Wuhu for example, to not need these & so we spent the morning simply trying to find out where it was we needed to be & where we wanted to go!

We never did find the Forgein Bookstore for Jenny who is desperate for something to read as she's hear untill June & already finished her books! I on the other hand did have a successfull day as I found a lovely pair of ankle boots & we did manage to find a little souvinier type market which was quite nice to meander around & there was a rather random golden tree!? We still don't know why it was there!

All in all though, by 5:30pm when our bus back was, we were ready to leave as I'm ill again (walking around in the rain in Shanghai on an hour's sleep probably hasn't exactly helped me fight it off!) & we were all tired & sort of had had enough of how difficult Nanjing is to navigate even with a map!

I'm back at Shuiyang tomorrow - joy of joys - & really can't be bothered if I'm honest. The early morning simply doesn't appeal to me! Hope all is well in the UK - I hear it's snowing!! Not impressed that I'm missing that!! See you all in 4 weeks - damn time is flying by!! xx