Happy December 1st! We can see on Facebook that it's Christmas soon - everyone seems to be in a Christmassy-kind-of-mood, but we've got to say that bar 5 Santas and elves hanging in our flat, it doesn't really feel much like Christmas is approaching here in China. A supermarket was half-heartedly playing some Christmas songs on Sunday, but somehow it just seemed completely out of place. We are a bit sad that we don't get to spend Christmas with our families and friends back home in Europe this year, but we were aware of this when we took the jobs out here, and in the grander scheme of things we wouldn't have wanted it any other way. We might get to take Christmas Day off and we will be celebrating it with our Western friends and colleagues out here with a lovely meal and pressies, so we're sure it'll be a lovely Christmas after all. But of course we are going to miss everybody at home, which is why it's a good thing that it doesn't feel at all Christmassy here... yet!
In the last month we have been pretty busy at work and just been getting on with teaching our - more or less - motivated students and testing and marking hundreds and hundreds of papers. As Phil said one day, we really feel like proper teachers now! We're breaking up the marking with English Club activities a couple of times a week, which is something we both really enjoy. Anette's Reading Circle is a great success and Joe's magazine is starting to come together as articles have started to flood in, which is creating more correcting and proof-reading work for him. 3 weeks ago we were both asked to be judges in HKU IDOL - a singing contest roughly in the style of X-Factor or the Idol shows. Nearly 40 students showed up to audition to be on the big show and in with a chance of winning 500RMB, which is a lot of money for them! The auditions were really painful though, and it turned out to be a very long afternoon and our ears had only just recovered by last Friday when the big final was scheduled to take place! The school wanted to use the HKU IDOL as an opportunity to promote itself in Suzhou, so they'd got a big sponsorship deal, and the production of the final was really rather big - but that didn't mean that the students we had put through to the final could necessarily sing though - they were really only the best of a bad bunch! It was good fun though on Friday. 2 of Anette's students had made it through to the big show, so we were both cheering them on to win, although that didn't help much as they went out in the first round of eliminations! The girl who won was marginally better than the rest, so it was probably deserved that she won, and it seemed that good times were had by all who attended – well, almost all. The cultural and behavioural differences in China continue to astound us, as Mark, the English Club co-ordinator was mobbed by all the friends and family of the not-so-successful contestants, demanding to know why their little Prince (the actual English name of one of the “singers”), princess or best friend hadn’t won – after all, they had travelled so far from such-and-such a place to see them win – like it was a formality!
It's gotten really cold here now. It changed literally from one day to another. One day we had 20 something degrees at the beginning of November and the next day it was 2 degrees. It was so bizzare and our bodies were like 'whoah - what just happened?!' - Joe didn't even have a winterjacket when the weather changed, but we soon found some good Columbia ski-jackets that will keep us warm! The buildings here in this part of China don't have central heating, so we are using our air-conditioning to heat up our flat - a kind of dry heat, but it seems to work ok. It is kind of nippy at work though, where everything, apart from the classrooms and offices are practically outdoors, so it's pretty fresh going to the loo and stuff! The classrooms are often heated, but the students are still sat there in their big coats and hats - it's quite a sight really! So, it's no wonder really that Anette succumbed to a cold that quickly turned into a bitter lung infection a couple of weeks ago. She woke up one morning feeling a bit worse for wear and after an hour at work she went to the doctor, who sent her home. The next day she was much worse and returned to the doctor, who told her that she had a lung infection and needed to go to hospital to get an IV-drip, so off we went to the International Hospital nearby. Joe came with her, as she was rather delirious with a high fever. Once we got to the hospital, everything started off well enough, but it quickly became a bit of a nightmare, really. We were sent up to the VIP-section of the hospital (courtesy of our white faces), where the only English speaking doctor was located, but once we got there we were informed that he had gone home, so we were then sent down to A&E (Emergency) which was just chaos! Nobody could speak a word of English, and we got a bill for 9RMB before we had even seen the shadow of a doctor! After many failed attempts of finding one of these elusive men of medicine, we finally managed to pin one down that would 'talk' to us! Picture the scene. He was sat at a tiny desk, Anette was sat on a chair next to him - she was exhausted from wheezing around - and there were other patients surrounding the doctor's desk throwing their papers on top of Anette's slip of paper that she'd got from the clinic here in SIP which stated in Chinese that she's allergic to penicillin (a bit of a problem if she lost that slip of paper). The doctor was seeing all these patients at the same time as Anette was playing Pictionary with the doctor to try to persuade him to listen to her lungs! Of course, he didn't speak a word of English - University educated as he (hopefully) was! He didn't seem to accept Anette's excellent drawing of a set of infected lungs, and instead he just stuck a thermometer under her armpit, and then proceeded to treat 5 other patients before we got his attention again! He finally listened to the bottom of Anette's chest, and sent us off to get a blood test and an X-Ray. This meant more walking around completely lost and clueless. We kept walking past a big room full of really sick people (like 60-70 people) sat on chairs with IV-drips attached to them, and there was a really foul smell coming out of that room. Anette was terrified that she would have to join them in there, as the doctor here had said that she needed an IV-drip with some fast-acting antibiotics - and the more we walked past this big room the more scared she was! After a while we managed to get the X-Ray and the blood test done, and after that everything suddenly seemed to go our way! We got the results from the blood test within 10 minutes (impressive) and 20 minutes later we had a diagnosis of (probably) bacterial bronchitis, and got a shed-load of antibiotics (and flipping loads of Chinese medicine) to take home, as Anette had managed to convince the doctor that she'd be much better off in her own bed with some oral-medicine, so we paid the £55 bill and got out of there, hoping that we don't have to go back there any time soon! In the taxi back to our flat we decided that we have definitely never appreciated the NHS enough back home, and that we are not gonna make the mistake of not bringing a Chinese speaking person with us next time!!
Anette stayed in bed for a week and a half to recover fully, and is now feeling much better, so she did get the right medicine after all - we thought it best to leave the Chinese medicine alone, and just stuck with the antibiotics! Phew – Anette was so relieved she escaped the dreaded IV-room!
On Saturday we moved again. A colleague decided she wanted to move back to Hong Kong, so her flat in the Teachers' Building became available, so we quickly snatched it up before anybody else had a chance to even think about it. These flats are so sought after, because they are so big and lovely, so we were really lucky! We decided to move after pay-day, and we spent the entire Saturday moving stuff a couple of hundred meters down the road! This was the 3rd time in 3 months that we've moved, but we are hoping that it will be a while before we have to pack up and move again! This flat is 90 sqm and on the 10th floor. It has 2 bedrooms, so it's perfect for when some of you come to visit, and it has a real kitchen! We are really happy that we were able to move up here. We will upload some pictures soon!
Enjoy December and we promise that it won't be a whole month before writing again!
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