The latest wheeze of TPTB (the powers that be) is to register and evaluate all foreign language teachers in China online, and evaluate how good they are with a series of tests. (No similar test for Chinese language teachers I note!). So yesterday, I took all three tests; General Knowledge, Psychological and Written, all timed.

It was actually very amusing, with some fantastic Chinglish and a bizarre mix of questions ranging from, "What money do people use in China?" (if you live here and don't know that, you should really consider your position!) to "What did Jerome Bruner propose about hermeneutic composability?" (Who? What? I've since looked Mr Bruner up on the internet and am none the wiser about the correct answer!). All the questions were multiple choice though, so I had a punt even if I couldn't understand the question! Some questions made me laugh out loud, eg  "How much alcohol do you drink, (a) too much, (b) a lot, but under control, (c) a little each day, or (d) only on special occasions. It seems nobody can imagine a tee-total foreigner!

You get your results immediately. I got a respectable 67% in General Knowledge, with top marks in "Chinese Knowledge" and "World Affairs". Psyschologically, I scored a whopping 71% with top marks in "Drink, Mental Health, Motivation, Communication Skills, Sense of Achievement, Expressive Ability, Emotion Stability, Tendency for Violence, Tolerant Capable, Inspiring Capacity, Professional Spirit, Sense of Responsibility and Optimism"!! So, acccording to the TPTB at least, I'm sane, peaceful and optimistic. So there!

Today I was part of a team delivering water to a drought-stricken part of Yunnan. Our school had raised enough to buy 250 large bottles of water and the money to replace a broken water tank there. We set off in a convey of a truck (carrying the water) and three cars but, within 20 minutes, we had all become separated from each other and everyone was equally lost! It turned out that only the truck driver knew the way there, and he was long gone. The "2 hour" journey finally took us 5½ hours! The Primary School is in a very picturesque setting, but although the school buildings looked quite modern, the state of the children's clothing showed the very real poverty in the area.

After the water bottles were unloaded by the excited  students [see photo] there followed the usual inappropriate school meeting on the playground -  250 little kids forced to stand to attention in 40ºC heat while leaders shouted at them with microphones and I gave a short, and probably unintelligible, speech in simple Chinese. Then we handed out a bottle of water, a notebook, a pencil and an eraser to each student.

We also brought a large poster, signed with the best wishes of hundreds of our Kunming students [see photo]. As I wandered around the school, the students were very fearful of me  at first (their first foreigner up close?) but warmed up with a couple of magic tricks and a few smiley handshakes.

Later we visited a local village perched on a hill but were asked not to take photographs as (a) it was so poor that the villagers were embarrassed, and (b) it isn't actually as poor as some people think and they didn't want donations (like the surrounding fields) to "dry up"! A great example of Chinese "doublethink"! However, it's no laughing matter to be dependent on crops that fail when the rains don't come.

My landlord paid a visit the other day to say goodbye to his balcony, fix a leaking tap and install a digital aerial box for me. I haven't been able to watch Chinese TV for over a year (though I rarely bother anyway), but for £30 a year, I can now see China's "Sports Channel" (occasionally of interest), the "English Language Channel" (useful if there's an interesting world news story) and amazingly a previously unknown (to me, at least) "WIN TV Channel" which actually shows Premiership League football - both live and highlights. So suddenly I can follow my team on TV rather than just online! Shame the season's just about to end...

Having visited "Dwarf Empire" earlier this week, and then finding that no less than two of my lessons this weekend involve stories about hippo attacks(!) it was somewhat bizarre to stumble across this story in the newspaper.

Sadly, a quick Google search reveals it's a hoax, and a pretty old one at that. Undoubtedly good news for the dwarf concerned, but disappointing to those of us that enjoy a bizarre story!

After weeks of nagging, Ava finally laid aside her various excuses and took a day off work to drive me to the "Dwarf Empire". We were told it was just 30 minutes away, but we finally arrived after an exhausting 2½ hrs - a combination of a rather wild underestimate and getting a bit lost! First stop was an enormous plastic fake tree stump [see photo] atop a hill. Despite being hollow, you weren't allowed in it or on it and no one could quite explain what the point of it was. But it was big!

Next door was "the biggest butterfly park in China". There were disappointingly few butterflies actually there though (I think we spotted  a dozen in half an hour). But it was certainly big!

And then on to the highlight of the day, the "Dwarf Empire". About 80 dwarves from all over China live and work here, none more than 1.3m (4ft) high. They were all very friendly and, when asked, said they really enjoyed living and working in the park. They quite genuinely asked me to invite some western dwarves to come join them there... as if!

The big show was due to start at 3.30pm. The park claims to get 4000 visitors a day (surely a typo?) but as the singing and dancing started, Ava and I were the only visitors in the huge outdoor auditorium. So when she sidled off (claiming the sun was too hot) there were nearly a hundred dwarves performing just for me - quite bizarre! All were dressed in fancy clothes, singing, dancing, doing magic and acrobatics, it was a wild spectacle. Where else but China could you see something like that?

After the show Ava and I wandered around the mushroom houses where the dwarves are supposed to live (they actually told me they have accommodation outside the park). But the houses are still very cute [see photo]. We also climbed a steep hill behind the houses to explore a huge (fake) castle, devoid of  visitors, before heading back. It was such a nice feeling for me to  "climb a hill" without any dizziness or headaches.

Ava didn't enjoy the long drive to the park, and suggested I drive back to the main highway as, "there are never any police on the country roads". I decided not to risk it (I haven't got my Chinese license ...yet) and it turned out to be a very wise decision as we came across a flipped car [see photo] right outside the park gates, with police and ambulance in attendance!

I had a visit from the "Balcony Police" today. For those who haven't followed this crazy story so far, TPTB (the powers that be) have decided that all overhanging balconies are ugly and, in an effort to win a "Beautiful City of China" award, they are currently demolishing literally thousands of them. (You might think that their money would be better spent helping the hundreds of villages around the city that currently have no water or crops due to the ongoing drought?). The lady who came today to measure my balcony agreed with me privately that the new flattened facades and silver gratings were, in fact, a lot uglier than the old ornate cages [see photo], but that she was just "doing her job". The demolishers are coming sometime next week.

It seems my recent blog entry recording "only" hundreds of deaths in the Qinghai earthquake was premature. The number of dead has now risen to over 2000. And yet how soon it drops off the international news agenda.

I have the occasional look at the blog of my good friend Nita, and was a bit concerned to see a photo of her on an IV drip yesterday. However, her blog is largely in Chinese, and so I couldn't work out the reasons for her hospital trip. Undeterred, I used Yahoo's website translator, and now I know that she, "trickles the creek and roars the gallium to flog aboard.  Pigtail houses change Jan in a careless brook, in the sea of the village domain." I'm glad I cleared that up!

I've managed to have 4 fillings this week after the toothache of last week. There's still more to do, but my kindly dentist, Prof. Liu, told me to let my mouth settle for a month or so before tackling the next bunch of cavities! She was even kind enough to ring me up this morning to check I wasn't in any further pain. The dental visit was the usual circus - patients wandering into the treatment room [see photo], drilling interrupted by phonecalls from the dentist's friends, and a gang of trainee dentists all taking the chance to gawp at the foreigner's  mangled teeth.

Another visit to Dr Yang in the army hospital last Tuesday led to him suggesting I stop virtually all the medicines I've been taking for various ailments, and see how my headaches and dizziness are affected. So far, I've felt no worse. The all-day headaches are now just an occasional light-headedness, which is an improvement of sorts.

Worse news from home though, with my Dad finding out that a recently removed tumour was cancerous. None of the doctors thought it would be, so it was quite a shock for him and all the family. They will monitor him closely now, and don't think it's likely to spread. But still, not nice.

Another day, and another disaster stikes China. I was sleeping when the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Qinghai, and I live quite some distance away [see photo], but I did feel one of the aftershocks. I wasn't sure it was a quake though and didn't bother checking online until later in the day, when I realised how bad it was.

"Only" hundreds of people have died, and not thousands, thanks to it being a sparcely populated area of West China. No consolation for those caught up in it, though. With 10,000 people injured and many thousands more without houses or possessions, it will be a struggle to rebuild the area, especially because of its remoteness.

My school seems to be experiencing better-than-ever quality amongst its teaching staff these days. Certainly, the current ten foreign teachers are as professional and reliable as any I've worked with over the last few years. So it was particularly sad to say goodbye last week to a top teacher - Leo [left in photo]  - off to Eastern China to seek his fortune in the cabling market!? He was one of the few Chinese teachers who regularly interacted with the foreign teachers, helped by his fluent English, but also because he's a genuinely kind and outgoing chap. We're still in touch by e-mail. Next to him in the photo is Rex (who supplied the UFO photos in the previous blog entry) and then Sherry, my Chinese teacher. Robert and Rachel are in the middle, though I'm not sure who the strange guy in front of them is...?

A Chinese teacher from my school showed me these photos last week and swears they are genuine. Taken on a phone camera from a plane window on a recent flight, he says there was a bright light below the plane, but above the clouds, which seemed to be tracking the plane. After a while it fly up above the plane, looking a lot less bright and more metallic, before shooting up out of sight. The photos look pretty impressive.

At the recent "Tomb Sweeping Festival", families gather at their ancestral graves to remember their dead family members. They burn a variety of symbolic objects which they hope will then materialise in the afterlife. Ava burnt fake money, but we also saw paper cars, little paper clothes, fake gold, etc. I've since seen even more extravagant items to burn, include paper credit cards, fake marriage certificates, various "birth control" items(!?), mahjong pieces, speedboats, jewellry, alcohol bottles and even paper buildings. And if you have a car materialise in the afterlife, you'll need to fuel it, hence this paper petrol station [see photo], rather disconcertingly called "Hell Gas Station". It makes you wonder where the family think the dead member ended up!

 

I've had geckos in some of the previous houses where I've lived in China, but yesterday evening was the first time I've seen one in my Kunming flat, scuttling along the tiled shower wall. Being eaters of mosquitoes, mayflies and cockroaches they are all jolly welcome here!

Plane trips are always enlivened by the odd Chinglish, like this wet handtowel I was given on yesterday's flight!

I flew back this afternoon from a hectic (4 hour meeting) but comfortable (5 star hotel) Lattitude Conference in HangZhou. The 40 or so attendees included the Heads of the Provincial Education Departments that work with Lattitude (except for Yunnan, tut tut! Hence, I was introduced as "representing Yunnan", all of the 45 million population, presumably?). There were ex-volunteers and current volunteers, Lattitude Programme Managers and the new head of Lattitude [see photo] on his first visit to China. The early (Chinese!) 10-minute speeches were taking 20-30 minutes each and by the time my slot came along, we were already overrunning by an hour. So I ditched my planned (and much practised!) attempt to speak in English and Chinese, and left the Chinese to the professional translator. That meant I finished in only 8 minutes, doing my bit to get things back on schedule!

It was good to make new friends and meet folk I'd only ever contacted by e-mail before. It was also really nice to catch up with the volunteers I last saw tentatively flying off to their projects after our training course. And perhaps the highlight was seeing Helen again [see photo]. We last met three years ago, in a Hani tribal village, singing and dancing with the locals (long story!). Then, she was "just" the mother of a Lattitude volunteer living in my town and I was "just" a VSO volunteeer.  Now though we've both ended up working for Lattitude part-time! Strange world!

Tomorrow morning I am due to fly to Hangzhou (3 hours away) on China's East coast. It's a city renown for it's beauty [see photo], though I won't have much time to see any of it as I'm only staying for 24 hours, attending a celebration of Lattitude's 20 years working in China. Lattitude is the UK-based "gap year" charity I do training for twice a year.

At least, I'm hoping to be there - this week has been another very difficult one, healthwise. On Monday I wasn't able to walk in a straight line, such was my dizziness. Tuesday's trip to the hospital resulted in a very confident (cocky?) doctor saying his medicine would cure me in three days. I''m now halfway through the third day with no sign of improvement. My gout returned yesterday morning (though I can walk on it) and I broke a tooth (dentist booked for next week). Neckache, headache, toothache, runny nose, itchy rash, sore throat, dizziness, swollen glands, haemorrhoids, gout - it seemed like nothing was working yesterday. I didn't leave my flat - just rested and felt sorry for myself. Twelve hours sleep later, I feel a little chirpier (although all the syptoms are still here) and I'm heading to the school today to practice the talk I'm giving in Hangzhou (in English and Chinese!) and then teach my adults class in the evening.

Jiajia's store has been refurbished over the last 2-3 weeks. It finally re-opened the other day, looking much fresher and more modern. There's already been an increase in new customers. The shop's name hasn't changed though, despite my many suggestions. It's still just called, "Clothes Shop"!?

Anyone doubting Yunnan's current drought need only check out this photo of a nearby river bed. Even the poor fish didn't realise how bad it would get!

I had a visit today from "Diary", who was a student of mine in YiLiang over 4 years ago. Her spoken English was always better than others of her age but, after further study in Zhaotong and Kunming, it's even better now and it was a pleasure to chat to her. The daughter of potato farmers from a small village in the YiLiang countryside, Diary is a real inspiration in the way she smiles through hardships, insists on heavy-duty study (even when others are sleeping or relaxing), and refuses to give up when faced with constant challenges (eg she opted to retake her last year of Senior School in order to improve her exams scores and get to a better University). She has such a refreshingly independent mind, and always sees the "big picture" despite her fellow students bemoaning the minutiae of University life. Perhaps it's her humble upbringing? When arriving at her new University dormitory (yes, even University students in China are required to share bunk bed dorms with 5 others!) she was amazed to find them complaining at the poor conditions. She decided not to tell them that, for her, "...it's the cleanest and warmest place I've ever slept". Whilst her classmates take breakfast back to their dorms to eat, Diary prefes to eat in the canteen because, for the price of the cheapest food there - a 1RMB (10p) dumpling - she's allowed unlimited free cabbage soup! "...I'm used to it, and it seems to keep me healthy". She's such a grounded young lady.

On the subject of health, I met Diary in my flat, rather than at a restaurant, because I woke at 5am to a "spinning" bedroom and have been so dizzy today that I'm having to walk from room to room with my hand touching the wall. Previously, I've "only" been light-headed, so this is a worrying new development. I've got an appointment tomorrow with the doctor who diagnosed my blood-brain problem and hope it's just a bad reaction to the Chinese herbal medicine he gave me.

This weekend marks the first round of my school's annual English Speaking Competition. Students are required to write and memorise a 1-2 minute speech (or for the lazier or more confident ones, make an impromptu speech on a random subject) and then recite it in front of the class and a visiting "judge" teacher. The second round is in two weeks time, when the 3-4 class winners compete against winners from other classes. The photo shows my crazy Friday evening class who tend to do particularly well in these competitions - not because of their teacher, but because the class was initially formed to "hothouse" the most gifted students from other classes.  

 

To celebrate Easter and raise money for Yunnan's drought victims, our school boiled up over 100 eggs, got all the teachers to paint them and then sold them to the students for a 10RMB (£1) donation each. Some sold better than others, and I was told my three were amongst the last to go! I can't believe a self-portrait, a snake wrapped around an egg and an alien face were that unpopular!

The adult students from all the school's classes were invited to a party yesterday evening to celebrate April Fool's Day and Easter. There were plenty of snacks, drinks, silly games [charades in the photo] and prizes so, after a little reticence, the students mixed well, using only English (nearly!). Two of my students, "Sally" and "Alice", are on the far left (one behind Mark's arm) and another, "Rose", is in the centre in checks. About 20 students came, plus another ten staff and teachers. Much enjoyed by all.