Today is Halloween and this weekend our school has its usual wild celebrations; decorating the corridors, getting teachers to dress up, and playing a variety of silly games with the students.

The theme this year is "Dinosaurs fighting Robots", inspired by recently released films such as "Pacific Rim" and "Jurassic Park 3D". I decided to be a dinosaur and set myself the task of creating a full-sized head to wear. Starting with various cardboard boxes, I joined them together, covered them in brown paper and added "hair", horns, antennae, teeth and eyes. I'm quite pleased with the final result, though how long it will last is anybody's guess with hundreds of kids dressed as robots wanting to "fight" me. And there is the added danger of not being able to see where I'm going, in a school with lots of steep steps...

Anyhow, the effort has been made and, once the weekend is over, I can look forward to 6 weeks of uninterrupted, normal, educational lessons (until Christmas, at least!). I must be getting old!

I had a bewildering, but very
amusing, conversation while
in Beijing recently:

Me:                 So what do you do?
Chinese lady:  I’m Harry Potter
Me:                 You mean you LIKE Harry Potter?
Chinese lady:  No, I AM Harry Potter!
Me:                 Really? So can you do magic spells?
Chinese lady:  Pardon?
Me:                 Spells. Can you do spells?
Chinese lady:  Certainly. R-E-P-O-R-T-E-R.
                                          I’m Harry Potter …for a newspaper.
Me:                Oh. You’re a reporter!
Chinese lady: Yes, I told you. I'm Harry Potter.

We finally managed to get enough Robert's School bodies together for a game of indoor 5-a-side football this week. I'd played with them all before except Eugene [yellow shirt in photo] who is a foreigner studying Chinese at our school. Nice guy. When I asked him before the game whether he had played much before, he said "Yes, a little". Well after a few touches, it was clear he was no beginner. He later confessed to having played in "a few internationals"(!) albeit for Bhutan, a country of less than a million people. Mind you, an early "accidental" knee in the thigh slowed him down a bit...

The last whole school meal was to a very classy buffet, but fellow-teacher Kelly and I weren't able to attend because of Lattitude training duties. So yesterday, we had a catch-up lunch at the school's expense. And boy, what a meal. The restaurant (amusing called "Gloden and Silver Jaguar"!) lays on between 200-300 different dishes to choose from, and it's all-you-can-eat. They specialise in seafood, and as well as oysters, shrimp and various shellfish they also offered sea cucumber, shark and crocodile!  I'd deliberately not eaten for 18 hours before, and so the temptation to gorge was immense. The seafood I could ignore (gout dangers), but there were still 200 other dishes to try. After 2 hours I could barely walk! Didn't even bother with dinner that evening. or breakfast today, come to that!

I got a CD sent through from an old college friend yesterday. His son is now in a band, "Featuring These Guys" who have released a CD of three songs. Pretty good stuff. Check them out on Facebook and YouTube (not that I can - these sites have been blocked in China for many a year).

Jiajia and I bought a new mattress for the nanny's bed the other day. The old one wasn't that comfortable but, more annoyingly, made all sorts of squeaking and creaking noises as you moved around on it, waking the baby. (We bought it new, a year ago, for just 150RMB (£15) so what did we expect?) The new one was 850RMB and is, not surprisingly, a lot better. It comes with its own Chinglish too. "I wish to present my dearing bear to you"! Should that be "dear" or "darling"?

Ma-in-law decided last week that she was so ill she needed to check herself into the local hospital for tests and IV drips. A less charitable person might question why the illness conveniently started the day after the nanny returned from her holiday. And why someone who is so weak regularly decides to make the 45-minute walk home when she doesn't fancy the hospital food. Or why she tells us her illness is so serious when the doctors say they are just giving her IV drips of sugar and vitamins. I tend to leave this situation to my good wife who knows better than I do how much leeway to give her only close relative, and
where/when to draw the line!

I'm led to understand that most babies get grumpy and start screaming when they are hungry. JD seems quite the opposite. He's never keen to eat, so feeding him his milk every 3-4 hours can be quite a struggle. He wriggles, swats the bottle, hides his mouth and fakes a cough. It took nearly two hours to get one bottle down him the other morning. But Jiajia has now found a good way of keeping me going while I keep the feeding process going...

Jiajia and I were in a minor car collision yesterday. I was driving slowly down the road, past parked cars, when one of them decided to pull out without warning and thump into our passenger door. Luckily Jiajia was travelling with me and JD wasn't. It was the start of a 4-hour experience which highlighted the best and the worst of life in China...

Everyone remained very calm and civil (you seldom get road rage amongst the Chinese  - China 1  West 0) despite the fact that the other driver had the cheek to blame us (China 1 West 1). We had to leave our cars there in the middle of the road "for the police to see" which caused chaos amongst the traffic behind (score one for being able to move your cars out of the way in the West - China 1 v West 2). One phonecall however, and within ten minutes a traffic cop arrived on foot. (China 2 v West 2). However, when she saw both cars were functional she simply told us to take photos with our phones and drive ourselves to the "Assessment Centre" (China 2 v West 3).

The Centre was teeming with people (China 2 v West 4). There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of car crashes in Kunming daily - driving skills here are appalling (China 2 v West 5). But, rather sensibly, the Centre included administration, police and insurance companies all together (China 3 v West 5). The forms to be completed are manifold and complex however (China 3 v West 6) - thank goodness Jiajia was there! Once the forms were done, we were taken to see a policeman (China 4 v West 6). He took one look at the photos and told the other driver he was 100% at fault (of course he was - idiot driver!). The other driver was made to sign a "confession" and we were quickly shown to the insurance company desk (China  5 v West 6). They sent someone to look at the damage to the cars and report back. Meanwhile, Jiajia rang her garage, described the damage to our car and got a quote over the phone - just £100 (China 6 v West 6)! The insurance representative agreed it was a reasonable quote and handed over the full amount in cash there and then (China 7 v West 6). Further receipt forms (China 7 v West 7), a belated apology from the other driver, and we were on our way to the garage. The garage took our car (to be fixed in just 2-3 days - China 8 v West 7) and gave us a free ride home (China 9 v West 7). So everything was done same day (China 10 v West 7), though it took us a stressful 4 hours from crash to home (China 10 v West 8). Overall, a very annoying afternoon But, boy, it could have been so much worse in so many ways!

Buying electrical goods in China leaves one with a decision to make. Buy Chinese and expect it to last a few years, or buy foreign (Japanese or Korean, usually), pay more, but expect it to last 10+ years. Jiajia and I splashed out last year on a widescreen, wifi, HD, 3D monster of a TV and went with a western brand. Annoying then to find it having a major problem, requiring an engineer to come out (albeit under warranty) to replace a circuit board. I was most surprised, however, to see just how little electronics there is in a modern TV [see above]. I mean, 80% of the space is empty. We're hoping it will all be fixed before the nanny arrives back from holiday. She enjoys her evening TV while rocking JD to sleep.

Another statistic you can get online each day for Kunming is the quality of the air. It makes depressing reading - seldom anything better than "unhealthy" - and probably explains the regular coughs people suffer from here (myself included). The only bright side it that the rest of China seems generally a lot worse off. Count your blessings, I guess!

When  I lived in the UK I used to be allergic to cats and cut grass, but it was treatable with anti-histamine drugs. Here in China I usually only get an allergic reaction in September/October and, having made it through September dry-eyed, I thought I'd managed to avoid it this year. But October is proving to be a very tearful and sneezy month so far, and anti-histamines provide no relief from what I'm told is almost certainly plane tree pollen. Lots of foreigners get it in Kunming (which is surrounded by forests of plane trees) but it's hard to convince the local Chinese (who don't get it - in more ways than one!) that no, I haven't caught a cold! I've found a website which purports to show the allergy forecast for Kunming, and it predicts today  is "extreme"!! Mind you, its weather forecast for yesterday was "mainly cloudy" and yet it poured all day. So we'll see!

I bought a small picture book for JD from our local supermarket the other day. Up until now, the books we've bought for him have come from a small factory outlet shop in Shenzhen (near Hong Kong) and, having been made for export to western stores, the English has been impeccable. This book though is by Chinese for Chinese. The English is therefore suspect, to say the least!

Most of the book features simple fruits and vegetables, but a few oddities are included too. I'll give the publishers the benefit of the doubt on the "Nepenthes", though it hardly seems common. "Sago Cycas" may well be right (though don't we call them palms?) while Googling "candock" shows pictures of inflatible pontoons! And surely those are runner beans, not "kidney beans"? But what do I know?

The last two I feel much more confident about. It may grow in paddy fields, but that is rice! And corn is definitely spelled with an "n".