Went out Friday night which was greatly helped by getting paid for the tutoring I've been doing although the Shamrock was full of businessmen and LBBs full of idiots so came back reaosnably early anyway.
Saturday morning went to get Zak's bike fixed and had a look at some myself. Looks like I can get a pretty reasonable one for cheap so I may look into that this week. Getting around locally isn't difficult but a bike would just make everything a bit quicker and easier. I also bought a couple of plants. One is on my table in the main room which is really nice, kind of cheers the place up. The other is a bonsai which I've put on my balcony. Total price less than 3 quid.
Watched Dog Day Afternoon in the evening, which I haven't seen for years, and is still a really good film. Had to get an early night though as we were required to be up for 7:30 to get a tour organised by the school to a local festival in a town called Hengjie. It was a kind of food competition so got to try lots of different tasty things - although it did keep raining. I guess local festivals are the same all over. After that we went for lunch although I was still pretty stuffed so couldn't eat much. Then we were supposed to go climb a mountain and pick bamboo (the area has a lot of bamboo) and Nick wanted to go panda spotting. Of course there are no pandas but it gave us something to talk about. Unfortunately the narrow streets of the town meant that the bus got trapped by another bus that had broken down and we ended up just sat on the bus for an hour. Then we came home.

Teaching

Keen students (sometimes)
Originally uploaded by grazulis.

It's been kind of a mellow week in the run-up to pay day. Got called by a friend at Webb, a language school in Ningbo for adults, to see if I could take an English Corner as a one off that evening. I said yes, it's a bit extra money and I figured it would be interesting to talk to grown ups for a change. The chosen topic was adoption, although I was able to pick any I wanted, so I talked about that. It was pretty interesting to see what questions I got, like: "Do people adopt babies so they can get tax breaks?" "No"; "Is homosexuality legal in your country?" "Yes"; "Is that why there aren't many babies to adopt?" "No"; "Why are you left-handed?" "Because I'm smarter." (Well, ok, that wasn't the actual answer I gave to that one). When I got back Nick was just heading out to the shop so we went out and bought a crate of beer as it was pretty warm and we all needed a drink. It was pretty heavy to carry back though.
Tuesday was hot, apparently up to 30 degrees. A little taster of what the coming months hold for us as it has cooled off a bit since. Other than that it's just been teaching, drinking and watching the odd dvd. Although 24 bottles lasted four of us 4 days so it's not been excessive. Also been playing frisbee after work a bit and doing some weights (so Mike, you'd better get to it too) which has been fun.
Got one of the Chinese teachers I work with to take some pictures in my Second grade class this morning so I've posted them for your pleasure. The lesson is to teach shapes by getting the kids to learn how to describe aliens. It works quite well. Afterwards Linda suggested I could use this lesson plan for a demonstration class for other teachers and parents. Gulp.

Got woken up this (Sunday) morning by John Zhu telephoning me. Apparently a parcel has arrived for me. Yay! But I really could have waited a couple of hours to find that out... Especially as drinking to the wee hours last night with Nick and Ardon. Well, 1am, which counts as pretty late in these parts. So it goes.
Weekend has been pretty quiet. Zak set off for HK yesterday to try and get her visa sorted so we went to the Indian Kitchen in Ningbo on Friday night. Had the All You Can Eat buffet for 78 yuan. Kind of expensive but it was really really tasty. Nice to have a proper curry again. Only managed about 3 plates, though, including starters.
Yesterday mostly just lazed around but got some GTD stuff sorted and did some writing. Watched an old John Woo film called A Better Tomorrow starring Chow Yun Fat. Good fun but pretty ludicrous. Then everyone started congregating at my place in the evening.
Found this article in the China Daily the other day. The China Daily is the official English language newspaper in China. Serious topic. Made me chuckle.

Guidance needed to prevent teen pregnancies

2006-03-18 07:01

They were 16-year-old classmates, studied together regularly and were clearly attracted to each other.

One afternoon, they were in the girl's bedroom with no one else at home doing their homework.

A brush of limbs, a touch here and there, then kisses, leading to the "forbidden thing."

O, yeah, for those of you looking for love Google is branching out...

My todo lists printed
Originally uploaded by grazulis.

Got an email from David I last night with a link to TaDa lists but also a comment wondering whether I needed GTD style tools anymore. Strangely this coincided this week with an effort on my part to use my lists as effectively as I used to, especially via my good old Hipster. Why? Well, my lessons are obviously structured around a weekly timetable but I find that outside of the everything gets kind of aimless and I am constantly thinking of things to do, or buy, or organise, that are then getting forgotten. Not that this is usually a problem but, you know, it'd be nice to keep the system going. Plus it means I'm taking a fairly random and shotgun approach to my writing and I want to be able to track and manage what needs to be done there. So I've started devising some new lists based around my current requirements. There's still some work to do but basically it comes down to:

1. Writing
• The novel
• Other writing and fiction
2. Work
• Lesson plans and follow up work
3. Shopping list
4. Personal list, e.g. things I just want to do.

I had a look at Tada which does look pretty good but is fairly basic and then I remembered Remember the Milk. I haven't been to it for a while and it looks like it's undergone quite a few interesting changes. You can add tags, type in "Tomorrow" or "Monday" in the deadline and it'll automatically fill in the correct date and create "Smart" todo lists based on searchs of your existing lists as well as email to-dos to yourself. So I hammered out a few basic lists to get myself started (will probably do a full dump tomorrow) and printed them out for my wall so I can always see what I need to do next.
Hopefully this will stop me wasting a lot of time in the future. Of course, it's my time to waste and I don't plan on making myself manic with all this but it's interesting to work out how GTD is just as important and necessary within a low-stress environment as an intense and busy one.

Well, the big news of the week is that my resident permit finally arrived yesterday. , John Zhu, the bloke in charge of the foreign teachers, is incompetent and I have absolutely no idea what goes on in his head. One of the American teachers who has been here for five months still doesn't have his resident permit because this bloke hasn't been bothered to sort it out (otherwise known as doing the minimum of his job requirements) and has now been fined 5000 RMB even thought it's not his fault. So I'm pretty glad to get mine done and everyone else who arrived at the same time has also been sorted.

Had a pretty good week of teaching. After a couple of my classes the Chinese teachers even came up to me and said they thought they were good lessons. Now I just need to think up something for next week.
Overall things have been pretty quiet. Probably this is partly due to a need to watch my spending and partly as I got a cold on Thursday. It wasn't a bad cold or anything it just tired me out and I'm still a bit bunged up. Yesterday the weather was warm and sunny so went for a walk around Moon Lake again with Zakiya and took some pictures. In the evening we went to one of the local market and had noodle soup where you pick what stuff you want to go into it and put it in a basket so it can be cooked. The chef then puts it into a small wire basket in boiling water with several others to cook it for you. Pretty tasty for 6 yuan. Also watched a pretty cool film by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean called Mirrormask.
O well, back to lesson planning...

Forgot I was going to write this about Saturday. Was walking, in the evening just after dark, over to the supermarket with Nick for some beer. We got to talking about how to explain living in CHina to people back home. Just that you can do normal things like go to buy shampoo or beer and yet it somehow transforms into a bizarre and surreal situation just by being in China. Like, it's buying a beer, just like at home, but then it's 5 degrees off. Just then we turned the corner into the supermarket car park. It was full of people watching an old anti-Japanese war film being projected onto the side of the building like a scene straight out of the 1960s. "Like this, then?" I asked. We stood and watched for a few minutes then went to get the beer.