OK, so a little hungover over today, well infact thats a lie, I'm a lot hungover!! What was meant to be a few drinks, mexican food (pretty amazing) and bed, turned in to mexican food, vodka, dance classes and being stupidly drunk, banana ice lollies, monkeys, waking the entire corridor howling laughing at Laura's "bargain shoes" snapping in half, notes under doors and a pretty crappy hangover!!
What a day! so you have 2 days events in one here, as I was too incoherent last night! yesterday we went to the markets at Ningbo University! clothes, shoes, bags and food! well not what i would call food but definitely chinese food! Everything is so cheap but I am starting to feel a bit like a giant and rather fat! nothing ever fits! buying shoes in a size 6, is virtually impossible, although i'm ok i'm a 4!! the clothes are soo small, nothing fits me! Its insane how small these girls are! After this Tong Tong dropped us off at Loa Waitan, we had a few drinks in Office Bar, where we got talking to a canadian man called Jeff, he owns a bar called Studio in Lao Waitan and asked us to go down later! We went for mexican food, chicken and beef fajitas, really nice! And then ended up in Studio, 10pm arrived and went, 11pm arrived and went, finally at 1am we decided we should maybe call it a night, especially as me and Laura were teaching 4 children english at 9am! Crap!
WOW! The hangover really kicked in during teaching, shakes and dehydration not a good way to teach kids I must say! The class was really sweet, 3 girls and 1 boy, aged 6-10! They had ok english! We had to get them talking as best we could, proved rather difficult, as they were all so shy, I think they were nervous infront of us, as they have probably never seen a Western person before! Towards the end of the class, they picked up a little bit, we showed them a trailer from Happy Feet as they had never seen a penguin before, they were mesmerised! We went through some english animals, and spellings numbers and colours! For next week we have asked them to try and remember the animals we taught them! But we shall see!!
Ah finally back to bed!! After a few hours sleep I was back to normal, Tong Tong picked us up at 5pm and took us for tea! we had pizza, well not real pizza chinese pizza! and the images lied, it was not what i expected! Tong Tong and her husband Peter, brought Peters English teacher Lucy, her english was amazing, I later found out she did english for her degree! felt pretty normal having such a normal conversation without having to break things down and talk really slowly!
The conversation with Lucy was very interesting and found out some cultural background about China! It is so different to back home, they have no freedom of speech at all, everything they do is censored to stop China being portrayed in a bad light! Facebook and social networking sites are completely banned to stop any one speaking out of turn about the government or the rules they must follow! I think its quite bad that they are controlled in this way, but on the other hand they do have better some rules than the UK. Pensions are pretty amazing here, Lucy was saying it is better to be retired than working as the income is 1.5 times the amount of your income whilst working! The property market is insane with hardly anyone being able to afford to buy their own house, what would cost us for a small house back home, will literally only be able to buy them a small apartment, with 100 square foot costing 10,000 RMB! The reason for this is they have limited land?? I asked why they have limited land when China is so large, but beacuse more than 1/5 of China is very inhabitable and the population being so large, 1,336,718,015 people actually live in China, it has the second largest Population in the world, so basically there just isn't enough room for everyone to have houses!
I am still baffled with the one baby rule, I was convinced that this was a myth and surely a government could not have this much power over the people, as to how many children you can have! But as we have found out this is true, if you are a single child and you a marry another single child you are permitted to having 2 children! But for anyone else having 1 baby only is the law, for anyone who chooses to have more than one baby, they are fined 10 times their annual income, so as Lucy explained if she chose to have another child, she would be fined 800,000 RMB! Crazy Crazy money! I dont know if I agree with only being allowed one baby, but I suppose what is a country meant to do, if there isn't enough room for all these people!
I have had a really nice evening, Lucy has invited us to visit her home to experience a real chinese home! Which I imagine will be a little crazy!
O yes I also have found my perfect dog, we matched so well! A Toy Poodle!
Pictures to Follow!
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