Oh Bollocks I said I’d Write A Blog.

So it’s been a while. Sorry about that. I’ve changed jobs and I’m much happier in my current one. The old one turned out to be a bit rubbish. Working 11 hour shift both Sat and Sun and trying to have a social life was a wee bit difficult. I teach in a really lovely school now. I have two classes of 3-4 year olds. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. I’ve attached some photos below.

Perry (pic on the right) is one of the twins in my class. He seems to be developing some kind of elbow fetish. He constantly attaches himself to my elbows and will barge other kids out of the way when they line up in order to get a better grip on them. The elbow thing is developing unfortunately he now likes to slobber on my elbows as well as hold them.

Flora is one of my youngest and is very sweet. She likes to smell my arm. She starts from my hand and sniffs all the way up to the elbow. And then grins at me. Much in the same fashion as someone doing a line of coke off my arm might do. Which is alway a tad disturbing but I think she just likes my body lotion.

Sandy likes to tell me she is angry every time I ask her how she is. This is a fairly normal response except most kids say it with a big grin on their faces. Whereas Sandy screws her face up, stamps her foot and declares “I am very, very angry!” At which point Angelina begins to fake cry very convincingly and wails “I’m sad!”. These two are competing for dominant female. It could turn nasty.

Sometimes you teach things to the kids and you realise pretty quickly it was a mistake. For example I taught them what a bee was. I did an action for it and buzzed a bit and then acted out (my finger did the acting - it played the part of the bee) being stung by a bee. Now my kids all pretend their fingers are bees and try to sting me. By digging their finger nails into me. 

Also,

Action shot

In other news, I went to a festival again and this time I wasn't locked out of my house by my evil aunt and made to walk the streets of Beijing with no battery on my phone until I found Rocco's hotel and she took me in. Also no one was beaten up and I even got a little bit drunk.

Ouch my face!

I have got myself a teaching job, which was fairly straightforward. All I had to do was turn up to the interview and speak English. They then presented me with the contract, which was a little scary, but I decided that the contract probably wasn’t very binding so it’d be ok. Like most of my speculations about China this is based on absolutely no information.

The job is great however the hours are terrible. I work 3pm-8.30pm Wed-Fri and then 8.30am-7.30pm Sat and 8.30am-6.00pm Sun. I teach one class on Thursday evenings and then do a load of demos to try and encourage perspective students to sign up. The kids are aged between 3 and 12. I have discovered that children will do anything for stars even though they don’t actually mean anything.

Now I’ve been there three weeks and it is the summer holidays the head master decides the whole company is going on a team-building trip. So they pack 100 employees from all of the different branches of Best Learning (the company I work for) off to Ye San Po. Ye San Po is 4 hours from Beijing and is in the mountains and consists of one street with a few newsagents and a load of rubbish. Everything that could be seen in the distance looked great though.

The first team building exercise was a cheap version of the TV programme Total Wipeout (an obstacle course made from floats in water). It started with the travelator (think gladiators, or if that means nothing to you think a conveyer belt which is going in the opposite direction to the one you want to run in). After this you do some leaping from float to unstable float. Then there are some spinning floats that you jump from and you grab a bar, which you then glide down. From the float you land on you walk along a tight rope style float and then run across some rollers and end it all by leaping onto a rope net and climbing to the top of a small tower. Where you turn around and face your cheering adoring audience.

I was somewhat worried about having a go. I knew deep down I should just do it or I’d regret it and after almost everyone else had done it and a fair amount of peer pressure. Sentiments such as you only live once and you might never get the chance again were directed my way and I thought fuck it! So I gathered my team around me and told them if I fell off the travelator more than 3 times I was giving up. A lot of people had been falling here since it was pretty wet. The man with the microphone that was commentating asked me if I had something to say and I explained I would be falling in a lot. I got into position. I prepared myself to run fast. I took the first step. I immediately slipped and attempted to break my fall with my face.

I learned an important lesson this day - breaking your fall with your face leads to concussion. Also it causes your face to swell up like a melon. I was rescued from the water by two of my co-workers. Everyone was concerned and chose to surround me and express their concern in both Chinese and English and all at once with lots of gesticulation or by holding hands over open mouths and directing their shocked eyes first at me, then at each other. Obviously all of this was very comforting. I was given a cold drink and some cold spray to put on the wound. One of the foreign teachers was worried I might have broken my cheekbone so I was whisked off to the local hospital. The doctor had a prod and decided to give me an X-ray.

After it was concluded I had not broken anything I was given 3 different lots of pills to take - 2 of each, 3 times a day and some stuff to rub in. One set of pills for pain, one in a miscellaneous paper bag with no label on and one set for my heart. I decided not to take them.

The rest of the day was spent eating and watching karaoke. There was an attempt at a fire however it was very small and didn’t last long.  Although I would say the team building exercise was rather pointless I feel that my injury did bring the team closer together. We ended the night playing a card game called killer, eating Chua (meat on sticks) and drinking beer.

Day two was supposed to consist of a cruise however it turned out that cruise actually meant rafting. And obviously I’d decided to wear a nice dress for the cruise only to have to buy some shorts and persuade one of the boys to take off their T-shirt so I could wear it. A kind lady saw me getting undressed in the queue and blocked me from view with her umbrella just before I exposed myself. I then handed her my dress as I was pretty sure she was the tour guide from our bus. 

We get in our raft and then proceed to paddle down the shallowest river ever until we all get a bit stuck and a digger comes along and using it’s digger arm thing pushes people out of the really shallow water into the marginally less shallow water. We eventually make it to a fake cave, which is full of fake clay stalactites. We did not gaze in owe at the unnatural wonders instead we pushed off of them with our paddles in order to manoeuvre through the fake cave.

We end the trip in the dirtiest river imaginable and feeling quite disgusting head back to the hotel to shower, eat and leave. So people, the next time you’re feeling swore about the extensive health and safety regulations at work think of my bruised and swollen face and be thankful you don’t work in China.

 

Tiger Momma

 A few weeks ago I quit my job with my Aunt. I had been with her 5 months and she was becoming incredibly suffocating and I realised that I was never going to be the materialistic, money hungry, business savvy, “lady” that my Aunt wanted me to be. When I was a kid I asked my mum what the difference between a woman and a lady was and she told me that ladies were proper and followed a bunch of rules some idiot men had thought up many years ago whereas women gave as good as the men and generally had more fun.

I first meet my Aunt when I was 4 but my first memory of her is from her wedding to my Uncle Leo when I was 6 or 7. She was very beautiful and looked very exotic to me. She gave me the silver bracelet she was wearing and I remember thinking she was very generous. I think this was when I decided to go to China one day.

She and my uncle were married for 20 years and I would see her every Christmas. I always looked forward to seeing her more than anyone else in my family. I think this was just because she was the most interesting one. She told me when I was working for her that she always hated our Christmas meals because they were so boring. Which in all fairness they were but that’s just because none of my family feels they can be honest about what they get up to in private.

About 4 months before I came out to China I meet my aunt for the first time in 4 years. She had a baby with her. He was 1 years old and she told me he was her brother’s second child and she was bringing him up because of the one child policy. I accepted this at the time although I could tell that the baby obviously saw my Aunt as his mum.

When I arrived in China I was kind of disappointed by my first glimpse of Beijing out of the window of the plane. It doesn’t look great. I love it now but it’s not because it’s pretty. DD meet me at the airport with the baby and a man named Da Long. Da Long’s role in the family was never really explained to me. He seemed to be the father figure to Niu Niu (DD’s baby) however he was never referred to as baba, which means dad in Chinese. He shared a bed with DD and the baby. Although I didn’t know for definite I had assumed my uncle Leo and DD had been separated for a while as DD was never in England and Leo always was. I knew however that she stayed with him when she was in England and he visited her once a year in China.

There were lots of photo’s of the baby around DD’s house and some of them had her in them and I kept thinking she looked a bit chubby in them. After a few months DD asked me to sort out the photos on her hard drive and whilst doing so I found the photos of DD heavily pregnant and in the hospital and I knew she had lied to me when I was in England. She may have done this for my Uncle sake rather than her own though.

For some inexplicable reason when I first got to China I became obsessed with the magpie rhyme. You know, one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told. I kept seeing two for the first week and kept thinking this is an excellent omen. Then we had Chinese New Year which I will right up at some point.

After this I started seeing one magpie all the time. And then my Nan died. My mum called me on the house phone and got through to DD. She asked to speak to me and told me the news. I think I was a lot more upset than I would have been at home. She had died in her sleep in her own house. I just kept thinking about how horrible it must feel to wake up and realise you’re having a heart attack and to just feel helpless. You can’t get up, you can’t call for help you just die. She might not have even woken up but it’s all I could think about.

My Nan had been run over by a bus when she was 10 and had had her leg amputated. For most of her life she had not let this affect her. She was fiercely independent and until the year before she died having one leg had caused her few problems. However as well as being independent she didn’t like to be a bother either. And when her leg got really bad and started bleeding all the time she didn’t tell anyone because she thought it would get better on it’s own. She was in and out of hospital with ulcers after this. And this last time she had just been out a week or so. I know she would have been much happier to have been out of hospital and that she had kept her sanity (she was a bit worried about this).

After my mum told me the news I was upset and I knew Leo was going to ring DD next and tell her so I went down stairs looking for some comfort. I felt pretty stupid about this because I’m not big on the whole getting emotional in front of people business (far too British for that!) Unfortunately the Chinese appear to view death of an old person as just one of those things. “It’s just life” DD said “she was old”. Her comforting words were that “she had lots of children so she’ll go to heaven”. Not a prerequisite for heaven that I was familiar with but hey-ho.

I was sat with the family and they told me that a few days before I had arrived Mr Guo’s (the old diplomat that works for DD) brother had died. DD’s brother Xiao Liang said Mr Guo’s brother had smoked everyday and then his doctor told him if he didn’t stop he was going to die, so he gave up and just afterwards he died. “So you might as well smoke” he said and offered me a cigarette. I smiled a little and DD explained that he was making a joke to try and cheer me up, she said it as though I were being ungrateful and should have smiled more.

Three days later DD calls me down to speak to me. She asks if my mother had known it was her (DD) that had answered the phone the other night when my mum had called to tell me about my Nan. I said probably but I wasn’t sure. DD asked me if my mum was aware of what she (DD) was doing for me. She said my mum should be very grateful, she (DD) didn’t need me, she could find a hundred pretty girls, models even, that had business training and that she was doing me a favour. She said she was very angry with my mum for not at least making conversation with her when she called. I explained that my mum was probably somewhat preoccupied with telling me about my Nan but DD didn’t feel this was acceptable. She told me I had to ask my Mum to apologise.

From this point onward things went down hill. She asked me why I had studied Maths at university. She said it was a pointless thing for girls to study. “What are they going to do with it?” Exactly the same thing men do with it obviously! She then explained that if she had been my mother she would have sent me to modelling school. Which is just absurd, I’m a geek through and through plus I can’t fake smile and I have trouble keeping both my eyes open fully (as an annoying large amount of people have seen fit to point out to me – see facebook for details).

She told me my clothes were all wrong. Every time I’d come down for breakfast in the morning she would tell me what I was wearing didn’t suit me, was too baggy or that the colour looked faded. Eventually she got me to bring down all my clothes and she went through them all. Most were too young/studenty and I shouldn’t be wearing them anymore. A few were too old and a couple of things were acceptable. She told me I wasn’t to wear the ones she didn’t like anymore. She did take me shopping to increase my wardrobe however it was mostly with clothes that were too big for me.

So basically she wanted me to be Chinese. She said that when people saw me they expected to see London fashion and that I wasn’t showing them this. Which is bollocks. That’s how Londoners dress. In London it is perfectly acceptable for 20 something’s to dress like students. In China girls wear ball dresses to work. They bleach their skin white. In fact this was something else DD wanted me to do. All the lotions and shower gels she gave me had whitener in. I meet someone not that long before I quit my job and they said I had very pale skin. I told them I have olive skin and she looked at me as if to say “in your dreams you pasty bitch” and my eyes tried to say I have Jewish, Romanian Gypsy blood actually, my mum’s so tanned she sometimes looks Indian but then I looked at my arms and knew it was pointless. I have regained my colour now though I’m pleased to say.

I was told that when we had meetings I should wear a full face of make-up and the little bit I usually wear wasn’t enough. I have a bit of an issue with this as I’ve always had this weird fear of seeming vain. When I was little I wouldn’t look in the mirror if I went to the toilet because I was worried it would look like I cared about what I looked like. So I’d just look down at my hands. Then I got older and a whole load of other insecurities crept up and I decided I had to accept that I did want to look good but I still find it hard to show that I care about it in public. Being vain is a very private thing in my eyes.

I was told I had to be a morning person. I was forbidden from coming down the stairs and keeping to myself, I had to be cheerful and make everyone feel happy. Which I’ll admit is a nice sentiment but it’s not me. I’m a moody teenager in the morning and I need a good few hours to get my head together. I’ve always felt that some of us our morning people and some of us are evening people and it’s not something that should be messed with.

DD went to military school from the age of 14-18 and because of this see was taught to eat fast. “If you didn’t eat your food within a minute you went hungry” she explained. And this was something I had to do as well. Now most people that have had a meal with me pre-China will know that I like to take my time. Not just with food but with all things. It’s one of those traits that people find both irritating and endearing (or so I tell my self). So eating slowly was also banned.

Next up for scrutiny was my lack of confidence. When she brought it up I explained that “I know I’m just being pathetic” and she said “yes, pathetic, that’s the word for it”. She then went on to tell me to treat meetings like they’re a performance. You should practice at home and then when you’re in the spotlight you should be better than when you practiced. You have to relish the spotlight. The trouble is I get stage fright and I hate the spotlight, I’m definitely a behind the scenes kind of gal. She also told me that whenever I walk into a room I should walk like a model and I should feel the power. People can see that you feel it and they will treat you differently. This is true as far as I can tell.

DD wouldn’t let me take Chinese lesson as she felt I should be able to pick it up through osmosis. This is a completely insane idea. Maybe some annoyingly gifted people could do this but I cannot. I have to study hard to remember words from another language. DD was willing to admit that she had no patience with me when it came to teaching me Chinese. She told me she would only say a word once and I was to learn it, she would not tell me what it meant again so I wasn’t to ask. In meetings I would often be asked questions in Chinese and I would do my best to reply. Unfortunately when I try to remember a word I screw up my face and this was another thing I was banned from doing as it was unattractive.

Part of the agreement I had with DD was that I wouldn’t be paid but that she would pay or provide everything for me. This was fine when I was with her and she was generous and did make sure I always had shampoo and the like. However when I went into town on my own I had problems. DD would give me 500 yuan (about £50) a month and she said this was my allowance. On my first outing into Beijing on my own I bought a coat and DD didn’t like the coat. She decided not to give me any more money for a while because I was obviously bad with it. This was rather frustrating as it meant that whenever I went into town I was spending my savings and they were supposed to be so I could do some travelling.

I realised after a while that if my aunt suggested “we” do something this was not at all what she meant. If for example “we” were going to the spa this meant she was going to the spa and I was waiting for up 4 hours in the waiting room with nothing to do. Whereas if she felt that “we” should clean out the water heater thingy she meant I should do it.

She felt it was important to explain to me on a regular basis that I was very lucky to have this opportunity. Also that she was very generous and very kind and fair. I suppose it was necessary for her to state this since the actually events that had been happening around me did not make it clear.

Events reached a head when we moved house. We moved from far away to the middle of nowhere. I could only leave the house if I got a lift from someone to the nearest subway station. Which made going anywhere very difficult. I hadn’t been given much freedom before this however suddenly having what little freedom I did have taken from me made me feel very trapped.

The new house was lovely and it was good to be out of Beijing’s smog. It’ll be a nice place for Niu Niu to grow up. But I’m glad I’m rid of it. She decided everything in the house had to be cleaned. And this basically meant I had to clean everything. The builder’s wife helped as well. But my God, DD owns a lot of crap. A lot of really dusty crap. 

For three weeks straight I was scrubbing things. More or less for 12 hours a day. My fingernails got so dirty I couldn’t even get the dirt off. The water wasn’t working properly so I was constantly smelly and dirty. I discovered that when you do a certain amount of cleaning there is no way to get your nails clean afterwards. You can scrub and soak but the dirt just wont come off. It’s rather upsetting.

One of my jobs was to sort out a load of tea sets and china cups and arrange them on some shelves “artistically”. So I attempted this. In my opinion it looked good but of course it was completely wrong. She informed me that I should be more practical and that she didn’t want all of the cupboards to have things in. So she squashed everything up into a few cupboards so that everything looked cluttered and told me this was much more artistic and that she couldn’t understand why I never put any thought into anything.

10 days after the move DD took a trip to London and left me with the study to sort out. Again she told me that I should arrange things in an “artistic way”. Also, that all the books were to be dusted before I put them away. So I sorted everything. I check with Mr Guo to make sure I’d done it in a way DD would like and he said it looks good. Whilst sorting the study out I discovered my aunt and uncle’s divorce papers from 2009 – just before Niu Niu had been born. I wasn’t at all surprised but I did wonder why my Uncle had never mentioned it. I also found a photo album with DD and another man I had not met. This was labelled 2005. I wondered if he could be Niu Niu’s father.

DD returned 2 days before my birthday. She had fairly practical presents for her parents and for Mr Guo and lots of things for Niu Niu. She hands me a birthday card as an afterthought, which I open on my birthday and can see has been written by my Uncle. Now in hindsight I can see that I shouldn’t have assumed anything and I know I can be a bit a twit at times when it comes to drawing attention to myself. I usually kind of hope that people will just notice things on their own without me saying. However because she gave me the card I assumed she knew when my birthday was.

I was wrong. On my birthday I woke up and DD was in an awful mood. She immediately put me to work. Telling me that the way I had arranged the study was terrible. Why had I put the books at the top and what was all the space in the middle for. I considered explaining that I had asked for help from Mr Guo and that he clearly didn’t know what her artistic vision was either but instead began to re-do the room. At 8am she told me that she needed my phone. The Mayor of Tang Shan was going to London that day and his phone wouldn’t work there but the one they had given me would. So I handed over the only form of communication I had (the internet had still not been set up). I considered mentioning to someone that it was my birthday but it just sounded so pathetic in my head whenever I considered doing it. I thought they would just say “so what, your 25, aren’t you a bit too old to be celebrating birthdays”.

So no one was able to wish me Happy Birthday on my Birthday and I decided to pretend it hadn’t happened. I moved it to Sunday and celebrated with my friends. And on my fake Birthday I finally made the decision to quit. I would move out and I would find a teaching job. And that is exactly what I did!

My day off.

Well I've not had much time off so I was very excited when I was allowed out on Saturday night. I meet up with some friends and we went to a vampire inspired bar for some true blood. Most people had had a heavy night the night before so they left and it was just me, Andy and a girl called Rocco left. We went to a few dive bars and then headed to youth which is where disaster struck!

Someone barged past me and Rocco tried to stop them pushing me and the guy (a really big guy) pushes her really hard in the chest. Rocco's like "what the fuck" and he goes mental and pushes her even harder until she falls over towards the stage behind us. Then another guy complete unconnected to the first starts pounding her in the back of the head. It was fairly horrific. I attempted to stop him by pulling at his T-shirt - obviously this had absolutely no affect. Fortunately I resisted an impulse to jump on his back and wrap my arms around his neck in order to strangle him as the more realistic part of my brain reminded me that I am not Buffy and I in fact have no upper body strength. Although I did flex my muscle the other day and I'm fairly sure there was something there. Anyway, back to the action, so the pounding lasted about 30 seconds and this felt like an eternity. At some point Rocco gets pushed over the stage knocking about 30 beer bottles over and getting a bottle thrown at her head by another on-looker. She then manages to escape and I grab the bags and we all run outside.

Me and Andy have lost Rocco when we get outside and are frantically looking for her when we spy her with her hands clutched over her head and blood pouring down her back and her face. Rocco is calm as a cucumber and tells us she has lost her wallet. She needs it as this will tell us which hospital to take her to. So Andy ventures back in and fortunately finds the wallet straight away. I help keep pressure on the back of her head. Obviously now we know where we are going there are no taxis. We can see one but people are getting in. I'm still buzzing from the adrenaline so I decide to run over and steal it. I run up and say "we need this taxi my friends been attached" and wave my bloody hand in their faces. We get the cab but the taxi driver doesn't look impressed. Andy tells him where to go but he wants to go to a closer hospital. We remain stubborn as Rocco says they know her at the hospital she wants to go to. So eventually he sets off and then gets stuck behind another taxi. He just sits there. Me and Andy are getting pretty stressed by now as we have no idea how serious Rocco's head wound is. Rocco is obviously somewhat preoccupied with bleeding.

We make it to the hospital and walk in and are taken straight to a room. They calmly ask a few questions such as name and weight and what happened. Rocco answers and then the doctor takes a look. They clean it up a bit and then the doctor says to the nurse "get the staple gun". Rocco's eyes widen and she says "would this be a good time to tell you I'm scared of needles". Andy says he is too and leaves the room. The staple gun is about as bad as it sounded. After 14 staples Andy returns and we're told to wait for the insurance company to call to ensure Rocco can have a cat scan.

While Rocco speaks to worried friends, me and Andy explore. We discover that the hospital has a yurt. We see what the doctors having been teaching. The white board says that endorphins produce a happy face and adrenaline produces a fuzzy face. Filled with a greater sense of confidence that the doctors know what they are doing we steal some tea and go back to Rocco. Around 4am everything is sorted and we drop Rocco off at her hotel with a large bandage around her head and slightly bloodied pink and purple flowery shirt (kindly  given to her by the hospital - though they did explain that when she came back for a check-up she should return it).

After such an exciting night I have trouble sleeping. I ask DD if I can have the day off at 8am because I've been invited to a music festival. She agrees and I decide I deserve a lie-in. The first lie-in I'd had in 3 months. I wake up eventually and go for eggs benedict and a proper cup of tea (twinnings English breakfast with milk)! Feeling satisfied I venture off to the festival which is pretty far out of town. I arrive and am informed by Will who I am meeting that the festival is dry and could I sneak in some booze. I wander around aimlessly for a while until I find a shop selling alcohol. They don't sell anything I recognise and most of the bottles look too big to sneak in. However I find some small ones and I ask the man what it is. He tells me and I am none the wiser. I ask how much and he says 4 yuan for 2. This is about 40p. I start to doubt if the bottles actually contain alcohol but I buy them anyway and then head to a toilet to sample my purchase just in case. A quick whiff is enough to tell me that I defiantly have alcohol. I stick both bottles in my belt like guns and don my coat. It's boiling outside so I kind of wish the coat wasn't necessary. I head off to find a taxi to take me to the festival and discover I can't remember where the train station is. I wander for a while constantly reminding myself that people are looking at me funny because I'm white and not because I have two bottles of ridiculously cheap spirit concealed in my coat.

I make it in and meet up with Will and his friends. One of whom is a teacher at their school and is Chinese. I show her the alcohol and she says that it is 72% proof and sometimes she uses it as disinfectant. We watch and wander and I really enjoy myself. The festival is fairly standard but minus some of the drunken antics and a lot less cross dressing though a fair few funny hats and some flags. I did see someone dressed as chopper from one piece though which made me smile even though he is probably the worst character.

We have a dance and a jump and even a sing along at one point when the Chinese version of Green Day did a cover of 'you are my sunshine'. It's about this time that my phone runs out of battery. We stay till the end and then head home. We get the subway and I leave the others as I live in the middle of nowhere. I get to Wangjing East which is where the last part of my journey begins to discover that I have missed the last train by 4 mins. So a taxi it is, except there are no taxis. I wander for ages until I find one and get home at 11.40pm. I get to the door and find it is locked and the key has not been left out for me. After overcoming my guilt at having to wake everyone up I ring the door bell. No one comes so I give it another go. Still nothing. I do a bit of banging. I try a shout. I go round the back and repeat my front door tactics. I then sit in the porch for a while weighing up my options. I can keep banging or I can go back into town. My phone has died and I have no ones numbers however I know that I have Will's number on Facebook so if I could just find a computer.

I get a cab back. It takes 40mins. I go to the wrong place and get another taxi to Sanlitun which is where we went out the night before. On the way we pass Rocco's hotel and I remember they have computers in there so I yell "stop" and rush to pay and get out. On the internet I realise that I don't know any of my proxy sites as they are on my phone and saved on my laptop so facebook is out of the question. I then attempted to contact anyone and everyone I can find online by other means. Hotmail, googlemail and skype. Eventually Sam comes on skype and I get him to access my facebook and tell me Will's number. I call Will from the hotel's phone and wake him up. I explain the situation and he say's he'll have a think about what I can do. I have no passort so hotels and hostels are out. Will says I can stay at his and he and his girlfriend could check in to a hotel but I don't feel comfortably making them do this. He suggests asking the hotel if they have a charger. I had until this point felt this was pointless as I have a Sony Erickson and I can't imagine anyone having a charger for it. However it turns out hotels have these nifty universal chargers and I get some power back in my phone. After waiting 20mins of course. I try calling everyone I know (Andy and Alex) and get no answer. My phone dies again. I try again and 20mins later I ring Rocco (the only other person I know) - I had not wanted to call her in case she had a horrible headache and hated me forever however she was fine about it and at 4am I finally put my head down on a pillow and got some sleep.

At 8.30am I'm up and heading home. I return to the house to be told I'm incredible stupid "why did you think you would be able to come home at 4am?" I explain that I text her at 4am because that is what time I sorted myself out in town and that in fact I got home at 11.40pm the night before. DD still thinks I'm an idiot but she didn't seem to know what I should have done differently.

At 4pm I find that the rabbit has died. I'm incredibly sad about this as she was my first friend. It appeared that no one had feed her in my absence and she had eaten some newspaper, an ikea pencil and my watch. Captain Sam Zigga Zappa esq will be sorely missed and never replaced in my heart although physically she will be replaced as Niu Niu really likes rabbits.

The White Rabbit.

I have commandeered a rabbit! She was in the smallest cage ever (approx. two hands wide - and I have small hands) so I rescued her and set her free in my room. She was not too keen on the idea of getting out of her cage at first so I said some encouraging words, namely 'some bunnies are born free, some bunnies achieve freedom and other bunnies have freedom thrust upon them' she was unimpressed so i coaxed her out with cabbage and then she tried to eat my toe nail.

She is about half the size of my foot (I'm a size 5) she is the cutest pet I've ever owned but also possibly the most mentally handicapped - if any of you have meet Zac the cat or Barney the dog you will know this is no mean feat! She shits every where which I was warned about and according to the internet if she gets diarrhea she could die!

I'm in over my head. I don't know how to look after a living thing. All of my plants have died! I don't have any resources. No reasonable sized cage, no bedding, no restricted space for her to play in, no cardboard box with holes in. The internet advice people seem to be assuming quite a lot. I have given her a strawberry for roughage.

At the moment she has a variety of names. I elicited the help of Miss Annie Herbert in the naming of my rabbit and we currently have Captain Sam Bartholomew Ziger Zaper, Esq. However I feel we may have to drop the Bartholomew part as it is too gender specific. The issue being that although I have looked I'm not entirely sure if she is a girl. I can't find a penis but rabbits have a lot of hair.

Plus I remember when I was younger and we got a cat who also had many names. I wanted him to be a girl and my mum looked and said it was too early to tell (maybe this is the same with the rabbit, or maybe she lied) so I named him Rose. For reasons I have long since forgotten I wanted to be called Rose when I was 5. I even insisted my teacher Mrs Cooper call me Rose but she refused on the grounds that my name was Holly but when I refused to answer to Holly we compromised and I was Rose for the day. So my cat Rose turned out to be a boy (apparently all entirely ginger cats are boys, and all white cats are deaf also a liter of cats have multiple fathers - I can't tell you if any of the facts in this paragraph are correct or if they were all made up by my parents). After discovering the maleness of our cat we called him Tiger Rose (slightly more masculine) however it didn't stick as we had been calling him Kitten whilst the sex was confirmed and this seemed like the most appropriate name. Obviously it quickly became completely inappropriate as Kitten reach adulthood but it was far too late by then.

The point of my story being that gender non-specific names can solve a multitude of issues in later life but everyone gets old.

Beware the baby...he bites!

Well my cousin Niu Niu pretty much tries to eat everything which I believe is standard baby practice. He's particularly keen on anything you've told him not to eat. He also suffers from a terrible case of food envy. Unfortunately for me he only seems to get jealous of the food I'm eating. Not a meal time goes by I'm not offered something new to try and seconds after I've skillfully scoped it up with my chopsticks I hear the pita pata of Niu Niu's teeny tiny feet and he grabs my jumper from behind bites my lower back and tries to pull my jumper off until I offer him my food. He's very cute though so as of yet I've been unable to mind.

 

Niu Niu hasn't exactly got the hang of giving you a kiss on the check, he just kind of dives in and deposits slobber all over you. And for some reason even this is cute. He also likes to play with the dust pan and brush. He sweeps some dust one way and then back the other way and then attempts to pummel the dust to death by repetitively hitting it with the dust pan.  Every time he does this it reminds me of times when I've been with Charley and one of the cats has done something human-like, like sit at the table while we're eating and Charley says "Ah, he wants to be people". Except I have to keep reminding myself that Niu Niu actually is a person. For some reason when I first arrived I kept getting a huge urge to make that tutting sound you make to attract a cat when ever I needed Niu Niu to come towards me. It doesn't work though. He just kind of tuts back at you. 

Part of the reason I'm here is to help Niu Niu grow up bilingual and I'm proud to say he has learned his first English word (sort of) he can say bird (he say birb). He has also learned to say no, no, no, no, no which is what I say every time he does anything he shouldn't (very regularly). He has now taken to saying no, no, no, no, no, no just before he throws which ever expensive glass object he's managed to grab as you carry him up the stairs on the floor. So basically saying no five times is not a successful deterrent for babies.

I appear to be bad at discipline. Not only does the baby not listen to me but the dog is the same. If anyone else goes outside and they sort of shoo him out the way he just moves but if I go out he bites my leg. It's very playful but a little obstructive. Whenever the dog is like this Niu Niu gets worried and I have to pick him up. The other day I'm heading outside and the baby decides he's coming too, the dog is ready in waiting. I pick the baby up and head out the door and the dog immediately bites my leg, I pull away but he keeps hold of my trousers. I sort of dance around in a circle with the baby and the dog and for reasons unknown to me Niu Niu picked this exact moment to bite me in the face!

I think my lack of discipline skills might come from my parents discipline techniques. Which basically consited of them assuming that if we did something stupid - such as jumping off a 3 meter high shed - we'd learn our lesson from that when for example we sprained our ankle. Fortunately this didn't happen to me as I decided to jump second.

I have named the dog Mao Mao as this is what Niu Niu kept calling him when we first got him. Initially I thought mao meant cat so I was a bit confused when no one seemed to be correcting Niu Niu about this. But it turns out mao also means fur. So basically it's a terrible name but I'm sticking with it. Presides a lot of Chinese names don't translate that well. Niu Niu means cow cow.

Pain or pleasure?

Right, so Saturday was a day of relaxing. DD's friend Shu Li who now lives in London was back in Beijing and we went to visit her. Shu Li is very very rich. Well really Shu Li's brother is very very rich as he is number 5 on the Hong Kong stock market list (I do not know what that means) but anyway she has a massive house and swimming pool and all that jazz. DD says she is crazy and at first I had this image of a crazy eccentric woman but this was wrong. She was just angry. She shouts at everyone. She's not entirely evil or anything just not much fun to be around. And DD says that if Shu Li wants her to spend time with her she will have to pay for things. So we went to the spa.

At the spa you get naked. I've become used to pretending like everything is normal when it really isn't so I just went along with it. You don't share the shower but there isn't a door. Eventually I'm taken to a room on my own. A masseuse comes in and covers me up a bit. She massages my back. This is kind of nice but at times it hurt quite a lot. I haven't figured out if it's meant to or if there is something wrong with me. A bit of me wonders if it's because I have virtually no muscles though I have no idea why that would make it hurt. Anyway, they do that thing where they stop your blood flowing in your arm for a min and then let go and it feels really nice. It's a bit like the feeling when you have sat on your leg for too long and blood rushes back but without the pins and needles and feeling slightly concerned your leg may have given up on you completely and you'll never walk again.

After the massage I get a facial. It's my first facial so I didn't know what to expect. They rub in about 20 different creams. Some they take off others they leave for a while and then kind of dab you with a sponge. She put some gloop on and then covered my eyes and left. Then I thought I could hear her in the corner and I thought why is just watching me, surely this isn't normal, oh my god maybe she is going to kill me! So I try to open my eyes and it really hurt because the things covering my eyes have got some kind of bloody soothing cream on them. The pain caused my paranoia to subside and I realised she wasn't in the room it was just the air con rattling.

Next she attempted to ask me if I wanted to have my eyebrows done. It took a while to get this across. I thought she was telling me to close my eyes at first and then I thought she wanted to do my eyebrows so I said yes and then she looked confused and started pointing at her eyebrows so I said they looked nice. Eventually she got a pair of tweezers and a eyebrow razor and waved them at me. I picked tweezers and she used the razor anyway. Though to be fair I do have a lot of eyebrow.

Finally she gets a pair of ultra thin tweezers and sticks them into my face. This was by far the most painful part of the whole thing. After a while she says tong bu tong (which means does it hurt) I say Tong! (yes!) and she shows me all the gunk she has pulled out so far. It's quite amazing that I could have that much crap in my face and not know about it really. I let her continue without complaining and felt a bit guilty later when I covered my face in foundation because we were going out.

So I've learned that being pampered is fairly painful and rich people have to go to much less effort to look good than everyone else because other people do it for them but it's not a fun experience and they would be happier with the gunk in their faces.

For the evening we went to dinner with a couple who are friends with DD. DD was in the military secret services from the age of 14-19 and this is where she knows the man Wan Ge from (I remember his name because it sounds a bit like wanker though he seemed very nice). His wife who introduced herself to me as Kylie is learning English (from someone from Liverpool which I said was a little unfortunate but I don't think she understood). Their daughter goes to university at St Andrews and might be considering staying in Scotland so Kylie wants to be able to communicate. I wanted to say in that case learning English from a Liverpudlian might not be such a bad idea cause the Scottish accent is even harder to understand. But I didn't. 

So we had a hot pot which is amazing. You have a a big bubbling pot in the middle and you throw stuff in and fish it out once cooked with your chop sticks then dunk it in a bowl of brown tasty stuff. It's great. In China they eat a lot. And they seem offended if I don't also eat a lot. So I've been trying but there is a limit. The other issue I have is that they eat fast. Some of you will know that I am not capable of eating quickly and I feel a bit silly when everyone has finish about 30mins before me and has eaten twice as much.

Anyway I need to get to the interesting bit. So Kylie says "do you like shopping" I say yes and she looks at her watch. It's 9pm. "We go" she says. So I follow her and we go to some Harvard inspired store and she picks up a few jackets and then she takes me to another store and says "do you like this store" I say yes because I've never heard of it and I don't want to offend her. She then says "anything you want I will buy for you, because I like you". Obviously a bit of me wants to buy everything just for the sake of it but I feel a bit worried about picking something too expensive. So she basically picks for me. I try it on and try to see how much it'll cost but the labels don't have prices on. She buys them for me and it comes to 1070 yuan (about £107)! She pays on a special store card. I'm very grateful and tell her I like her lots as well. Which wasn't a lie. I did really like her before she spent a load of money on me. Although a part of me did think who says money can't buy love?

On the way home DD tells me that the reason they have so much money is that the husband is very high up in the military and he gets bribed a lot! So I feel less guilty about having the money spent on me in a sense but a tad worried about what he might have been bribed to do.