Thursday 25th October, 2007, Zhengzhou

Teaching this afternoon, and smalls-washing this morning. Really exciting!
So I probably won't have very much to report today, but we'll see. It's only 7.45am, and I haven't had breakfast yet.

The chilli-attack was mercifully short-lived you'll be glad to know, but I think I'll still take it easy today!

Well, I ended up spending most of the morning editing my PowerPoints - adding Mandarin translations for some of the more technical terms - for which Google is surprisingly useful.

Before setting off to University I went to the Spar and toook a few shots en route. These were looking in the opposite direction from that where most of the other pics were taken. The first photo shows the front of the main university campus, which is almost opposite my hotel. You might just about be able to see the bus that I later took to the south campus, where my lectures are.

















Gave the students hell. Not deliberately. But really, they are certainly suffering. They start at about 8.30 am and have a full day of classes before I get to them at 4.00pm. Given that we finish at 7.40pm, and that most of them are still struggling quite hard with English, you can imagine what mental state they are in. I have every sympathy for them.

Met up with Nigel from Hull on the bus back. He's teaching here for a year, but would like to do longer if he can. In fact, he was talking about trying to buy a house, he loves it that much. We went for a late-evening snack at a little cafe. Offal and noodles, and two bottles of beer (one each). Total cost, the princely sum of £2 in total. We don't know we're born in the west.

Tomorrow, the Dean has instructed Shuai to take Nigel and myself out for the day sightseeing. I'm looking forward to that, and there should be some good photos for the blog.

Incidentally, I decided not to use my laptop for teaching today, but just take my memory stick to plug into their PC in the lecture room. It was recognised, but no files were visible. We gave up, and used the files that had previously been loaded on to their computer - ie my earlier versions; the ones without my hard-won Mandarin translations! But they did have an online dictionary which we found valuable.

When I got back here (hotel) I thought I ought to try the memory stick. A soon as it was recognised, McAfee pounced on a trojan. I deleted it, and everythiong seems to be OK, but I'm going to have to warn them about that.

Come to think about it, everywhere in the world must have a Spar supermarket.

Whoops - it's 11.20pm already. Time for bed, methinks.
Bye for now. Keep checking the blog.

Mike
x

Wednesday 24th October, 2007 - Zhengzhou

Today was another day off. Yes, I know what you're thinking: "It's Mauritius all over again". Well no, actually. Tomorrow I'm teaching from 4.00pm till 5.40pm and 6.00pm till 7.40pm. Saturday and Sunday I do the same amounts each day but starting at 9.00am. Then again Monday, Thursday and Saturday the following week. So there!

But, as I said, today was another day off. He Shuai, who is our main contact here, very kindly took me to the Henan (province) Museum, and also for a hot-pot. Yes, that's right. But not like what we're used to. You'll see from the pictures, a little later. It was "hot" in more ways than one, too. As I found to my cost not half an hour ago. Still, the less said about that the better! Here we go, starting with a few shots outside the museum.













Don't let the dull grey sky and the warm clothing fool you - the temperature was in the 20's (C). For some reason, though, you feel you want to wear coats. It looks as though it ought to be cold. But that "fog" almost certainly isn't: have you ever seen fog when it's that warm? It's got to be air-borne pollution. Which should come as no surprise. But it's not all bad news on that front: my hotel has low-energy light bulbs, and almost all the motor scooters seem to be battery-powered. Bear in mind that they outnumber cars by a considerable margin. OK, I suppose the batteries will be re-charged from a coal-fired electricity grid, but at least they're taking it seriously.

Now, this is what's meant by "hot-pot" in China:

The centre dish has a mild, unspiced cooking mixture (the milky liquid). The outer liquid is oil, water, chillies, various peppers etc. There is a gas burner underneath. You drop in the various items of food, let them cook, then dip them in a garlic-sesame-seed-oil paste and eat. Yummy! Shuai ordered two portions of everything. We only managed one between us.






Above: preparing "special noodles".

The museum was most impressive, by the way. It's a large building on three floors. You can imagine how much stuff they have there. It begins in pre-historic times and continues to chart the all the dynasties right up to the last one, which just about overlapped Victoria's reign.

Sorry, there are no pictures from that. But in the afternoon there was a recital in teh museum of traditional Chinese music on traditional Chinese instruments (naturally). We got great front-row seats.







I took a couple of video clips but the shorter of the two is over 100Mb so unfortunatley I can't upload it. Unless anyone knows of an easy way of compressing them? They are .AVI files.

In the evening, after dinner (the humble noodles) I decided to stroll down towards town with my camera to try and capture a few night-lights.


Above: according to a colleague, who shall remain nameless, the "pointy thing" is a children's museum. He knows this because he has visited it. He says he didn't count how many children there were. (I don't write 'em all, you know!)


It was exactly at this point, approximately 20-minutes from the hotel, that the lunchtime hot-pot began to demand attention. So it was a nerve-racking-traffic-dodging double-quick march back!

We'll stop there, I think!

Bye for now
(Zai Jian)

Monday 22nd in Zhengzhou, China

Today I finally started my teaching at Zhongyuan University of Technology. But since my classes were scheduled 4.00 - 5.40 and 6.00 - 7.40 pm (no, that's not a mistake. And it gets worse: the unfortunate students are having to attend next Saturday and Sunday, too, for more from me) I had chance to stroll towards the downtown area with my camera. Here are a few shots I took.


Above: view looking back toward my hotel (Jin Jiang Inn). It's the building centre. My room is on the top floor facing the camera.










Above: he was playing a one-stringed fiddle while she bashed two sticks together and "sang" at full belt, and occasionally at a pitch to seriously worry a sheepdog (I'd guess!).




Above: the future of China!


Now I wonder what that's trying to tell us?
The white dove's fly-past was a complete fluke. Yes, it is indeed real. There were lots of them in the park. Rather appropriate though, don't you think?


Above: not sure what the attraction was, exactly.
(Maybe the young lady in the foreground!)


Above: an olympic athlete? He doesn't look too comfortable though, does he?


Seen at close-quarters, that building (which is quite close to my much-more-humble inn) is a clear rival to both the London and Paris Hiltons; just another recent sign of the upwardly-rocketing China.


But happily, traditions are being maintained. I haven't a clue what this was all in aid of, but whatever it was, it was popular, very noisy and being televised.

Above: this is an exceedingly rare shot - an empty road junction! The brave lady in the yellow top will be taking her life in her hands, however: within a few seconds she will be surrounded by scooters, bikes, cars and lorries with the sole intention of getting to their destination. She will actually have a "walking" green man signal with a countdown . The fact that it is on green, I believe, indicates that she is PERMITTED to ATTEMPT to cross. I shudder to think what happens if you try to cross on red! I was crossing on green and cars were not actually aiming at me, but I was under no illusions - it was me that had to give weay to them. I am seriously convinced that they would run you down. It's not that they have anything against you (I hope), more the fact that to them you are invisible or, more likely, irrelevant.

Finally, here's a fascinating observation. The other day I heard "Happy Birthday" being played out in the street very loudly, repeatedly, and in electronic tones reminiscent of Grommet's card in "A Grand Day Out" (or was it "The Wrong Trousers"?). I couldn't see what it was, being as how I was in my hotel at the time, but it was obviously mobile. It had to be an ice-cream van, didn't it? Or possibly somebody celebrating a birthday? Wrong. It happened again while I was out walking in the boulevard. Believe it or not, it was the road-cleaning vehicle.

Zai Jian!

M

Mike in China

你好，每个人都
Nimen Hao!

I wasn't originally intending to write a blog during this trip, but I couldn't resist the temptation at least to have a go at offering one or two photos. Only arrived here in Zhengzhou yesterday evening so, what with sleeping off jet-lag etc, I haven't had chance to do much photography yet. Anyway, here's the view from my 6th-floor hotel window.



Sorry about the barring effect. That's a kind of "Moire" pattern caused by the fly-screen.

I have free broadband access (you'll be sorry to learn!!) and here's where I get the electricity from to run my laptop:



Nice touch, don't you think?

Incidentally, Gmail works fine, so if you fancy emailing me (keysmike@gmail.com) please feel free. Don't expect an immediate response though as I'm currently seven hours ahead of you. After next weekend it may well be eight. (? Yes, definitely eight not six.)

Zai Jian
(bye - for now)
Mike
再见
迈克

Grapes Pressed - Thanks to Oli!

... and to Tina, for recording the proceedings!

Saturday 6th October, 2007, preparing for action:















It takes a bit of muscle power to press grapes.















Filling the press ...















to the brim ...















makes pressing effective:















The "must" goes straight into glass jars called
"demijohns".
(I've often wondered why they aren't "semiberts", for example.)















What's left behind is a solid "cake"







































which will end up in the compost bin.

And just to show that we got (almost) four jars'-worth...















A job well done, I think.
Cheers!

And here are my FAQs on grape-growing/wine-making