one week down... 4 months to go!

So I've managed to survive my first week of being a foreign teacher in Houjie without being eaten alive by chinese children (but have been munched to bits by about a million mosquitos... but that's a different matter altogether). And despite still not being able to find real milk to satisfy my desperate need for a giant cup of tea, I've come to the conclusion I think I'm going to like it here :)

When Friday night rolled around, me and my fellow teaching buddies decided to head to our local English bar for a relaxing drink to let off some steam. We met Annie, who taught at our school last semester, who gave us some great words of wisdom and introduced me to "the king of Houjie".. a mad old Iranian man who kept my glass full all night. After a few too many free drinks, me, Annie, Sean and Phil met a group of Chinese men who wanted to practice some of their English on us... which then lead to them taking us to the only nightclub in Houjie for some more free drinks. In China, they have a tendency to shout 'Gambai' at you if you have a full glass, which essentially means DOWN IT. Twenty million gambai's later, we decided to call it a night and jump in a taxi back to our flat. This all seems very good and simple until we realized we had no idea how to explain to our taxi driver where we lived as he spoke no English and our Chinese was a little shaky to say the least.

At first, this didn't seem to bother us too much so we asked to instead be taken to the nearest Mcdonalds for some late night grub (because everyone in the world knows how to translate McDonalds). We jumped in another taxi from here, who again, could not understand our vague description of where we lived in our broken mandarin. THREE HOURS LATER we were still driving around Houjie desperately trying to work out where the hell we lived. I know it was three hours because I had a little snooze in the back of the taxi and woke up still to be driving around in no particular direction. Finally we found Tesco (god bless you Tesco), so were able to direct ourselves back from here to our apartment, where my hard, uncomfortable mattress has never seemed so comfortable.  Lesson learnt... never go out in China without an address written down in chinese. If someone doesn't speak English, they REALLY don't speak English. Apart from McDonalds of course.

Last night consisted in a night of disney movies, recovery and a Chinese takeaway (50p noodles and our favourite greasy bread thing)... well deserved bliss.