This is a strangely addictive little viral video making the rounds here in the Middle Kingdom- a couple of foreign teachers...dancing on the train. I really love the second half, when all the passengers start dancing too. 

 It's Sunday morning, ridiculously early, and I'm at work, in my little empty office. Me and the cleaners are the only ones haunting the halls today, so far. Admin seems to be sleeping in. I'm half hoping the kids will have all bailed and gone back to their home towns early. One of the side effects of having moved to a new flat (aside from waking ( Read more... )

 We have no net at home and I have no proxy at work so I can't do much here. Hopefully this will pass. I'm having to squeeze in time between classes to post my daily NaBloPoMo (the Blog Post equivalent of NaNoWriMo).  This is all part of my cunning plan to get my ass in gear. I think either today or tomorrow is my last day of daily posting. I ( Read more... )

 So we got the keys to the new flat today. I'd been running around like an overwhelmed headless chicken all morning, trying to sort out my police re-registration (it's that time of year again) and bringing D. documents he needed for his but had forgotten to pack. The first time I trudged out there, they laughed and told me to come back later- ( Read more... )

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 We got the flat! And we met our landlords and they are a really sweet, very educated couple around our age with a toddler in tow. The contract is signed and we'll get the keys at the beginning of june. We went to the flat today to make sure everything was okay and to see what we need to buy for it before we can move in (er, mattresses? Landlords ( Read more... )

 We appear to have found ourselves a flat. Yes. In spite of the absurd Expo 2010 housing insanity wherein anything even remotely central costs upwards of 6500rmb for a dump and in which 8k is what you have to expect to fork over if you want to minimize the peeling paint and mildewed bathrooms, we actually found a flat we both liked in a location we ( Read more... )

 First of all, here are the photos from our just-completed long weekend away in the southlands of Sinotopia. And here is some other writing I did about it while I was putting off writing it all down here (the more personal bits, that is).

In other news, our landlord sent a text message tonight announcing that at the end of our 6 month contract ( Read more... )

 I've been absent from here for a few days, away in the southlands of Sinotopia, heading down nearer to Vietnam than to the urban clutches of the Eastern seabord where I dwell under normal circumstances. If the Grave Sweeping festival brought us up to the far north of China, then the May Day festivities have brought us in the opposite direction. It ( Read more... )

 It's the afternoon before a wonderfully long weekend and I'm trying to assemble something, anything for my two 90 minute sessions this afternoon. At least half the kids have already gone home for the holiday (only 11/24 showed up this morning in one group, even fewer in the other) so I can't do anything important. Our new books (already 3 weeks ( Read more... )