Long time no see!

I’m sorry for my lack of blog posts lately!

So, the Spring festival finally came to an end! The fireworks calmed down after about a month and all the stores, bars and restaurants finally opened again!

Since my last post, a bouncy ball craze arrived amongst the kids of Zhengzhou, the weather has become much hotter and I finally feel a bit more at home here in this city!

Just when I was ready to be social again, I got ill and I was unwell for two weeks. I continued to go to my classes so that’s probably why I was ill for so long, I didn’t give myself time to recover properly!

As soon as I was better I realised I hadn’t had much of a social life so I decided to do something about that! So I have been exploring ZZ more and meeting new people all the time, foreigners and Chinese alike. I have been to many restaurants and been out to the Western bars a lot more recently. Old lady Becca is no more! (I got called that by a few friends here because I had the habit of changing into my pyjamas as soon as I was back at my flat after teaching and then refused to go out). I find that I am enjoying the teaching even more now because I have things to look forward to after I finish work!

Seeing my family in four weeks is something I’m really looking forward to!! They are coming to visit me and I will finally get to see other parts of China that I’m sure are much more beautiful than ZZ! I haven’t done any travelling yet and I really can’t wait to have a look around China! Zhengzhou is under so much reconstruction and in comparison to Bologna, (the Italian city I lived in two years ago), it’s not a pretty city at all!

In the past couple of weeks I have been to Chinese restaurants with Chinese people, I have been to the famous Hot Pot (finally), a Korean restaurant and a Muslim restaurant in the Muslim district of the city that I didn’t know existed! (I thought China was a complete non religious country but it seems there are Muslims and Christians here and there). Some food I encountered when eating with the Chinese was Chicken feet and turtle. I’m afraid I didn’t try either of them! 

Turtle anyone?....

In recent weeks, China has been in the news more than usual due to the knife attacks in a train station in southern China and for the missing plane that flew from Malaysia and was due to land in Beijing. There were six people on the plane from the Henan province. They were three young couples. Very sad!

I have been very sociable in recent weeks! Many people have asked why they haven’t seen me before despite the fact that I have been here four months now! When I have introduced my self, people have replied saying, ‘ah, so you’re Rebecca! It’s nice to finally meet you.’ So people haven’t been talking about me at all! Haha! The foreign community in this city is fairly small so I imagine people get to know people or hear of people pretty quickly! A group of students have recently arrived from Edinburgh and even they are meeting people for the first time the same time as me and I have been here longer! They have even seen far more locations in China than I have!

That will change in four weeks! I can’t wait!!

Teaching is still going well. Some of the children are so cheeky! I had one group of 12 year old boys chat away to each other and I didn’t need to understand what they were saying because their eyes were giving it away. Their eyes were staring at my boobs! (Bearing in mind I was wearing a woolly jumper and my bust is quite small). I also finally met a student with the same name as me! When I said to the class that my name was Rebecca, they shouted out in surprise and pointed at the other girl called Rebecca. She was my best friend for the rest of the lesson! The kids often don’t use their common sense (if they have any) and sometimes guess what my instructions are. They then end up playing a game that makes no sense and I have no idea what they are doing!

The buses are still driving me crazy and I’m still stared at all the time, but I am finally feeling a bit more relaxed here and making a life for myself here that involves more than just work!

Here is an example of how busy it can be in this city...

My friend took the picture near where she lives. This is the result of lots of construction near her apartment!

That’s all for now! I promise I will write more frequent from now on! It has been a very busy few weeks!