Last of 2012, but a resolution!

Ok, so my blog writing has been shocking recently, apologies for that. I am planning on updating it much more frequently next year, as it really doesn't take too long and I am also able to upload my photos now!

I won't go into detail about the last few months as I am sure I have spoken to most of you about it. But I am really enjoying being at home for Christmas, and can't wait to see all my friends in London over the next few days!

On a side note, I am looking for a new challenge for 2013.... Suggestions welcome!

X

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Location:Back in the UK!

Shanghai tourists

Charlotte has just left after a fantastic 9 days here in China! It was so great to see her and we had a very busy and touristy time in Shanghai and Beijing.
Here is a little update of what we got up to here in Shanghai :)

On Saturday we wandered around the French Concession, an area developed by the French in the 19th century. It is very pretty - lots of tree lined roads with little shops and cafes. The cocktails at the restaurant below were very well deserved after a few hours of walking!




We then went into Fuxing Park where we enjoyed looking at the fountains and lakes, as well as the spontaneous dancing and maraca playing that seems to be typical in Chinese parks!



This woman really knew how to shake a maraca with style!




We really threw ourselves into the tourist life on Monday and Tuesday after buying tickets for an open top bus tour! I really enjoyed it - it is a great way of seeing the big sights and it helped me get my bearings a bit better. It included entry into the Jin Mao tower and the Jade Budda temple, which were both very interesting.







An added benefit of the bus tour was that it helped us get away from the hoards of people that were in the city for the Golden Week holiday. Everywhere you went you were fighting with hundreds of other people for space on the pavement - unlike anything I have seen here so far!




On the Monday night Charlotte and I treated ourselves to a night on the Bund. We went to a restaurant called New Heights which was very fancy! Fantastic food, wine, views and company! Can't ask for much more!




It was a great way to end our tourist trip around Shanghai...next stop BEIJING!



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Cooking!

As you may already know, cooking has not been something I have done much of since I have been here. The temptation and ease of Sherpas and Element Fresh delivery after a long day at work are just too much! But I do enjoy cooking, so I have missed it.

Therefore, when Charlene suggested a Chinese cooking course for her birthday I jumped at the chance!

Chef Mike was our guide for the day, and our first dish was xiaolongbao - the traditional Shanghainese dim sum. They are different to normal dim sum because they have a soup inside them! The pastry (I'm not sure pastry is the right word, batter maybe?) was very easy to make - just wheat flour and water, but it was all very technical with how they are rolled out and shaped. Eventually you should end up with 8 perfectly circular shapes to fill with meat, but ours were a bit more "abstract" (to put it kindly!)

The filling in pork mince, onions, mushrooms and lots of sauces and herbs - vinegar, soy etc. there was also a load of chopped up pork jelly (yum!!). That proved to be the secret to the soup inside the dumpling - as the dumplings are steamed the pork jelly melts and turns into the soup! You have to twist the pastry around the meat filling in a fancy way of folding and pinching, which we managed with varying degrees of success...



My dim sum ready to steam (looking very pleased with myself!)

We also made pork wontons, which were made from ready made pastry (pah!) they were very easy to make, and the filling seemed pretty similar. They also looked quite impressive with only a small amount of effort.




These ones are boiled for a few minutes and then added to a soup.





Again, tasty! But really hard to eat with chopsticks!

Realistically I probably won't make them again myself - no idea on how to even start to find pork jelly and I don't want to think about what I might get by mistake!! But it was a really fun afternoon and it was great to get cooking again!

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People's Square

My aim whilst I am here is to visit a new place each week, and also to not return to the same restaurant twice!

I started this a few weeks ago, and my first destination was People's square and Renmin Park. It is a plaza with a mixture of traditional, colonial and modern buildings and skyscrapers, with a park just to the side of it.

Renmin Park was a lovely surprise, once you are inside you can't really tell that you are in the middle of such a busy city. The only clue is the sight of skyscrapers peeping over the top of the trees.




It is very calm and I enjoyed watching the old men playing cards, surrounded by onlookers.




I then turned the corner and came across the marriage market. As the name suggests, parents are there advertising their children in order to attract a suitable marriage. There were so many people there, I would guess over a thousand! And so many adverts for their children, I only wish I could read what they said.




There were lots of couples talking animatedly, I can only imagine they were discussing how suitable the matching of their daughter and son would be.




It was very interesting, but it did make me think of those sons and daughters who are having their future decided when they aren't even present.

Anyway, Charlotte is here at the moment! We are having a very touristy day with an open top bus tour so I am there will be plenty to talk about!

Zai jian x

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A long time coming!

Apologies for the long gap between my posts. I recently got a new camera and I am trying to work out a way of easily adding the photos to my blog. However, using an iPad is no use as there is no USB port and using my work laptop is no good either as blogger is blocked and VPNs aren't allowed. (VPNs direct your internet through a private network and therefore avoid the bans on Chinese Internet, otherwise known as "The Great Firewall"!)

The past two weeks have been great! I hope my weekends carry on being as fun as they are now!
Highlights of the past couple of weeks;

- Visiting People's Square and Park - eating street food whilst watching old men playing Chinese checkers. Wandering past hundreds of couples displaying information about their children to entice a potential husband or wife for them. Photos to follow!
- Chilled out BBQ in Yanlord
- Trying loads of different types of dim sum (I do have photos of this, as I had to take them on my phone)



Shrimp and sticky rice dim sum



Me and Charlene perfecting our chop stick skills!

- Irish music in a tiny bar called the Wooden Box, followed by dancing in a shockingly bad club!
- Residential trip with year 5 to Nanbei Hu. The kids had a great time on the leap of faith and we all had fun kayaking. The nickname "miss bum in the lake" is likely to stick for the time being! It was nice being outside and getting to know the kids a bit more, as well as the other teachers! Nothing like bonding over cockroaches in your bathroom and toilet incidents on the coach!!
- Ladies day at Aussie Rules - free champagne, great food and fit men in shorts. No complaints from me!

So there is a short and sweet round up of my last few weeks! I will try and add some more posts in more detail in the coming weeks!


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Faking it!

Yesterday was a day of fakes! First stop... Food republic. This is found in the basement of a big supermarket called Carrefour and it is the equivalent of a food court. Lots of different Chinese, Korean and Japanese food. BUT the menus are all in mandarin. A problem? Oh no!




This food is all plastic! So any meal you want to buy, you can just point at one that looks quite nice and a similar bowl is produced for you! Perfect for someone who hasn't moved past ni hao and zai jian yet! My lunch was therefore a MASSIVE bowl of noodles with Chinese cabbage, pork, mushrooms and some purple vegetable that I didn't work out. It was very tasty, and only cost 20RMB (about £2!)

Next to the famous fake markets. We spent a while looking at the converse shoes (all starts), toms shoes (tims) and uggs (ugs) :) Kevin walked away with a tintin painting that had started proceedings at 530RMB and finished on 180. As for me - I now own a very authentic Cath Kidston bag, which I am planning on using for a planned trip to Suzhou in a couple of weekends time.




And finally, last night was much more chilled out compared to Friday! A DVD and a bag of cheesy lobster crisps (yes, really!) with a couple of the other teachers.. DVDs here are amazing! As a general rule each disk is 5RMB. I got a bit excited last night and walked away with:




Series 1-7 of greys anatomy and how I met your mother, series 1-3 of modern family, plus a copy of the artist and the hunger games. Which came to a grand total of £13.50!

Now if you don't mind, I have 176 episodes of how I met your mother to work my way through!

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First week back at school!

I am straight back into school now! Monday and Tuesday were whole school inset days and Wednesday we had just new children in (of which I had 6!). Then the rest of my class returned on Thursday and Friday. I have 22 children and a whole load of different nationalities - I am sensing a display here! Australian, American, British, Hungarian, Indian, Chinese (unsurprisingly I guess!), Indonesian... I could continue! But also a lot of the children have moved from several different countries too, so it is very interesting chatting to them about all the exciting places they have lived in.

The school day is a lot longer than in the UK-the children arrive between 8 and 8,15, and we finish at 3.30. It may not sound a lot but I am used to getting started at about 9, so you can tell the difference! But we always used to say that it was hard to fit everything in each week so hopefully that won't be too much of a problem now! Next week we will start on a normal timetable so I will get a bit more of an idea what we are doing then.

I am still going out when I can to meet the old junior school staff, everyone seems really friendly. I am also going to write a list of everything I want to do in Shanghai as it seems likely that the weekends could just pass with constantly going out! Last night I combined the two...

KTV! For those of you who haven't heard of KTV, it's karaoke... Which is MASSIVE here. The building was the size of a supermarket, with a compete maze of individual rooms and flashing disco nights. I swear they get you deliberately lost so you the idea of trying to find your way out is so off putting that you just stay and sing some more.

We payed 100rmb each (just under £10) to get the room for 6 hours. We scoffed at the idea of being in there for 6 hours... Little did we know!



That 100 each also included 3 BIG bottles of Smirnoff vodka, 20 bottles of coke, 20 bottles of beer and a random assortment of snacks





6 hours didn't look quite so unlikely now!

And yes, here we are 5 hours later, still singing!




We managed to work our way out of the maze at 4.30am, when it was still surprisingly busy! And just enough time left to stop off at the 24 hour KFC for some chicken porridge (or fries, though the porridge was an option) before wandering home in the morning sunshine!

All in all a very cultural evening, but also an incredibly fun one!!

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