haonowshaokao

I haven’t seen the married woman for more than a week now. She was calling me up to 12 times a night, including a few times after I’d told her I was going to sleep. Recently I’ve been not answering her calls and they seem to have dried up. There are a few other problems with her too – she’s rich and spoiled and treats waitresses with what looks to me like contempt. She’s “racist” too, but Chinese “racism” is a different beast to its western counterpart and not quite so offensive. They literally just haven’t ever seen a black person. Even the television programmes are almost all Chinese-made. In such a homogeneous society there is no difference between talking about race and talking about whether you like to have a tan or not. The Chinese idea of beauty is to be as white as possible – if you have dark skin it means you have a low status outdoor job. In England the plebs work in data entry (as I did) and having a tan means you’ve spent two weeks in Minorca, so the aesthetic prejudice is reversed.
None of this excuses Wen Wen from saying that she didn’t like Samantha because “her skin is too dark,” but it does go some way toward explaining why I wasn’t that shocked.

Meanwhile, tomorrow sees my possibly cack-handed attempts to assess and move things on with the alternative options I should have been pursuing in the first place.
First, though – two more classes, football, long long sleep.

Two months of on-off (serious) rain seem to have provisionally ended and now it is intensely hot. Spring term is finally ending too. The next two months will mainly involve “summer school” which may mean I have weekends off. I’m fairly glad of this as the world cup has once again got my sleep pattern out of rhythm, and I taught last weekend’s classes in a baggy-eyed daze. Thankfully most of the lessons were exams, which are a little less strain than real teaching.
Otherwise I’ve been staying at John & Macro’s place and watching the football constantly. On Tuesday I’m moving into back into one of the school apartments. I suspect it may be in the same building I lived in twice before. I suppose it will be interesting to live on my own for a little while, though I’m not particularly looking forward to it.

I haven’t updated for a couple of weeks, as I’ve been too busy generally having a good time. The crisis is over, vaguely. Brent is getting his own place with his girlfriend and I’m sorting something out in a couple of months. In the meantime we are both staying at John & Macro’s place, a pleasant and spacious flat which doesn’t have the tendency for cabin fever that the last one did. Though we are technically further away from the more attractive and active parts of the city (not the city centre – that’s a mountain) we’ve been going out a lot more, and spending a fair amount of money on taxis, drinks, barbeques, cigars and bb guns. Generally I’m having a great time. The idea of staying on in China for longer than a year has even entered my mind a few times. Life really is good for me here.
For anyone who hasn’t noticed (probably some of you lot in North America) the world cup started last night. This will be my main occupation over the coming month, so I’m just warning you it is something I’m likely to go on about a bit, in the public entries at least.

I’m going to have to write more of these private entries now that I’ve found out people round here are reading this lj secretly. There’s a streak of malicious gossip around the foreign community in Zhuhai which has shocked me a couple of times, and I’d like to stay out of it as much as possible.
So, I seem to have got involved with a woman called Mandy. She’s only moderately attractive and doesn’t speak English that well but I like her enough to go out with her when she calls me, go to stay in a hotel with her when she asks me to, all that. But I don’t want to enter into a serious relationship with her and don’t know how to tell her to lay off a bit as communication is a bit basic as it is. I just got a text message from her saying ‘I miss you’. I know I’m a complete coward, it’s just I’m not used to the attention I get from girls here. I’m afraid it’ll be a bit of a culture shock going back to the uk where being shy and ginger are as bad as having six-inch warts on your eyes.

I came into school on Saturday, started feeling ill, came home and lay in bed for two days cold-sweating and lacking the ability to eat or (largely) move. When It didn’t give me a headache I was able to watch some TV. Otherwise I slept, fitfully.
On Sunday I was taken to the hospital and given some medicine. It was a struggle to get there and while we were inside a monsoon-link thunderstorm began, and continued over the next day.
Today I feel almost better, and might even teach tonight – I’ll see how it goes. Still, on the downside I have to move out of my flat tomorrow and have nowhere to go. Will be able to find somewhere fairly soon, I’m fairly sure, but the stress is going to be something else. Brent is getting a place with Samantha, everyone else is sorted out for flats now, and it’s a month or more until the next turnaround of teachers.
Bollocks.
Stay tuned for less negative blogging.

I woke up on Thursday (now my only day off) with the usual semi-hangover and caught the bus into Gongbei with Brent. Gongbei is the area of Zhuhai bordering Macau and therefore the shopping district where the Macanese types pop over to stock up on cheap clothes and groceries. We went to a large underground bookshop with a mediocre selection of books in English, none of which I bought. Then we went for a walk down “Walking Street”, a pedestrianised area with fashion boutiques in the daytime and prostitutes at night. I got some “official” DVDs, underwear, food and “milk tea” but failed to find any of the other things on my list, so just checked out the gigantic underground go-kart track and went back to the flat.
Then in the afternoon I wandered around until I found a hairdresser and mimed the action of cutting off almost all my hair, which he then did for 5 RMB (40p).
Sent a message to a girl I met a month ago asking her out for a drink, but she didn’t get back to me so I went out for some dinner at a Sichuan restaurant with Sheena, another teacher. While eating I got a text message saying we wouldn’t be able to move into the flat after all, so we will have to continue looking.
With nothing to do for the evening and feeling a bit crap, I returned to the house and watched the monty python DVDs I’d bought earlier. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood, but they weren’t remotely funny. Brent went off to bed, and I would have tried to go to sleep if I’d been the least bit tired instead of bored and wide awake.
At 1am Brent reappeared and suggested we go out instead of sitting around going crazy, which proved to be a good idea. We got a taxi down to “Bar Street” and had a look at the two clubs. The first had an appalling Michael Jackson impersonator on stage, the second only four people inside and no lights or music.
After dawdling around the street for a short while, we ended up going to a new club called ‘Yesterday’ with a couple from Goa. Surprisingly enough it was a proper European-style club with decent enough music and a fairly good atmosphere. The only negative was the world’s creepiest toilet attendant, who attempted to give me a neck rub while I was having a piss. What are toilet attendants for, anyway? Why don’t they just all fuck off and get proper jobs?
Back in the bar we got talking to some girls. I had my eye on one and everything went very well until I started to feel predictably sick while dancing with her. Back at the seats she tried to make me down a glass of beer, which ended up all over me and my clothes. The alternative (swallow drink, probable food escape to follow) didn’t bear thinking about. She left soon after, and I went back home with her less attractive friend who didn’t speak a word of English.
Waking on Friday I had another hangover but a good reason for it this time. The girl had left a few hours before. We arbitrarily swapped phone numbers though the chances of a call are minimal as we don’t speak each-others languages. The remainder of the day was fairly quiet – stayed in, for the main part, planning the weekend’s lessons. In the evening I put on a suit and went to teach my business course, then came home to pass out.
Saturday was even more hectic than usual. First three lessons in the morning, including the nightmare 10.10am class, which I managed to control as far as possible without having to shout this time. Next was lunch break, when I planned the rest of the day. The afternoon started with two more classes, then I was taken down to another branch of the school to act as a judge in a strange talent show. There were only about 10 people there and some of the acts were a little hard to judge. One boy came up, mumbled a joke for twenty seconds, then walked off. Didn’t hear a single word, yet had to give him a mark out of 10. I thought 1.1 was fair. A girl came up and sang a country and western song pitch-perfect, so we gave her first place for being competent.
We had some KFC for tea, then I went back to the school and gave a two-hour talk / Q&A session on travel in Europe. Most Chinese people haven’t heard of Sweden or Austria let alone Belarus and Lithuania, so it was an opportunity to genuinely tell them something they didn’t know.
Was a bit tired after that, so went home, prepared a few more lessons, had a kip, woke up and came in here to do it all over again. As I type this the day is almost over. Macro is leaving tomorrow so she’s having a party at one of the karaoke hotel places.

There was a typhoon heading straight for us today, but it seems to have veered off to the East. Though this is in a way a relief, it is also a little disappointing. I suppose there will be plenty this summer anyway.
Also in a less than good mood today because I just found out we’ll be unable to move into the amazing place we thought we had bagged. 15 days to find a new place.