may day holiday part 2:

Longyan:
well, before longyan, there was zhangzhou. we took the less direct yet cheaper route back to matt and ryan's placement so we could visit ally and phoebes. zhangzhou is a boring town, which is why the girls frequently escape to longyan on the weekends. their apartments are nice though, and their link teacher susan was lovely. unfortunatly we didnt get to meet the other link teacher, piano =P then it was onto longyan. longyan is a rather large city, especailly comapred to hengxian. the most amusing part is that, because of some inconvinietly placed mountains, two of the ditricts are 2 hours apart, and dont even ask me where the others are hidden.
ryan and matt teach at longyan yi zhong, longyan number one middle school. turns out its number one in the province and number ten in the country, or something along those lines.
we stayed int he boys apartment, which is an absolute pigsty. nice enough though. arrived there quite late on sunday so we just went out for dinner (delicious noodles =D) and stayed up playing cards.
next day we went with the boys to watch while they taught. they teach much larger classes than us, the standard chinese size of 50 - 60 students. they were giving some of their classes a lazy lesson of playing hide and seek tag in the garden, as they had exams the next week and weren't that keen on focusing. so carina and i got roped into playing, which was highly amusing. it resulted in carina climbing a tree to catch a student, and me injurying my knee whilst running =D so i got to spend the rest of my time in longyan hobbling.

ok, so hotmail has been playing up, and im forgetful and lazy, so you're going to get a really breif version of the rest of my holiday! which is probably what i should have been doing all along, but oh well!

so we hung around longyan for a few days, watched the boys classes, played card games, road around on their mopeds (dont worry, my insurance covers it!), and ryan taught me to drive his, which was fun! and i didnt kill anyone!!!
found a store here that sells western food =D i bought malteasers!! MALTEASERS! i was a happy girl!
from longyan we caught a bus to SHANGHAI! 18 hour bus ride. 18 hours... but it was a sleeper bus! we had beds! on a bus! it was weird, and cramped, but probably better then sitting up!
shanghai was crazy busy. ate some cool chinese food, and lots of yummy western food =D went shopping at markets, i have aquired some awesome bargaining skills whilst in china! went to the sex culture museum, very... phallic. walked along the bund, its dirty plauged by foreigners and people selling their dodgy wears. went to the peoples square, attempted to go to yuyuan gardens, but my attempt was thwarted by laziness of others.
went clubbing in shanghai!! was crazy! i also have mad dancing skills! and i am becoming very good at looking after drunks. being the only sober person this job was usually given to me. it was fun though, awesome meeting up with lots of gappers! there was about 25 of us at one stage, all staying at the same hostel.
the thing i said most whilst in shanghai was "BU YAO!" which means "not want!" because all these poeple on the street show you picutres of rolex watches and luis vitton bags, and offer them to you cheap, if yu go with them. one group of people said yes and were taken down some seedy back alley. they ran away. but they got really annoying, so we started saying "feichang bu yao!" which means "extremely not want!!". travelling certainly improved my chinese =D

left shanghai after four days, and trotted up to nanjing! fun city, went to the nanjng massacre museum. its on the site of a few mass graves, so they have pits showing all the bones and stuff, rather sad. althrough it talked about how horrible the japanese invasion was, and how bad they japanese are, then in the lst room it spoke about how china needs to forgive and forget, and move on. but, just as we though everything was fine and dandy, the next sentence goes on about how the japanese are evil and whatnot. it went on like this for the rest of the final display. so just your usual chinese history.
also saw the ruins of ming temple, and tried to go to a museum, but it was closed =[
after three days in nanjing and a lovely relaxing 2 weeks, carina and i headed home to hengxian. we had to take a train from nanjing to shanghai, which was 2 hours, then a train from shanghai to nanning, the capital of our province. it took TWENTY EIGHT HOURS. twenty eight hours!!! on a train!!! SITTING! on hard seats! because they were the cheapest tickets. but its like tow bench seats facing each other, three poeple to a seat, no arm rest in between!! at one stage i had some strange lady sleeping on my shoulder! carina had the luxary of a window seat. but we spent the entire time sitting opposite strange men, who we gave code names so we could talk about them! not that they spoke any english anyway... and they dont turn the lights off, so it was almost impossible to sleep!!!!!!!! and people were constantly staring, and taking photos and muttering "lao wei" (politically incorrect yet most common term for foreigner), it was insane! for 28 hours!!! ah well, its the price you pay of being poor.
got to nanning and were picked up by our link teacher lily, and were swept back to our sleepy little town!

so that was my holiday! it was great getting to see other westerners, practice my chinese and see more of this crazy place.

so, until next time, stay safe dont do drugs, and may the force be with you.
love from claire!