Yep its snowing! well not really, its just these white flowers thatare flying absolutely everywhere and getting in all the rooms (pluseyes of cyclists!), so it looks like its snowing!
no-one wuite knows where the flowers are coming from though, but iguess they are spreading their wings for flower mating season!
recently i had my first accident on the road :) not a bad one, justsome idiot on a motorbike pulled out and looked right before lookingleft (the traffic was coming from the left in the closest lane)..soI hit him at about 10mph, missed his leg unfortunately and just wentinto the side of his motorbike. anyway, totally harmless, butexcitingly i was looking at him saying 'kan, kan' afterwards (kan =look)
I also noticed that the chinese are nothing if not clever, in thatsince its so dry in spring (but the trees need water), they dig bigholes around the trees (mini-lakes if you like) and then fill themwith water (from a truck driving along the road taking aim so as tospray into the wholes) so the trees get more water. I think it isjust for 'young' trees and don't know if its just my area or thewhole of Beijing!
most of you will have read about the anti-japanese demonstrations inchina -I havent seen any yet, but there has always been historicalissues between the 2 countries. I asked my tutee..he said: "thechinese not like the japanese" so there you go. anyway, itsinteresting that the government seems to be tacilty encouraging thedemonstrations on one hand (to make japan look bad, and maybe tofocus attention on an external issue), whilst being careful to makesure they don't get too bad that they encourage other demonstrations(ie. against the chinese government). its rpetty obvious they arebeing lax though, since normally they would crack down instantly,and last weekend cars were being wrecked, embassies attacked andjapanese shops ransacked in shanghai and elsewhere.
the other interesting thing i learned is about a wordcalled 'pingde'. Some of you may know that recently UK introduceda 'citizenship' class into the national curriculum, so students knowa bit more about stuff like the law, ethics, voting etc. I am sureother countries have this too. Well the chiense have 'pingde' fromage 5-18, and it literally translates as 'morals/ethics'. Thats alot of classes on that subject. apparently a lot of it is based onstories etc from old times, Mao or whoever with a moral to them(like the bible really!)
Had my first KTV experience last friday night (karaoke), but not tooamazing since I slept through most of it (started at 1am, finishedat 5am)...I have to get up at 7am every morning and had not had abreak since conference, so i have an excuse (plus the room was toohot, and we had to wait an hour to get it)...maybe the next timewill be better. It was weird though that for the beatles songe,there were some 'imitation' videos involving a chinese 'lookalikeband' -classic! Sadly Ralph has now left; maybe I'll see him inIndia at International Congress...although I need to find a reasonto go! maybe an AIESEC CSR job could be the excuse...
tomorrow the whole class is going out for lunch, woohoo. we'll seeif I'll throttle the annoying old german lady (she wasted 45 mins ofmy revision time when she collared me on cmapus trying torevise!)..she is very nice and intelligent and quite a character,but sometimes...grrr
rightyo, better do some more revision, before teaching, dinnermeetings and then sorting out my tickets (and sleeping bag) to innermongolia (ooooh).
au revoir!
Adam
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