Hello UK

So, for all of you who think I fell off the world somewhere East of Riga here I am safe and sound in Wuhu, China.
Whilst I was in Moscow at the beginning of August trying to catch up on the blog for St. Petersburg the blog site I use suffered a main server attack and the whole database crashed. I lost most of my blogs and still haven't been able to find them in a cache. Since then internet access has been very unreliable and slow when available at all, so I haven't attempted to write anything else.
We have now been in Wuhu for a month and are settling into our new home. This week we have some time off for National week and I feel I have time to get back to writing. I'll bring the blog up to date eventually on St. Petersburg, Moscow, Trans -Siberian Express, Beijing, DPRK and Shanghai but for now a bit about our new home town.
Wuhu has a population of about 1 million and every guide book that bothers to mention it is scathing.
They're wrong. Wuhu is proving to be the perfect place to see ordinary China. The city centre is lively and bustling but small enough to find your way around easily. There are probably 300 foreigners in Wuhu, two thirds of them Japanese and Korean but that still leaves about 100 westerners. We aren't such an amazing sight and most days you see someone around town western (other than the people we work with). The local people are generally friendly, all wanting to try out their limited English on you. Even the ones who have no English are eager to help you with smiles and gestures. You do get stared at but not in a hostile way, people seem genuinely curious about how different we look.
We are living on the top floor of afive storey apartment block. We have two double bedrooms, a study, lounge, bathroom and kitchen. There is also a glassed in balcony that we use to dry washing just like the locals. In fact I think we are lucky to be living in the community as opposed to in the school dorms. The dorms are lovely and you do have the benefit of being closer to town and having office facilities on site but we get to see more of the town. There are 88 steps up to our flat and no lift! (and no lighting on the stairs at night) The language school (Aston) is about a half an hour walk from the flat but we can take a 1 yuan(7p) bus or a 5 yuan (35p) taxi to get there. About 70% of the cars on the road are taxis so no problem there. Aston is on the 6th floor (116 steps and no lift) so we are keeping quite fit. I've lost two stone since we left the UK and all Russ's trousers are hanging off him. (More about the food here in another blog but just to give you an idea a speciality here is deep fried duck head complete with beak!!)
There are seven English experts (who are they kidding?) here at the moment. Three of them are young part-time exchange teachers and three full- time teachers. The other guy does marketing in the office and covers lessons when needed. We have another part-time teacher arriving from America next week so we are all hoping our work load will ease. The part-time teachers do 10 hours teaching and 9 hours of Mandarin lessons. The full- time teachers work for 20 hours and get 3 hours of Mandarin. However, by the time you add on the travelling between lessons and all the lesson planning we probably do a 40 hour week! We did three days of training then got thrown in the deep end with real lessons. Russell has 12/13 year olds during the week at a local middle school (the dreaded Middle 11 school). I do kindergarten, business college and engineering college during the week. We both teach two adult evening classes during the week and both have a full weekend schedule in Aston teaching anything from 6-adult. I never thiought it would be easy but wow!
I think we have settled in Ok and things are easier now the weather has dropped to the mid 20's. Will try to keep up the blog now I've started again. Here's looking forward to Autumn in China.

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