Camilla

On the last weekend before the course ended a group of students were taken away for the weekend by Jerry the Dean, Mrs Chen, overseas students co-ordinator and a number of other office staff. We hired two cars and drove about 6 hours north of Nanning to Longshen, the most beautiful mountainous region north of Guillin. Lonshen is a minority group area with traditional villages, like the 'Village of the Long Haired Women'! It is up in the mountains and absolutley spectacular. We stayed at a village called Pingan, high up in the mountains and only accessible by foot. Truely one of the most amazing places I have ever seen with terraced rice fields all the way up the steep mountains sides. The next night we stayed in another village famous for its natural hot spings. ... read more

Hi everyone, Thanks to all of you who have left a message - its great to hear from you and feel connected to back home. Well i thought I'd better report back on some of the more serious aspects of the trip in case anyone was getting the impression that all we do here is eat and drink at resturants, dance on bar tops and sing karaoke. The rest of the time we actually work in the different hospitals that are connected to the university. For the first 2 weeks, my group: Mitch, Jon and I were all sent to Hospital No. 1. Now these hospitals are TCM hospitals, they incorporate Western Medicine into a mainly TCM framework....well at least thats the impression I got after 2 weeks. We were stationed in the acupuncture in-patients ward. ... read more

Our second weekend in Nanning was celebrated by a huge night out, possible a little too huge as it was around this time that everyone started getting sick with flu and bad chest infections. The night started in Felicity's room with vodka and warm juice drunk from tea cups. We had our 2 interpretors Ling and Simon along for the ride as well as two soccer buddies Mitch had befriended. Wicked, a night out with the locals is always good. The club we were taken to was a place called "Feeling 57"....(the clubs have some pretty interesting names)! From what i have seen most clubs around here have a similar set up. There are lots of tables throughout the club which you need to sit at in order to get drinks. There is no going up ... read more

One week has gone so fast yet at the same time it feels like i have lived in China for years. We have all settled in really well to our dorm....its the foreign students building on campus at the Guangxi TCM Medical University. Its been updated since the last students from ACNM came over and now has flushing toilets, sweet. Actually the rooms are really nice, much better than i was expecting. I and most of the Brisbane crew live on the top floor, level four. The rooms are like big hotel rooms with TV (only Chinse, very bad acting), phone (so you can all phone me), desk, kettle etc with own bathroom and they get cleaned once a day just like a hotel too. Not bad after seeing the dorms were the local students live, ... read more