For the long weekend, Humphrey, Dave and I decided to make a trip to the ancient Chinese capital of Nanjing for a weekend trip. The motto of the trip was definitely “bad luck, good times”. It seemed like bad luck just kept following us. But somehow it didn’t deter from how much fun Nanjing is. So that’s a good sign! But ya, baaad luck. Read on! We headed to the train station the morning of Saturday, June 23 to get our tickets for the little-more-than-an-hour-long trip. First, there weren’t trains for about an hour. Boo waiting! Second, executive class was all booked up so we “slummed” it in first class. Dave didn’t understand why we complained so much about the wide, plush seats and slew of European cabin-mates. It just wasn’t as nice as executive class! ... read more

Appologies once again to my loyal followers - I have been very busy visiting Shanghai and Nanjing and I haven't had time to blog. I wanted to get a top 10 in before the week ended but I didn't have an actual list prepared so I decided to be inspired by a little game my friends and I invented while in Nanjing. See, drinking on the streets is totally legal in China so we grabbed some beers from the local convenience store and drank every time we saw one of these hilarious yet ubiquitous things while walking around: 1. Couple with matching shirts 2. The three-seconds or more stare. We decided to put a time limit because it's not as big of a deal if someone just walking towards you stares. It's when that stare just ... read more

The morning of Friday, June 15th we had our last meeting at the Hai Ning city planning department. There were lots of maps and documents being passed around. I did some intense Chinese studying. In the afternoon, we headed back to Jiaxing, a neighbouring county, to see how the cities compared to the ones in Haining. They were definitely nicer. It was a fun little trip. We got to see the world's longest bridge which is almost finished and which crosses the Qiantang river. It's 32km long! I decided to have my own movie night in my room that night. I watched "Lost in Translation" which pretty much sums up my life in Hai Ning. And kind of in China in general. I killed myself laughing. Saturday, June 16th we spent the morning back at the ... read more

The afternoon of June 12th I did indeed find my co-workers and I went with them to a meeting with city officials. It had some interesting maps but other than that I was lost. I used the time to study my Chinese. That's the one good thing about these meetings -they force me to study Chinese. Because my hotel room is my sanctuary of English so I find it hard to be motivated to look at Chinese. I also came up with the hilarious idea to create a Chinese drinking game where I select a few Chinese words that I understand and drink whenever they're said. First, I need to aquire some alcohol. Some possible words are you, meiyou, yao, buyao (Jeff's favourite word!!), women, nimen...there are lots of words that are said a lot and ... read more

After the Forbidden City, I headed to CAUPD to meet up with my co-workers to head to the airport for our trip to Hai Ning. After we were checked in at the airport, my supervisor took me into the first-class lounge which had fresh fruit juice and REAL toilets with soap and toilet paper. It was so exciting. We boarded the plane around 5pm for an anticipated 5:15 departure. But then shortly after getting on the plane we were told we’d be delayed half an hour due to weather conditions. I guess in Beijing smog counts as a “weather condition”. Luckily I am reading a really engrossing book series so I just kept reading. Then we were told we’d be served dinner…all before taking off. Two hours later, we finally took off. It was such a ... read more