The holiday comes early...

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The cooler, wetter weather has begun to peek in on us every few days this week. Today, it was very rainy and windy but by Tuesday the temperature is supposed to be back up in the 30s. We are finally able to give our air-conditioners a little break for a bit.

Next Sunday, our National Holiday week begins. We have booked our flight to Hong Kong and reserved our 10 foot by 10 foot hotel room. It should be quite the experience. After several attempts to please the powers-that-be with our responses to the large number of students sick with the flu, the decision was made on Friday to close the school down for the coming week. That will give the sickies a chance to recover and hopefully prevent any more from becoming ill by being away from the rest for the next two weeks. We had a large number awsy with high fevers this week and it continued to worsen as the week went by. We still have to go to work all week but it gives us a chance to catch up and do lots of planning for the coming year.

Last night we continued our partying saga with a birthday party for Joe, followed by a night of clubbing and street food. Another 3 in the morning finish apparently resulted in many very tired puppies today. Luckily our planned bike trip was cancelled due to bad weather...however, I think that the driving ability of many probably wouldn't have been quite up to scratch after last night. Which brings me to another reflection...half the staff is buying scooters or motorcycles this year. Two purchased scooters last week and this past weekend another three have become proud owners of two-wheeled machines. Our scooter club is growing and our wannabe Wuhan-Tibet cross-country team is increasing in size each week. And all I said one day was, "Wouldn't it be cool to ride from Wuhan to Tibet next summer?" There are definitely some crazy ones around this year!

In between the parties, we managed a trip to Metro and Tailor Street again and I have attached a couple of photos of one of the shops. This is the first "shopping bus trip" we have been on this year. Every once in a while it is nice to stock up on stuff from the foreign section of the store (translation...North American and European food section). Never a dull moment...I was pushing my shopping cart around after picking up a few groceries including refried beans, kidney beans for chili, and a couple of cans of regular pork and beans, The locals often will peer into our carts to see what strange stuff we have purchased, actually I think they peer into each other's carts as well, now that I think about it. But Saturday took the cake. Not only did this older Chinese woman look into my cart, she actually picked up the cans of stuff one at a time trying to figure out what the hell they were, all the time babbling away in Chinese. I waited while she checked out the labels, trying to decipher what was in these strange cans. I got the impression she was not impressed by what she saw...soooorrrrryy! I tried to humour her while she was looking but she never lost her intense curious look, as she studied everything carefully and read the labels.

The only other news is that we sold our motorcycle in Canada this month, with mixed feelings. It gave us a lot of good times and over 60,000 km of North American road trips over the last five years but there was no point in keeping it for our brief summer visits. So that was the last of our stuff in Canada. Everything we own is now with us here!

Anyway, that is about it for now. Looking forward to some great photo ops in Hong Kong!

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