I'm ready for my close-up...

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In 2 weeks I (+ 2 friends + 1 friend's boyfriend) will be in Tibet, probably cursing myself on why I didn't pick Hainan (an island, south of China, where it's warm), but hopefully not!

The Spring Festival is the big holiday here in China, I guess it's equivalent to Christmas as it's the lead up to Chinese New Year, except unlike Christmas where you only get Christmas Day and New Year's Day off - if you're lucky - here, most people get about 3 weeks, and us lucky teachers get nearly 6!

A surreal thing happened to me last Sunday. My friends and I have a saying 'only in China....'. Here you can end up doing something in the afternoon which you never IMAGINED you would be doing when you woke up that morning! And these things happen pretty frequently! Anyway Sunday afternoon my flatmate and I went to a friend's bar to pay for our Tibet tickets - this guy has contacts and can get you good deals. While we were there, he introduced us to his friend (Chinese name Leo) and Leo told us his brother-in-law was doing a photoshoot for a furniture catalogue in a couple of hours, and needed some foreigners to model, and the pay was 500 RMB each (not a lot in pounds, but it's a good deal if your salary is 3500 RMB a month, like ours is!). So, we went, along with this other foreign guy who was at the bar. We were bundled into a posh VW and driven to a warehouse outside the city, where we ended up for 5 hours (it was bloody freezing as there's no heating indoors here, as I've probably complained about before!), shooting dining room, living room, bedroom scenes etc. It was hilarious, especially the bedroom scene where my 'husband' was considering which shirt to wear and I had to pose in 'hmm I wonder...?' poses, and 'I'm just doing the button of your shirt...' poses...this was made even more embarrassing by the fact that I only met this guy a few hours before....but a few (freezing) hours later, we set off back to the city 500 RMB richer! We are getting sent a copy of the photos, and hopefully the catalogue too, so that'll be a laugh! I will put them up on this blog asap!

So that was my excitement for the weekend. It partially made up for the fact that I was dragged out of my lessons on Friday and told to go home as it was an 'emergency', there was a leak, and not to leave my flat. I went home. No emergency. No one at all in fact, until 5 hours later when someone popped his head round the door, took one look at our leaking bathroom ceiling, and buggered off. Since then, the damp patch on our living room wall and hall as been growing by the hour, but is anyone bothered? Erm, no. We'll wait til it caves in I guess!

So I'm counting the days til our holiday (19th Jan onwards)...meanwhile I'll do some practising of poses for my next photoshoot.....

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