Marlies goes China

Published September 13th, 2006 by Mliesie

Another ordinary day…

Time flies by when you’re having fun. Yeah, right! I really have a hard time remembering what I did the last couple of days….. Saturday we went to the local nursery to buy plants for our flats ( Kate, Ellie & I) to make it more of a home. We spent more than than 2 hours, trying to make sense of what the people there were telling us about the plants and making the proper choice…..which we managed! Later that day, Ruby ( a Chinese colleague in the English department, an absolute sweetheart!) came by with her friend Yang Meifen, who will be my Chinese teacher here. She wants to learn Englih, so we seem to be a perfect match.

Thanks to Val, one of my VSO-colleagues, I found out that it was Ellie’s birthday and we were to have dinner at her place without giving her a presten???!!! No way! I immediately phoned Kate, and fortunately she had some students over and off we went to the ceramics market to buy her an original Chinese tea-set. Both Kate and I actually wanted one as well!!! So, back again to Ellie’s, to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and give her a big hug…. The dinner she cooked was wonderful (curry!!!) and our Waiban and his wife and son were also present. The waiban got Ellie a very colourful birthday cake with edible candles, after he found out it was her birthday, we sang happy birthday again (also in Chinese!!!) and had a wonderful evening. Mr Gao and his wife even danced around the room. But as all good things come to an end, so did this and Kate and I ended up in the kitchen doing the dishes while Ellie spoke to her mum and brother via Skype (long live internet!).

On Sunday Kate took me for a wonderful walk through the cornfields and ‘desert’ of Yulin and we also visited an enormous temple in a village, just outside Yulin. We decided to take the bus back into town and just sat aside the road until a bus (no. 9) came by and picked us up. Much better than looking for a busstop….. While preparing dinner for Kate and Ellie, Mr Gao unexpectedly dropped in with a new TV-cabinet (the other one he thought too small…), and a bag of goodies: oil, stinky dofu (no not sticky….stinky!) and seet&sour rice. It was Teachers’ Day, but I (or we, actually) hadn’t expected this to happen. Kate got a new TV-cabinet as well and Ellie got a new table with 8 (!!!) chairs. I guess they expect to have more dinners at her house?? As you can imagine, my dinner with Ellie and Kate kind of went up in smoke as we were all tied up with workmen putting our furniture together…. An interesting day again.

Furthermore, nothing special really. Preparing lessons, lunch with students (I wish I could show you the kitchen the food came from……but the food was great!), shopping in the local shops and on the local market (I am learning to bargain!!) where people start to regognise us , sorting out AAAAALL the DVDs and VCDs the English department has, meeting the freshmen in English Corner (I definitely have a challenge ahead…..), out for dinner with Ruby, and to my surprise, just now, as I am writing this, a 4th year student called me, saying she wants to meet me to chat with me…. I DID agree, but I do not hope all the students want to do this, as a day only has 24 hours to it and I very much appreciate my bed. Well, as you can see there’s enough going on here and I haven’t even mentioned the way I do my laundry and the fact that I put up some great posters of Holland and………..that’s for another time to tell.  

     Happy Birthday Ellie!!

From left to right: Kate, Gao Yi Buo, Ellie, Mr Gao’s wife, Mr Gao (our waiban)

See ya!

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