Doesn't everyone climb the school gates?

That budget completely went to pot. It’s a good job we’re not actually short of money! I decided on Friday evening that we should do something, nothing big as I had kindergarten the next morning. We hit upon the idea of having a few drinks in a jazz bar. So Isobel and I set off in a taxi and after 5 minutes we saw a group of incredibly familiar people standing on a street corner. I successfully managed to explain to the driver that we had seen our friends and could he turn around… in Chinese!!! Impressive. Turns out they were stood on the corner because they couldn’t decide which way Nanhai Plaza was. We pointed them in the right direction and ambled along with them. They were looking for a cinema, gave up and went to McDonald’s instead. They didn’t want to come to a bar with us but Mike showed up and off we went. After a while in the bar, he said Aaron was over in a different club and did we want to go. Naturally, we went. We were talking to lots of Chinese people and we named the bouncer, who later declared that he loved me…. as you do. I left my cardigan there too. Maybe one of the guys will collect it for me. It became a rather late night, resulting in another episode of clambering over the school gates. We should probably stop doing that at some point. They do have CCTV after all. I completely overslept on Saturday and was woken by an incessant ringing of my phone and relentless knocking at my door. True typical Seòna style, I was late. So I rushed out of bed and down to the classroom in less than 5 minutes but the only problem with this was that I was still half asleep and thus my body didn’t take very well to being vertical. I’m quite well acquainted now with knowing when I’m about to faint (it was fairly common when I worked at the airport) so I sat myself down and explained to the assistant. She went off to get some sweets and to see if Isobel would take over. Whilst she was gone the children came to see if I was OK and fetched me glasses of water. Such sweetie pies. It’s a fair point that had I not had a late night I would probably have been fine but then again it’s just lack of sleep and I do that regularly. I blame the fact that I am not in full health. I think Izzie passed on her illness back to me. Not fun in the slightest. Needless to say we did very little for the rest of the weekend except do some shopping (our most expensive one yet I believe, like I said, what happened to the budget?) Further to my progress in Chinese, I had a text conversation with Mike (an intern from last year so his Chinese is pretty good) in Chinese characters. Hahaha I was extremely impressed with myself. Ok so it was a very basic conversation and I did eventually confuse ‘we’ with ‘mine’ but I am still proud of myself. 我能写中文.我是英文老使. Yes I do actually understand what that says ‘wo neng xie zhongwen. Wo shi yingwen laoshi’[. I can write Chinese. I am an English teacher] Ah the pride! We have done a fair amount of cooking this weekend. We experimented with our rice cooker. We can cook more than rice, we can use it to boil almost anything!! If we could find stock cubes, I’d make a soup. I will be a master of boiled food by the time I return. Today has been fairly uneventful so far but we are going out later to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Isobel is Irish after all!