Monica the update-deliquant strikes again! How has it been a month since I posted last? Aiya! I say that a lot these days, aiya, it's a fantastic chinese expression I've picked up from the kids and I absolutely love it! Anyways, so what's new with me...well I just spent the weekend in Beijing, how great is that?! I love that it's like, oh what should I do today...maybe I'll just pop over to Hong Kong, or maybe I'll fly up to Beijing, which one haven't I done in a while? It's so cool! So anyways, I climbed the Great Wall on China on Saturday, super fun but a whole lot of stairs! The Chinese love stairs. Forget dirt paths or rustic trails up a mountain, no, they'd rather climb stairs. And then once you're on the wall it's all just 3 stairs down, 10 stairs up, 5 stairs down, 7 stairs up, etc. So we didn't cover a lot of distance on the wall, but it was a solid 30 minute climb up to it in the first place. The view was spectacular, the mountains, the trees, and we could see the wall for miles in each direction. All in all one of the best experiences yet in China! We also visited Tiananmen Square and saw the Forbidden city, not the most exciting places but definately tourist destinations! There were more groups of Chinese seniors than I could count! It's great watching all these Chinese omas and opas in their brightly coloured tour group hats following their tour guide who's carrying some outlandish flag. It provided some good laughs anyways. We also hit up the Beijing zoo and the aquarium. Chimelong here in Guangzhou was way better zoo-wise, but the dolphin show at the aquarium was fun. There are pictures up on the pictures page if you care to have a gander.
Otherwise what have I been doing for the past month? Geez, I don't even know! May holiday was nice and relaxing. I finished up the school yearbook which is now off at the publishers, thank goodness that is over! I think I'm cursed to be in charge of the yearbook at any school I work at! I can't seem to escape it, so I figure I may as well embrace it and make the best of it. The time I didn't spend at my computer was spent outside at the pool enjoying the beautiful Guangzhou weather. The sun has since left us and now we are back to rain and cloud and stickiness again, I won't miss the humidity, not one little bit! I got evicted from my bedroom a week and a half ago by a nasty swarm of cockroaches who decided to make my bed their final resting ground. This is the unfortunate part of a first floor apartment. I have a sewer drain on my back patio and one day I came home from work to find my patio literally crawling with cockroaches, it was disgusting! I've never seen so many insects in one place at one time! And to make it worse, they were flooding in through my air conditioner and landing on my bed right below, but the thing is I spray my air conditioner with raid regularly, so as they crawlled through they got posioned and then lay twitching in my room for hours before they died. This was my worst night in China, hands down! So I slept on my couch for a week and then I took off to Beijing and now that I'm back, the rain has washed all the roaches off my patio and I cleaned up all the carcasses from my room before I left and no more have turned up so last night I slept in my bed again and how wonderful was that! To that end, I love the rain and I hope it keeps up because at least it keeps the cockroaches away! And what else...I got a job in Winnipeg for next year. I'm going to be teaching math and science at MBCI (grades 9 & 10 science, grade 12 consumer). That's exciting. I'm starting to get very bummed about leaving China, the count down to coming home is starting to depress me. Much like the homesickness I felt when I first arrived, I just feel this heavy sadness when I look at everything around me here. I love my little apartment, my disfunctional classrooms, my adorable students, my wonderful collegues, our beautiful Clifford Estates, the wet market where I buy live chickens, the restaurants where I eat eel and crocodile and 100 year old eggs, the crazy little tuk tuks that don't feel safe to ride in, the shopping, oh how I'm going to miss the shopping, the fantastic mandarin language which I'm finally getting a really good handle on, and the metropolis of Guangzhou that I've finally started to navigate by myself. I feel like I've just settled into life here and now I have to uproot myself and move again, and while I'm thrilled by the prospect of everything next year has in store, it is with a heavy heart that I'm going to be leaving China. And that's where I'm at. Emotions are running high these days, but life is darn good!