milk man...

Well yesterday was ok; found out early morning it was our last day teaching at the middle school!!! Actually a little sad about that! Anyway it all seemed to go well, I have to admit though, iv never seen anything like it before in my life, when I was at school, we used to play up, and maybe push too far for some of the teachers to handle but here its all amplified by about 5000! They just literally do what they like, and the teachers do and say nothing! I think sometimes the teachers looked at me strangely when I told the students to be quite, but I don’t understand how they can teach anything with half the class hanging from the ceiling and the other half asleep! I do think its because all the schooling here consists of listening to the teacher and not actually doing much work themselves! Everything is centred around the exams and nothing else, so it doesn’t matter that the students have no clue about what any of it means as long as they can remember an answer to a question it relates to they will pass the exam. I also found out that for their English exam, they have to write 100 words, I don’t know what about, I suppose about themselves, the only problems with this is they cant actually say the words they write. They can spell better then me but if they had the read out a sentence from a book or even something they had written themselves over half of them cannot say it! So after our final day at the middle school, we made our way back to the college. After spending an hour talking to jasmine and deciding what to do today we went to get some dinner. It was Chinese food, wasn’t amazing but wasn’t bad either! I’m not losing weight though, which is very annoying! Had an image of my coming home really skinny due to lack of nice food, but know iv somehow worked around this and managed to stuff as much in as possible!! Had a really early night too, was in bed for half 8!!! Think I need it after all the super early starts. So today has been good too, we went to the factory where we got the milk fabric from for our first project in 2nd year! They make fabric from natural fibres such as milk, coffee beans, silk, soybeans, pearl and so many other things I can’t remember them all! They also use natural dying processes, so they use pomegranate and other fruits and food to dye the fabric with some amazing results! They showed us many samples of the different fabrics, showed us around the factory there its all made, from the dying lab, to the places where they dry and iron the fabric too!!

They also sprung a unexpected thing onto us, they want us to design a wedding dress and an outfit for a groom, who is one of their clients! As much as I like designing, wedding dresses ant my thing… it should be interesting to say the least, I really wanted to say no sorry I don’t have time, but they make it very hard, especially when they do so much to make you feel welcome. So I will be contacting my tutors about this one…. It’s even harder as there is the obvious communication problem too! So you are never sure if what they are saying is really what they mean. We will have to wait and see how this goes…! They also took us for dinner, in which I thought I ordered pizza (this is the reason I’m not losing weights) thinking the usual cheese and tomato, but no this was fruit pizza, so apple and banana on a pizza base with cheese on top, have to say it wasn’t the worst thing iv tried since I arrived but it wasn’t the best either, I wouldn’t choose to have it again put it that way!

Had a relaxing day today. tonight we went to the hair dressers in thought of getting our hair washed, ended up being there till mid-night, going from red to bright red to ginger to blonde back to ginger then to brown! have to admit tho, if your in china go and get your hair done! Its amazing they are tons better then english salons, you get a head and shoulder massage, get treated like a queen and if your hungry they order you food :)! and tomorrow we go shanghai for 3 days!!!!! Super exciting! We have it all planned out and 3 days of 7am starts and all day looking around the city! Can’t wait!!! New posts soon…. Toddle pip!