Lost In China

Well if you’re reading this thanks for being so patient. i couldn’t blog whilst I was in China as it was attached to Twitter and the CCP aren’t exactly fond of Google for Er…some reason. I’m flying back to China tomorrow but let me tell you a bit about my month in Zhuhai on the South Coast of China ; barely a spit away from Hong Kong.

I went at least partly to get a TEFL qualification as a sort of insurance, but really I wanted to see whether I could live there. Apparently some Westerners get on the first plane back, others tolerate China and some love it. I was in the latter category. 

For the first couple of days when I got there, I couldn’t quite place what was so very different from the West. Then I realised. Downtown Zhuhai, not a big city in Chinese terms makes London in the rush hour seem quiet. Everywhere there was noise. A constant hooting of car horns was the least of it. Every tiny little shop, and there are a lot of them, had what looked like a Marshall stack Amp (If you know what that is, it dates you) outside playing music. Usually bad American music. I say bad. That awful dirge from * Titanic * seemed to be polluting the air a lot of the time but occasionally sentimentality got the better of me. The school that I was at encouraged the kids to collectively sing Karaoke style in front of a screen to improve their colloquial English. One night whilst I was sitting in a bar near the school with some teaching colleagues I heard the strains of The Carpenter’s ” It’s yesterday once more”. To hear maybe 50 Chinese kids sing ” Every sha la la, every woa wo wo ” moved me immensely. Or perhaps it was just the beer…..