Hi Everyone,

We just got back end of last week from a trip to the coast to a place called Beidaihe had a nice time but it was a really long drive over 3 hours each way and "wacky races" all the way haha.There was 11 of us in 3 cars me and Jun in ours with nyarene a woman who is  87 years old from New Zealand and still travelling the world on her own she is a real character full of great stories.She lived in china from 1947 till 1951 leaving when the communists took over, she started a school with our friend Lung,s grandfather, she has also asked us to go out  to visit her and stay at her home Lung and his wife have been and said it,s amazing a huge house overlooking the sea on the outskirts of Auckland apparently she is very wealthy and still drives her own car ( lexus),so who knows we might get a cheap holiday haha.
It was nice to walk down to the beach and see the sea again, I spotted a woman stood in the water staring out to sea in a wedding dress i took some photos of her, then she walked back to a 4x4 so we went up to her and showed her the photos her husband was at the back of the motor with a makeshift darkroom set up and we got talking he is a professional photographer for one of chinas main newspapers and has had exhibitions both in China and Paris.He is currently doing a project using old fashioned glass plate photos and showed me some that he had just taken of his wife (thats why she was in a wedding dress in the sea) they were amazing and sell for upto 1,000 pounds each.Anyway we have swapped numbers as they live in Beijing and they suggested we meet up some time.There website is www.dijinjun.com if you would like to see some of his work. 
On the night we went to a really famous restaraunt (famous that is for its sea food) so it made no difference to me,the next morning we drove about 35 km up the coast to where the great wall starts, you might remember it from Karl Pilkingtons "An idiot abroad" the wall just goes out about 20 meters into the sea and Karl said "what use is that the invaders will just roll up their trousers and wade around it" or words to that effect haha. The car in the front had sat nav and on the way it took us right through the city centre and all the old areas of Qinhuaningdao it was a nightmare driving Lung said that was the roads from when he went there as a kid on holiday I said I think it,s the same roads Marco Polo used as well haha.It was very busy there with it being the holidays but it was worth going, they were charging 10 pound to go in and including a short boat trip but we said no and just visited the wall for 5 pound. Even the road from Beijing to Beidaihe was a toll road and cost us 12 pound each way a lot of money to pay to play russian roulette haha  ( we will go by train next time).We checked the news on Saturday for Friday the last day of the holidays and in one day  in this province alone 57 people died on the roads. And the following day a coach taking 55 students back to Uni in the next city to Beijing crashed,apparently the driver was having some kind of "duel" with a car driver when he lost control of the bus and it went over on its right side onto the steel crash barrier and skidded along for 200 meteres with the barrier cutting through it like a knife 35 of the students died.We saw some photos taken of the bus on a blog site as well as one photo of dead students scattered all over the road,It was really awful I just don,t understand why the Gov,t doesn,t do anything to change peoples driving habits eg stiffer penalties, driving bans.
 

Hi,Everyone

I started teaching 3 young women english the other week it was a good class and I enjoyed it,but they did not come back for another lesson, the school said they couldn,t all agree the same day and time as they shared the cost of the lesson. I am sure it is quite expensive for them although when it comes to their children money is no object and getting their children into the best nurseries is all down to bribes/backhanders etc.Anyway I have another class today with a young man so I will see how that goes. 

We went away over night the other thursday to the mountains north of Beijing about 3 hours drive spent a night in a guest house in the mountains had an evening meal at a farmers/smallholding house very basic but lovely food and very nice people.Up early the next morning got the motorboat across the lake then went for a hike then continued the car journey for another 30 minutes to a white water rafting centre and had a go on the river, got soaked of course haha.

  Jun had been told the other day at work that she might have to go on a 2 week training course down in Shanghai, that would have been a test for me living alone here for 2 weeks, or I was going to go down there and just see her some nights and the weekends and stay in another hotel but thankfully she got out of it but they said next year she will have to do it.

Another company got in touch with us the other week and wanted me to travel to other areas of China and give talks in English about their pharmaceutical products which were either genuine american products or copies, not sure which. But what they wanted from me was to pretend I represented the american company and they said they would pay all my expenses,travel, hotels and 10 pound an hour, I said no to which they then said ok we will pay you 15 as if it was only a case of paying enough,they really couldn,t understand why someone would refuse.

Jun is busy these days she has started to make soaps,lipstick,hand and body creams at home and already a lot of people at her workplace have tried some and placed orders with her. 

We went out the other sunday afternoon for a meal as it was the moon festival it was a lovely place we went to, we were driving in a really run down area then did a right turn and went through a security gate into these huge grounds of hotels, restaraunts, parks,lake,streams, you just wouldn,t believe it could be in that area, thats the land of contrasts for you.While we were sat in the waiting area for a table there was 2 young boys in the restaraunt really misbehaving and the parents were only making half hearted attemts to stop them then they started throwing the cushions about and one hit Jun I jumped up and shouted really loud "Bu, Gola" (No, Enough) you should have seen their faces they froze haha ,the parents ran out of the cubicle they were in and I let them know what they had done then they took them away , they just don,t seem to discipline their children at all and as it is one child policy they tend to be quite spoilt and are growing up to be very self centred as are a lot of 20/30 year olds now who are the result of this same policy which came into effect in the1980,s.Having  said that in general the children here are the most polite of anywhere in the world.

 The company which manages our complex introduced a new waste collection system the other week, previously each apartment block had a large brick built bin and all the rubbish went into it.Now we have had them removed and have 3 different wheelie bins for each apartment block each for different items, but I have yet to see anyone using them correctly they just continue to throw their rubbish in any bin,the company now have staff that go around each evening sorting the bins out before the morning collection,very strange, a lot of them dont seem to grasp the idea of (or care) about the environment,but I am sure it will all eventually change.

We have a milkman who delivers to us now he fitted a small metal box on the wall outside the apartment for the bottles I call him the midnight milkman as he doesn,t deliver till anywhere between 4-6pm haha.

Oh here,s a good joke going about Beijing now,There was a chinese politician driving his car and with him was an american politician and they came to a fork in the road with a signpost saying left to communism and right to capitalism the american turned to the chinese and said " well which way do you want to go" to which the chinese man replied "we will go right,but I will keep my left indicator on".

 
  

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Hi Everyone,
Hope this e mail finds you well and in good health,as we are here at what could be 'fingers crossed" the start of Autumn, it is certainly becoming a little cooler on the evenings (lovely).I have been quite busy these last 2 weeks teaching it seems all the parents want their children to brush up their English before returning to school at start of September so i am at classes in the morning then again late afternoon.I timed myself walking to work this week from leaving the apartment to walking into the education centre its 7 minutes thats nearly as good as working from home haha.
There are some real characters among the children one of them is a 11 year old boy called garry who looks about 6 small,thin, large glasses, he is so bright he has already told me he is going to MIT university in the USA and i believe him, whenever I show him something or explain he says "OK" or "I know" even if he doesn,t haha.I took some lateral thinking puzzles in the other day and he got everyone of them right in no time at all,whenever the children give me an answer if it,s right I praise them and even if it,s wrong i would say something positive as feedback,so after Garry answered these puzzles he brought one in for me the next day and i thought about it for awhile and i thought i had found the answer so I gave it to him and he looked at me over his glasses and with a very serious expression said "Thats a very good answer but it is not the right one". Well i just about fell out of my chair laughing the tears were streaming down my face.
We went back to the western hills area the other weekend near to that village restaraunt I mentioned in a previous e mail,we visited Tanzhe temple that time so this time we went to the other one that is close by called Jietai temple which looks more like a fortress stretching right up a huge hillside a good walk up the many terraces a really beautiful serene place with hardly any visitors famous for its dragon trees 1,000 years old, I think most go to the more popular Tanzhe temple.We couldn,t walk around the whole temple it was to large and to hot.Then we went back to the village restaraunt and spent the rest of the day there lying in hammocks under the large trees listening to crickets and birds.Oh just to mention the usual driving updates on this day we were driving there on the expressway (think M1) I was in the middle lane and I passed a man in the fast outside lane reversing his car I only knew as i approached because i spotted his white reversing light on,he was i think reversing back to the last exit which was a good way back.And last week we had to travel to the north side of beijing and it seemed like everyone that day was driving really badly ( full moon as well) I started getting angry and upset as well the futher we drove, at one point i went into the inside lane ready to exit and a car joining the expressway came at me from the right at the same time a car on my left was coming into my lane neither would give way or slow down so I had to break hard to let them both ahead then the car behind me started blowing his horn and flashing his lights the car and van that were now ahead were still both not giving way to each other, utter madness.The really sad part to it all was that on the news the next day 40 minutes after we exited our turn off a van stopped there in the emergency lane to fix a puncture with 5 people in it and another van racing down the emergency lane to overtake  crashed into them killing 3 and  seriously injuring the other 2.
We spent a half day on a lake in one of the bigger parks near to where we live in a battery powered boat two weekends ago it was a lovely day there were little islands scattered about the lake and as we went around one there was a young woman with 2 children stranded on the bank in their boat waving to us looking very embarrassed the children didn,t know if they were more frightened of being stuck or this big foreigner bearing down on them at 2knots haha I managed to get them off and said to Jun under maritime law i should claim that boat as salvage haha.
The next day we visited chairman mao,s collective farm but most of it was closed and the parts that were not looked very run down,they had a very large restaraunt /museum all about mao even a life size model of part of his home village the food (all grown on the farm) was really delicious.
  

Hi Everyone,

The weather is now in the middle 30's each day so we have not been going out to much at the weekend, sitting at home with the air con on just going out in the evening and on top of that I have caught a cold (in this weather). The mosquitos made a meal of me the other night so we have put the net up now around the bed it looks like one of them old fashioned four posters.I was woken up at about 2am today and for a moment I thought I was back at sea in the navy, the wind was howling through the open windows,curtains flapping wildly ornaments falling , heavy rain, thunder like the blitz and the apartment nearly lit up constantly by the lightning.It was like something out of an apocalyptic vision It was some thunderstorm, then at 7am when we got up it was back to blistering sunshine like it had never happened.Oh another thing we have every night is the frogs croaking and I mean really croaking they sound like them old football wooden rattles that the fans used to spin around haha.
I have had to turn work down recently they were offering me to much,I finished the editing of the manga book last week and that has gone to the printers and the english teaching is now 1 boy 2 hours a week one to one, also 1 girl the same then a class of 6 for 1.5 hours a week I am starting another young boy on 1 hour a day for 2 weeks before he sits an exam.I told the school I would see what I wanted to do when I get back at end of July,but i think i will be happy just doing some more one to ones . It was nice to be told by the school that the parents had told them that their children really liked my lessons (Or is that  just the school trying to get me to do more haha).
The head office of the Beijing customs is a huge new building in the city centre it has it's own hotel,restaraunt,bar I have been to visit it with Jun a couple of times and the last time Jun took me to see it's own state of the art olympic swimming pool and gym and told me how they got it.Apparently the head of the customs wanted to have it installed when the building was at the planning stage but feared there might be a backlash when people found out how the tax payers money was being spent so it was approved under the heading of fire prevention as a self sufficient fire system and back up.It must be the worlds biggest fire extinguisher haha.
We went for a meal last week with some of Juns friends from work and one of them called Lung works in the police department of the customs and we were talking about crime here compared to the west and how I felt there was a lot less in china and it seems a lot safer.He then told me that in 2008 when the olympics where here he and others where following a gang of drug dealers undercover (mainly nigerians),who when they realized they were being followed opened fire on them and he and the others returned fire he dishcharged his gun 4 times at them but was really happy he didn,t hit anyone and that was the first time it had got that serious for him and made him realize how things were changing here.

Hi Everyone,
I hope this e mail finds you all well and in good health,as we are here in (very hot)Beijing the average temp for last 2 weeks has been about 27.
We placed a couple of adverts on the internet and in the magazine "The Beijinger" 2 weeks ago offering my services as a English teacher and/or proof reader, editor of translated into English documents,within 1 day I was contacted by 2 schools and 1 publishing company and then the same evening when out for a walk we passed a private teaching company named "The glory teaching centre" and they had an advertisement in the office asking for teachers. So we went in and arranged to have an interview the following morning Saturday,after which they offered me 2 classes teaching conversational English one to adults one to children and asked if I wanted more as they were looking for people to go to local companies and teach their staff.I said no to that and reminded them I was retired and only wanting a few hours,they offered me £10 a hour which I accepted and agreed 2 hours for each group.
The first class with the 5 adults on the Monday night was not to good,  they had given me a copy of the topic on the Saturday that they said the class had been given the previous week titled "Natural Disasters",which they are supposed to read and study in order that they can then converse with me on the subject after struggling for over an hour (their English was not as good as the company had led me to believe) they said it was to hard that they did not understand and had just been given the topic the previous day. I asked them to pick a topic,they said food,I said ok start talking to me about food,one of them said "what,s your favourite food "? The students cancelled the next week.Then the one with the children was cancelled as there were not enough, but I was given 2 hours a week on a one to one with a 12 year old boy which is going well.
I have also signed a contract with the publishing company and they gave me my first book to proof read and edit it's a 200 page instructional book on how to draw Japanese Manga translated from Japanese into Chinese then English haha (quite a bit of work in that one).I have to have it completed by 1st June that pays £10 for every 1,000 words whether edited or not.
What else I have I done?Oh yes we drove upto the Western Hills on Sunday and visited the eight Buddhist Temples there,two of which were for nuns only and one of them was well known for it,s tea so we sat on a balcony enjoying the tea at £8 a pot.The whole area was extremely busy with visitors and very commercial even driving up the road towards them we were  stuck in traffic and other drivers were overtaking us then they were stuck facing the traffic coming down so no one was going anywhere,lots of horns honking, people shouting ( me included haha).What was not nice to see were the people outside the entrances with all kinds of animals for sale in overcrowded cages and sweltering heat.It's quite common to see some animals for sale as it's traditional to buy them and release them,but that was not the case here.
Also been to the Imax screen to see the film about the  space shuttle and hubble telescope in 3d that was incredible especially when you felt like you were going through the galaxies.
A last little story, I was at the hospital yesterday to see the doctor as I have been feeling tired,losing a bit of weight plus some aches and pains ect.We were, of course there all morning, I noticed some elderley people carrying little stools,benches with them,then I realized why whenever we were in a line they would promptly sit down,they know all about waiting .The best one was when I finally got into the room to see the doctor I was sat there and she was asking me lots of question while taking my blood pressure,looking at my throat,writing it all down in my medical book, and I looked around and there were 4 complete strangers obviously waiting there turn to see a doctor who had just walked into the room and were stood watching it all and leaning over my shoulder to read my notes and no one said or did anything,very strange.I then had to go and have a blood test done we walked into a large room and there were some girls behind what looked like a post office counter you joined one of the lines and then gave them the doctors notes rolled up your sleeve stuck your arm through the glass opening and they took the blood gave you a lump of cotton to hold over the puncture and as you walked away the next person stuck their arm through haha.
 

Hi Everyone,
We are still in a heatwave here I don,t think it will get any cooler now as summer approaches.There is a strange phenomenen that happens in beijing in April/ May a few years ago the gov,t decided to plant as many trees as they could in the city and a large proportion were poplars especially the female ones as apparently they grow very fast but this time of year they give off their seeds like small fine pieces of cotton so the whole city is covered in what looks like snow it gets everywhere,someone hadn,t thought that one through haha.
When we go for a walk around the complex there is an apartment in another block on the first floor which has a life size statue of Buddha in the window and gongs,bells ect,so I asked Jun could we just go and knock on their door and introduce ourselves which we did on Sunday they are a lovely family and practice in the Pure land tradition the bedroom is fitted out as a full ceremony hall they told us about their temple which is one of the ones we are going to visit soon anyway and said we can sit with them whenever we want to.
We visited a photography and art exhibition recently one of the art exhibitions was really interesting we walked into a large room and all across the floor there were clothes,furniture and other objects seemingly just scattered although it did look like some kind of pattern then we went upstairs following the arrows and when you looked down on it it became a picture ( I will send 2 photos one at eye level and one from above) very clever.We called to the bookworm i mentioned in my last e mail and i was right i didn,t like it.Also been to a couple more parks one of them was the beijing botanical gardens really beautiful but very crowded till we paid 20p each to go into the enclosed bonsai park that was fantastic an absolute oasis of trees,rocks and waterfalls.There are i think about 4/5 parks around where we live and have visited them all during the day but the other night we walked to the nearest one which is the smallest but i think the nicest and we saw open air ballroom dancing,a light/ water show kids and adults playing all kinds of games, ping pong,badminton, an open air film show (put on for the workers from the countryside who live on the building sites) a group of people writing poetry on the floor with water I now realize how popular that is since i first saw it,everyone was enjoying the evening and we found some nice bits of slate that had been thrown out for our plants,bonsais.
There was a lovely teahouse we went in not long ago in one of the old hutongs everything was old and subdued light with seats in corners overlooking a centre courtyard  with plants ,an old well, bits of furniture  and shafts of sunlight hitting them it was the kind of place you could have just sat in all day magical.
I laughed the other day at something i observed,the places we eat at over here aren,t sometimes as clean as we are used to in england and of course everyone smokes while eating ect, the food is always delicous but i make sure i dont see the kitchens, anyway i watched this woman who worked there wash her hands in a sink in the corner of the restaraunt and as i watched i was pleased to see how well she washed them then when she finished she walked over to the nearest tablecloth and dried her hands on it haha.
Well i will finish now and add a few photos, oh yes we have booked our flights we arrive back in UK on 7th July for 3 week visit we had to shop around as flights are very expensive but got flights on aeroflot flying to moscow then heathrow at nearly £200 each cheaper than other airlines ( I think they are ex world war 2 bombers ).
 

Hi Everyone,
Just got back home after a bike ride,it's to hot we have been having a mini heat wave for last 2 weeks although thankfully we did have a day and half of rain last week, it was lovely to walk out after and smell the air.The whole area is awash with colours all the cherry blossom are in full bloom the trees,flowers grass,the gardeners are doing a lovely job in our complex,they have just filled all the ponds and streams and turned on the waterfalls and stocked it all up with hundreds of goldfish.
We went to the Beijing International film centre and railway museum the other weekend it's out close to the airport,the film centre was an amazing building on 4 floors a bit like our film and photography centre in bradford with film and interactive sets.The railway museum was a very large building housing about 15 trains steam and diesel as well as carriages and other stock,nowhere as good as our york one but still impressive especially the huge long haul steam locomotives.I got a good picture of a woman sat in the middle of all these trains but she was just watching a kids show of thomas the tank engine in chinese on a tv haha.
Went to a concert last Saturday evening a french group performing Vivaldi,s The Four Seasons,we went to the centre on the afternoon and walked for miles around the square and through some of the old areas (the hutongs) found a nice old run down cafe "the cafe of poetry" run and owned by a young woman they have music ,poetry and book reading evenings,we got talking to her about the photographs she had displayed on the walls,they were her friends who was having an exhibition on in Beijing so she gave us two free tickets to go and see them.She also showed us postcards of the photographs that she had done and said she could do some of mine for £4 for eight they were really good so I might get some done.
My driving is getting better all the time, i can navigate around good areas of Beijing now without getting lost so by the time we have visitors coming out they will have a good taxi service although their heart will be in their mouth till they get used to it haha.
It's May holiday weekend so Jun is off for 4 days so we are planning to go back upto the Monastery on the Sunday setting off about 6am to arrive for the first service at 8am.Also going back to the art centre of Beijing on Saturday to finish seeing it all,and we might be going to a place called "The Bookworm"tonight it's owned and run by some English people,they have a very large bookshop and library, cafe,bar they hold music,reading,talks ect evenings there is a talk and presentation tonight with photo's about a british engineer who had a a lot of run ins and adventures with the local manchu warlord when he was building the bridges and railways in the 1920's.We are not sure if it's the kind of place Jun and I will fit in with but we wont know till we give it a try.

Hi Everyone,
We got back from our 5 day visit to the city of Xian on thursday it was a really nice place with lots to see.We left Beijing the previous friday evening it took me over 1.5 hours to drive to the main railway station in west beijing it was getting dark with heavy rain and the friday night holiday rush hour traffic and to add to all that we took 2 wrong turns i ended up just being a beijing driver and cut across 3 lanes of traffic to get to the other side waving my arm out of the window at everyone (It worked) I have now realized there is no such thing as lane markings they are just there for guidance haha.
We arrived in Xian at 9am Saturday after a 13 hour train ride we were in a 4 bed compartment but jun and I had the top bunks but managed to get the bottom ones for the return journey.
We went out every day visiting the sights or walking around the city and on an evening we went to an amazing massage centre we found the second night we were served tea in our own massage room while having a foot bath followed by 90 minutes of massage Ah bliss!
We visited a archaeological site of a 6,000 year old village of a group of people named Ben Po it was full of pots and urns with skeletons of babies inside as well as skeletons of adults and the artefacts they had been buried with,the whole village had been built over to protect it.We also of course visited the famous teracotta tombs it is a really big place, very touristy but still worth seeing it's hard to believe that so much could be created and buried it makes you think how much more is still buried they know where the emperor qin shi huang's tomb is located but apparently don,t yet have the means to unearth it all and keep it preserved as it covers a huge area.The farmer who discovered the teracotta warriors when digging for a well  was paid £4 by the gov,t at the time 1973 and later  when he became a bit of a celebrity and was asked to sign a book for the french president the gov,t were embarressed when he couldn,t write so they taught him.Now the strange thing was he was there the day we were there, signing books I took a photo of him then spotted the sign saying no photographs to late, but then a young woman with a child tried to get her child photographed next to him and gave him some money he looked at the amount maybe about £1 and with a complete look of arrogant scorn threw it on the floor and turned back to signing the books and ignored her.
Another day we took a bus upto the mountains then took a cable car upto the top it went straight up a sheer face into the clouds so at the top you couldn,t see down,poor Jun was terrified of the ride up and wanted to walk back down there was a small taoist temple at the top and a small building were you could stay overnight plus a couple of cafes.
I was stood on the top looking out when a chinese man appeared from over the edge climbing onto the platform and when i went over and looked down he had been stood on a bamboo scaffold fixing some electric wires no safety harness or anything crazy.
The best day was when we took 2 boneshaker buses out to the villages at the base of the chinling mountains the mountains are famous for the Buddhist and Taoist hermit monks/nuns who live in them,we walked up through 2 villages to the base and visited  a small Buddhist temple that had 10 monks living there.The villagers were really friendly and laughed at my attempts to speak to them the little children kept sneaking up to look at me then giggle and get all embarressed and run away,as we were walking back down going a different way through the village i spotted some old cave dweller homes (I have been hoping to find some for ages) they were locked up but when we spoke to 2 teenage boys who were passing one of them said he used to live in one till he was six and ran off to get the key from his grandparents but the lock was to rusty to open  but i got to photograph them.



   








 
 
 

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