Spring

Spring is here and pretty much gone, and we are still here. The weather changes very quickly here. After the longest coldest 4-5month winter the locals can remember in ten years or so ... all of a sudden one day it was spring. The trees all burst into frantic blossoms that lasted for about two weeks - the tired dusty city was a little more presentable for a while. Then a wind blew it all instantly away. We had about a week of what looked like snow, but was in fact some kind of wind-born grass seeds everywhere. They collected outside our building in flurries, and even floated through my classroom. Now everything is green. And the seed-snow is replaced by cabbage-white-butterfly-snow. Never seen so many!!

Typical of here. Everything small but in such huge quantities. We have had one wet day. We thought May was supposed to be wet - well, not this year. Mind you, the drains here are not built for wet, we are going to be paddling and swimming when it rains again.
The fruit is getting good. Mind you, the bananas and watermelon went all through winter - they must truck them in from southern China. They sell them by the roadside - but we found watermelon is not too special on a freezing day when the melon is frozen inside! Strawberries have been in for a while, huge ones remarkably, but the delicious tiny grape tomatoes seem to have come and gone. Cherries are everywhere - although for a while we were convinced they were red-currants (they are sooo tiny!) until we tasted them. Mangoes are in - no fun for Peter - and apricots, but they are like bouncy balls and very tart. Pineapples and melons are great now too - they sell you a quarter or half on a stick, all cut, peeled, ready to gnaw ...

Peter is away for a few days, helping the college out with "promotions". They go to towns and schools and try to drum up trade. Obviously it hasn't been working lately because the college numbers are less than 50, from a previous 300 and they have sacked most of their Chinese staff. Peter thinks it will be rather fun, something different! But it means being apart for about 5 days. They have taken him to PuYang to a school that has never seen foreign teachers ... we both figure "Poo" anything is a bit suss!

Anyway, today is Saturday of course - though here (at this school) it is Monday - or "Day 1" on the timetable. Regardless of that, Peter was listening to the footy - streaming radio - before he left. (I had hoped that was ONE thing I would leave behind when we came here!!) He hadn't heard the end, and I hadn't bothered... I had an excuse because our computer is sick and every couple of hours it suddenly makes a warning sound and shuts down. Which it did as soon as he left ... and then when it started it committed a "fatal error" and made all sorts of fuss. So when Peter messaged me from the car on the way to PuYang to ask whether the Dockers won ... I had to dig around on the net and find out!

And now I am enjoying a Chinese icy-pole - this one is like frozen Turkish delight. The ice-creams here are amazing! There is such a huge variety and they are so, so cheap. All sort of things which look like a "Peter's trumpet", cone-things with all sorts of other things inside, and various arrangements of layers of chocolate and caramel, and sometimes a cone layer somewhere, and fruit swirled through ... and then there is the one that looks like corn-on-the-cob but its cone on the outside and ice-cream inside which tastes like corn! And then there are things like frozen rice pudding, and occasionally a savoury one. And they vary from 20 - 25c! The only problem is always being presented with this huge variety and trying to remember which one you have already tried...