It already feels like a very very long time since Christmas, which I and many others celebrated in a fine hotel, which laid on not just turkey but also lamb chops, prawns, duck, dumplings, tiramisu, salad, cheese, mashed potatoes, roast potatoes and some other food as well. Its taken me the better part of a week to stop feeling overly full, much to the concern of my ayi, who after the Boxing Day became very worried I was not eating properly.

Sadly, though, this is China, and life here barely even paused for Christmas - we were straight back into lectures on the Monday, and although we have a three day holiday for New Year, two of those three days are on the weekend, and then we have exams... Alas. However, the end is in sight, thankfully. Very thankfully - my patience with Chinese, and especially 8am lectures and my ayi spending half an hour attempting to convince me to have children is wearing very thin. She did get quite inventive with her reasons towards the end, but I remain firmly unconvinced. I have however almost finished reading Harry Potter in Chinese, an achievement which I am going to be quite proud of, and a whole new appreciation of Chinese onomatopoeia. My favourite so far is probably still 'pu' for the sound of a puff of smoke, but 'gulougulou' for the sound of a rumbling stomach, and 'kalakala' for things that go rattle or clunk is still pretty good.


Latest Chinese weirdness: the pavement trees. We had trees planted in our pavements, as you do in cities, in neat little holes in the pavement. One day, overnight, they vanished. They were not small trees, so they left behind them quite big craters in the pavements where the roots had been dug out. Nice, big, muddy craters for innocent people to slip into on the ice... Two weeks later, there have been different trees replanted in the holes. They are of the same size and variety as the previous trees, although they have not had the bases of their trunks painted white. In all other respects they seem to be similarly healthy however. As they are big trees planted into new holes, they also each have rudimentary scaffolding round the base to make sure they don't fall over again. If anyone can know any reason why all this might have been done, I would be interested to know. It baffled me somewhat.