Longyan Campus

My dear daughter, long suffering and hardworking has been putting up  my posts on this blog because I can’t access it from China. From now on she will just post the text and there will be a link to my website where I am also loading up the posts and all the pictures. Please follow the links at the end of each post from now on to see all the pictures associated with the posts.  Thanks.

Coming back here after six years has been an interesting experience. Staying with Debbie is good, Peter and I were good friends with her during our first year here, and she has hardly changed at all. Her little flat is nice, but like all Chinese places the floors are ceramic tiles, the walls are tiles or plastered, there is no carpet, so they are quite cold.

My bed is very warm and cosy and I am sleeping really well. I think I have adapted to China time rather than Aussie time. The two hours makes a difference in the sleeping patterns.

I went with Debbie and spoke to some of her classes. It was nice to be in front of a black board again, good fun, and the students here really are very well behaved. I also think they are coming here to university now with better English than when we were here. The middle school seems to be doing a good job. Even the freshmen had pretty good English skills and much of the speaking has the prepositions in the right place, which is one of the hardest things for Chinese students to learn.

The actual campus is lovely. Well set out with trees and gardens. This is the round building we were supposed to teach at, but only go to visit a few times. It is also on the edge of town, and well set back from the road so it is quiet, we hardly hear any traffic noise. 

Clark is now a teacher at the Number 1 middle school here in Longyan. He was one of the best speakers at the school when we were there. He is courting a girl at the moment. He is just 30 years old, a good time to marry.

Even in the coldest weather there is  no heating, but this room seemed warm enough when I was there. They are used to wearing their heavy coats and clothes indoors, even in the house it is normal, rather than using power. Heating is usually only turned on in exceptional circumstances in Chinese homes. They generally have 3 or 4 layers of clothes on and woollen longjohns too.

The architecture for this university was based on the Tulou. Link to here……..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulou  

 These are round stamped-earth buildings that are unique to this part of China, in fact I think this is the only place i the world that has these. So this whole university was based on a round building concept. This is a photo I took when Peter and I visited some of these unusual buildings not far from Longyan.

So it has been an interesting time. The town of Longyan is changing, some lovely big buildings, more modern, but the old part is still the same, old and grubby and smelly in comparison to what we have at home. Although I really enjoyed my few times in the classroom, there is no desire to come back to it.

Follow this link to see the pictures…..Link to here.

http://www.englishstoriesforfun.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=594&action=edit&message=1

Day two in Melbourne.

I should have taken my  jacket! The wind was really cold out there. Anyway we had a good day, lots of walking. Today was my book sales day. First stop the National Library. They don't buy for all the Melbourne libraries, but I left one with the buyer there in case they want some for the National Library. Then to the 'Chinese book shop', which was quite small, but I left one there and they may stock it.

Then to Xinhua bookshop. Well this was a magnificent flop. We found the place ok. The website says it opens at 11am. The door says it opens at 11.30. In reality it opens whenever the guy feels like turning up. He rolled up about midday, spoke very limited English and using a student at the shop as an interpreter, it seems that I need to work through a Chinese publisher to get books into the Xinhua book shops. So I have some contacts, I'll work on that next.

We did the rounds on the city circle tram. This is a free tram that continuously circles the city center.

That was good, it goes round round the city, so we got a good look around. We had a coffee and sandwich and checked out the Immigration Museum. We were quite disappointed with it. The Adelaide Immigration Museum seemed to be much better, more personal stories, and just generally much more interesting.
There are some very interesting buildings around the city center.

This is the Flinders Street train station. It is the main central station for all the suburban trains.

Outside City Hall they had some lovely flower beds, with all the colder climate sorts of flowers we don't get in Queensland. Cyclamen, primulas, cyclamen. It was very pretty.

More flowers and some unusual elephants advertising the Melbourne Zoo.

Below is a very tall building. Our oldest son is a builder. When he was a new apprentice, he thought he would show off his newly acquired skills and put a shelf in his bedroom. The shelf was a triangular shape. He spent most of the day trying to get the thing to fit. In the end, Peter took over and got the measurements right, getting the shelf in the right spot in just a few minutes. This has become a family joke, talking about corner shelves. This building reminded us of that. I think he would have had some problems getting all the angles right for the corner shelves in this building. I didn't count how many floors it has, but I think about 40.

Right in the city center there was a woman with the music playing doing Tai Chi. It is very common to see men and women doing this in China, but not so usual in our Aussie cities. Mind you, there are thousands of Chinese people here, they are just everywhere.

This is part of the RMIT, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. A lovely old building, although it looks like it needs a really good clean.

So all in all, a good day, and the busiest day since we have got over our really bad colds. At least we got to do quite a lot of walking. Tomorrow, if the weather is good we'll go back to Victoria markets.