Xin nian yu kuai or Happy New Year (again)

It’s hard to believe another New Year has come and gone since the last time I wrote anything up here.
Not that 365 days have passed, just that one New Year a year is obviously not enough.
We celebrated the Chinese one with a certain sort of style, and lots of very loud noise. The bangers, (at one English pound per thousand) were in fashion for a full 15 days, as that’s how long it takes to celebrate the start of a year, and you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing them.
I spent New Year’s Eve itself at a friend’s house in Jinzhou, took part in her family’s big dinner, and spent the evening half studying, as the traditional thing to do on NYE is watch the telly for 8 hours, and you can imagine what I thought about that.
The day after that I went to a friend’s house a couple of big cities up, in a place called Fushun, which is a hole, but full of fairly good people and went to a couple of really interesting nightclubs.  In China if there are no events on stage then a night club is no good and so it was really very different. 
I didn’t get as much studying done as I wanted, because of these escapades with friends, but what I did learn is a serious amount about Chinese “mutually beneficial” relationships.  It turns out that the Chinese definition of a good person is he who repays a favour.  There are no other conditions, and anything goes, although honesty will be praised in name (not in practice) and being hardworking and money-orientated is also seen as a good character trait.
Since coming back to Uni two weeks ago, I’ve started teaching English as a professional teacher, which is good really, sometimes fun, sometimes hard, but all in all interesting.   I really need to find ways to make the lessons as interesting as possible.
I’m working far too much to keep studying well, (24 teaching hours a week) but I’m still having a go at it, which is making me somewhat antisocial. I’m not sure of the best way to deal with it, but I really don’t want to come back with only a basic level of Chinese.
Well, that’s about a round up of the last two months in two paragraphs, I’m sorry for being stuck away, but there’s not much I can do about it.  There are people who spend the whole time on the computer here, one of them, predictably is sat behind me, and she is somewhat of a laughing stock.  It’s tough, so I’m sticking with it for a while.
Miss you all

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