Check out that temperature drop! Almost 10 degrees in one day! The Chinese call the overly hot Autumn weather the Autumn tiger.. well, he just ran off with his tail between his legs. One day 33, next day 24. Jackets and longs are on the students already.

In other news of B&B, we have had recent internet trouble, not with our PC but the gateway. Try talking technical jargon to a second language speaker that’s reluctant to even look at you, let alone try to understand or help you… and you’ll begin to understand the hair pulling events that I’ve been through. But, in the end, technical people were called and the English & Japanese teachers were assigned a new (hopefully more reliable) internet gateway. It’s good news that I think was worth the effort.

We’ve both been kept well busy with the start of semester. I’m doing 1st year English majors (public school) and 3rd year International Economics & Trade (public school). Bazz has 1st year English majors (private school) and 3rd & 4th year International Economics & Trade (1 private & 3 public school). The private school didn’t get the grades to join the public enrolment, so mum & dad have to pay for them to get into private. This makes them less studious in general, but there are always the exceptions.

We are now staring at a week’s holiday and none to soon as my voice could do with the rest while I’m fighting a bug (and we can maybe push ahead with more lesson plans to make later workload easier). Only silly side to this, is that we have to work Saturday & Sunday to make up for 2 days of the holiday! (Note: Don’t try to understand the logic, it only damages your brain). No plans for the break, but rest and catching up with friends who are ordinarily busy during the term. It’s a really bad idea to attempt to travel during the week as it’s a national week holiday… meaning every man, woman, child and their dog are on holidays and attempting to visit all those places they’ve wanted to visit. It’s insane/crazy on the public transport system!

In the diet world of B&B, I’ve lost 9kgs to date and while Bazz has done 10.5kg. We are stuck on the Indian Daal and Rogan Josh (-like) dishes as they are so yummy and easy to make. On the holidays I’ll attempt to dream up some more delicious diet-worthy meals. For the curries and daal we have recently discovered pressure cooking. I’ll tell you now, pressure cooked Indian mung bean daal is absolutely divine and no amount of ordinary pot boiling gets it tasting that good! And the curries are just as good. The pressure cooking method has saved Bazz hours sweating over the stove in our very hot kitchen over summer. I’m drooling thinking about the left-overs in our fridge, a particularly delicious batch done with Bazz the head chef and B the kitchen-hand.

We have semi-planned our winter holiday from just after Christmas till mid-February as 2 weeks in Bangkok with old friends and tech. shopping, then 4 weeks in Malaysia. We want to try our hand at a cooking class in Malaysia and generally look/shop around. I’m really looking forward to it as it’s our real break for the year to be surrounded by a different culture/food/entertainment/etc. This year as an extra special treat we are able to catch up with Bazz’s folks who are coming to KL to visit us and for a holiday. Meanwhile, I will miss my own folks and sister as they travel to Vietnam and Cambodia But I guess we can’t be everywhere at once.

Yay for holidays!
Boo for working on weekends beforehand!

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 5:47 pm and is filed under China, Life, holidays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.