This is just a quick post to tell you to look at Jake's blogger page, he has better writing skills than me, but no pictures.

www.myspace.com/strange_meeting

Miss you all
xxx

Out of my very busy 4 day week, I have Tuesday and Wednesday off as my children have exams, so I am taking this time to write a blog. At the end of this week, Jake, Duncan and I are off to traveling as we have a week of holiday. We plan to go to a beautiful town called 专家届， Zhuang Jia Jie, which is famous for fantastic mountains and amazing scenery.
The weather has now turned cold. It wasn’t a gradual thing, last weekend it was still to hot, and one day, I woke up and it was freezing cold. They say 长沙 (Changsha) only has 2 seasons, and they were correct. I think I have lost all my cold immunization from living in York for the past three years as I have 4 layers on and there in no ice to be seen.

Jake and I are still learning Chinese, although his efforts are much more academic than mine. While he studies books and learns characters, I attempt to chat to people and let them correct me. This is a very lazy method, but I like it. My character learning is still very slow, there are over 80,000 Chinese characters, but only 5,000-6,000 are in common use. I know about 40. The structure of the Chinese language is actually rather logical. There are few characters which are used on their own, for example, 钱，which is pronounced “tien” and means money. When characters are put with another character, they form words. For example, 钱包，“tienbao” which literally means money enclosure, and actually means wallet. As you can imagine, there are hundreds of combinations for each character, thus making it very hard to learn.
Another example, 火 （“hore”） means fire and 山 (“shan”), means mountain, together, 火山 means volcano. There are thousands of examples like this, but not all of them are so logical. My favourite ones are:

手 （“show”）hand + 机 (“ji”) machine = 手机mobile phone
电 (“dien”) electric + 话 (“hua”) word = 电话 telephone
笑 (“xiao”) funny + 话 (“hua”) word = 笑话 joke
打 (“da”) hit + 火 (“hore”) fire + 机 (“ji”) machine = 打火机lighter

There are thousands of these, I will try and keep blogging the best ones.
Hope everyone is well.
xxx

Yesterday, we decided to take a ride on the Changsha Eye, which is like the London Eye, only in Changsha. It is the biggest one in Asia and promised to give some spectacular views.

This is the wheel in the day time, with the busy Changsha surroundings.
This is a particularly bad photo of the wheel lit up at night.
Here is the brave crew about to go into the wheel. Jake soon became very quiet as his fear of heights was tested once more. Bless him, not so macho now.
This is also a bad quality photo of the view from the wheel, as you can see, Asia looks amazing at night with hundreds of neon lights. I have grown to love this busy bright scenery. It was a good night, after the wheel we ineveitably ended up in a trendy bar.

Well, I'm not entirely sure what this is, but there was a really deep well next to where Jake is standing. However, I have no idea what it was used for.

This is the monkey that scared Jake and has started his phobia. They were quite a lot of lose monkeys and this particular one decided to "start on" Jake, or so he put it. I personally think it sould smell his fear, or rather his food, and came to investigate. However, after this tourment, we decided not to go to the monkey mountain where there would be numerous monkeys performing acts which would offend more people that animal rights activists. One in particular was playing the guitar. We scurried past and got totally lost, but had a great adventure.

When in Yueyang, Jake and I visited a famous park, which was on a spit of land, only accessible by a long thin road. It looked as though we were been driven into the wilderness, if not the sea. After 20 minutes of thinking how to get out the taxi while still driving along and running home, we arrived at a fantastic park.
This is Jake amongst the very large bamboo's.
This is me with an ancient warrior.
This is one of the stunning buildings at the park, which have the traditional Chinese curved roofs.
I think this photo is rather artistic of me! This is a temple, Bhudist of course, with lots of insense and over 2 thousand bhuddah statues.

On 26th October, Jake and I went to a town called Yueyang for a few days. The town is famous for historic buildings and its large lakes. This sign is a classic example of the mistranslations to English.
Here is a picture of me (yes, my eyes are closed) with the largest lake in the background. It actually looks like the sea it is so big.








We stayed in a very posh hotel, which was very cheap by English standards, but expensive by Chinese. It had everything we could ask for, including a huge English breakfast and a pastry section.
It also had a king bed which was the most comfortable night's sleep I have ever had. Mum, please add this to the Christmas list.
This is the most famous building, Yueyang Low. It is nearly 2000 years old and was originally a fort to see enemies coming from across the lake. Inside, there is some very ancient Chinese writing which I was not allowed to photograph, but it was very beautiful.

The school had a three day long sports day which involved all the student doing some kind of track and field event.
These pictures are from the Grand Opening Ceremony. Jake's rather unsavory joke about very young girls dancing to a song titled "Can't touch this", didn't go down too well with the others standing around us.
This is the school standing in parade, after walking around the track.

This is the Kung Fu display, demonstrated by 5 year old kids, bless.