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