The positives...and the negatives

Hi Guys, me again. First off, I want to say thanks for all the comments. I really appreciate all of them and its great to hear from you guys. Its now just under a month until I finish at the Uni and my time has just flown by. Hard to believe where its all gone.

I've got exams in 3 weeks time, and you'll be pleased to know that I've been spending most of my waking hours in the library (apart from my daily hours of Sopranos of course).

I took part in a fashion show on Sunday night, which was part of the Uni's arts show. The whole thing was a comedy of errors!! To give you guys an idea, there were loads of badly choreographed dances, and Chinese people singing English songs very poorly. As for the fashion show, there were missed cues - inevitable I suppose, seeing as we had been briefed only about half an hour beforehand. The finale was everyone singing We Are the World - a very amusing/cringeworthy night from a spectator's point of view!!


As you would expect with exam time, everything is quietening down... However, I do have two anecdotes to tell you.


I went to the bank on Friday (Bank of China). For those of you who don't know the background, I lost my wallet a couple of months back. Since then, I haven't had a debit card, and hence I opened a Bank of China account. Now transferring funds should be a simple process, with the introduction of internet banking and all. However, there is one rule for the rest of the world and another for China.
The process involves phoning HSBC, giving a Swift Code number for my Chinese account (China doesn't believe in Sort Codes and Account Numbers). Anyway, the money takes 6 days to transfer but once it has transferred, I have to go to the bank to convert the money (which arrives in dollars) to RMB.

Now unlike most Chinese institutions, the banks have quite a sensible system. They require you to take a numbered ticket and wait until your number is called.
Being a Friday, there were about 200 people in the queue in front of us. So we took a ticket and went for a nice leisurely lunch, anticipating that there would be only about 30 people in front of us when we returned.

We got back about 2 hours later and were shocked to see that there was still 150 people in front of us.
At this point we kicked up a fuss, and the Chinese worker (in typical style) nodded, raised his hands and talked nonsensical English. I was worried that we were going to be at the bank until the next week.
So I was shocked to see this worker return two minutes later, and demand to see our passports.
We showed them to him, and were promptly taken to a "VIP window".
So simply by having a British passport, we were able to pull rank on over 150 Chinese people waiting in the queue.
Fair? Hardly.. but it shows the power of having a British passport, and I wasn't complaining.






This time last week, I told you about hayfever being my arch-enemy. I retract that statement because I have discovered a more formidable foe........ mosquitoes!
These little pests have descended on Ningbo in the past week in their millions.
Its not so much the biting that I mind, because us Asians don't tend to get bitten that much.
They do, however, have the most annoying habit of buzzing right in your ear.

And they don't do it at regular intervals: they wait just until you're falling asleep and then come and make that really sinister buzzing sound. Some nights I haven't got to sleep until 5am because of this irritating tendency of theirs.

This was driving me insane, and on several occassions, I was contemplating giving up my non-violent principles and taking a flip-flop to these mosquitoes.

However, I stayed true to my principles and yesterday, I bought some incense and decided to smoke them out of my roome instead!!

So far, this tactic has worked and hopefully it will continue.


Anyways, time to sign off now. Just want to wish everyone lots of luck for the exams.


Take care,

and I'll be home sooner than you think,



Nihal