Days 172-178 – The teachers become the students

After the travels at the weekend we enjoyed spending this week relaxing. It was nice to actually come home after a trip rather than mounting the heavy packs and preparing for the next destination – it definitely makes life easier having a home base here in Jinan. Adding to the desire to relax was the fact that Liv wasn’t feeling to crash hot, and so we just blobbed. Apart from shopping during the week for the necessities of life (food) we did nothing until the weekend.

On Saturday while Liv increased her Chinese skills, Adam ventured out for his first training session up Da Fo Tou, which was literally a painful reminder of Adam’s poor physical condition which he blames solely on cheap Chinese beer!

After Liv’s lesson and Adam’s training we met up in town with some of our students, which turned into an effort, to say the least. They told us they wanted to join us in order to practice their English, but because there were four of them they just ended up talking Chinese to each other. The positive aspect of the outing with our students was that Liv was shown where the Foreign Languages Bookstore is and managed to get herself of couple of classics to read, after the Denton book stash wears down. After a mad dash into the Christmas-crazed RT Mart for dumpling supplies, we darted off home to relax the rest of the weekend away. Oh, but not before Adam shaved his beard in preparation for the Movember mo’ show! Adlibing ourselves into a routine?!.