Diudiu Dates


Last week I had two days off, as I was really very ill. On Monday I was away with a cold, runny nose and a very sore throat. I managed to drag myself into school for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but then on Thursday night I had an awful stomach ache and was vomiting at around midnight. It was pretty nasty and then there were also some problems at the “other end” too. Not surprisingly, I was off school on the Friday as well. The last time I had a day off was in December of 2016, so really I have an excellent record for not taking days off.

This Wednesday was my last-ever parents’ day. At Green Oasis, a “parents’ day” consists of lots of 15-minute sessions with all of the parents of the students in my class, 5G. It went okay and in fact Miss Yanee did nearly all of the talking. Normally I prepare a very detailed page of information for each student, but this time I could not be bothered and it did not seem to make much difference. Most of the parents of my students in Class 5G are Chinese and their English is weak or non-existent, so of course I do not have to say much at all!

On the Wednesday morning the parents were supposed to go to a big meeting in the auditorium for 45 minutes, but of course a lot of them could not be bothered to go to that and some of the 5G parents did not come to school at all. The meeting was supposed to be about the new campus SCIE, which is the senior school that quite a lot of our students go to. (I think that SCIE stands for “Southern College for International Education” or something like that.) The good news is that the new facilities at SCIE are going to be great, but the bad news is that the Green Oasis School students are going to find it much harder to get into SCIE in the future! The other little problem is that the senior part of GOS will be closed down, so there will no longer be the option of staying at GOS after Year 8.

If I wanted to do some teaching somewhere else, then I would have to get a police clearance here in China. Well, I am not going to bother doing that because I am not leaving China in order to get another job somewhere else. We really need to settle down in Bulgaria and start our new lives there.


Thursday was quite leisurely and we went for a long walk in Central Park with our dear Chinese friends, Bill and Julia, and of course Diudiu, the naughtiest dog in the whole of the Middle Kingdom. The Central Park was lovely, with lots of flowers in bloom and the lilies on the lake were looking particularly beautiful. The amazing modern buildings of Shenzhen provides an exciting architectural backdrop to the flowers, bushes and trees. It is really summer here in Shenzhen, with temperatures in the high 20s in the middle of the day. Soon, however, it will get too hot and sticky and then it will start peeing down with rain and that does not stop until the middle of October.



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