Taking the Piss!

G'Day from Guangzhou!

Everything here is pretty cool, although the temperature is pretty warm, temperature is around 16 degrees now and will rise to 24 on Saturday! As soon as I arrived I had to shed my thick coat and jumper and now it feels very strange to be working around in just a t-shirt. The school is in a central location, and has its own escalator that runs from the underground station directly up into the school. I am currently staying at a hotel about three minutes walk from the school for about two weeks until I find an apartment. The school is paying for this so its pretty good. They have also given me a welcome pack containing a metro card (like an Oyster card in London), with plenty of money on it, and a Sim card for my mobile with some credit. At the moment I am just getting registered, filling in forms, opening my bank account etc, and sitting in on a couple of lessons. Tomorrow we have a 'team building' exercise, basically a picnic at the top of a local mountain, so that should be fun.

Today we went to the 'foreigner' hospital to have an extensive medical check in order to apply for our visas. First we had to give a blood sample and pulse reading and were weighed and measured, then we were ushered through to another room where I had to lay on a bed and have a strange liquid smeared on my stomach and was poked and prodded with an ultra sound device connected to a computer monitor. I asked if my baby was OK, but they didn't laugh. Either they didn't understand or more likely, were just choosing not to. In another room I lay on another bed, but this time some metal devices were strapped to both of my arms and legs for a BCG reading, looking like a scene from a prison in Guantanamo Bay. I asked how many volts I was going to be given, but my joke was met with the same response as before. In another room, and yet another bed, my chest was listened to with a stethoscope then I was sent to a different room where they checked my ears and teeth! Then we had an eye test where I was given numbers obscured by coloured dots, (like those magic eye pictures in the papers), coincidentally the first number I had to read was 69. ;-) Another eye test had back to front and upside down versions of the letter 'E', so I started reading, 'E' 'M' 'W' '3' then was told, no, it has to be up, down, left and right. It was like a strange logic game from an IQ test, with the chart behind me, and reading from the reflection in the mirror in front of me, quite bizarre. Lastly I had a x-ray, and had to provide a urine sample in a little pot. Talk about taking the piss! I have to go back on Thursday to collect the results, hopefully I won't be diagnosed with anything more severe than a bad sense of humour. ;-)

Well that's it for now, I have to get some sleep before our field trip tomorrow. If the mountain won't come to Mohammad....

Bai bai

Phil in Guangzhou :-)