Weekly, Back and Forth!

This weekend I returned to Yingtan as usual on Friday evening, arriving around 1am after finishing my Friday afternoon class at a little before 3.30. The previous week I had been told I had 2 afternoon classes; I politely requested they be changed as I travel back to Jiangxi province each weekend. So they put one class onto Friday morning and left the later of the two classes as it was, so absolutely no advantage gained there, at all.

I went to my afternoon class, ready to leave immediately on the bell at the end of the class, with my bag ready to pick up in the office. About 15 minutes into the scheduled 40 minutes, the class teacher asked I could stop as she had messages to pass on to the students before they finished at 3.30, so instead of 40 minutes I taught for less than 20, I finished earlier than expected, but I checked with the office again as to whether or not this class would be best delivered at a earlier time or day, I am still waiting on their reply.

On arriving back in Yingtan and waking up Saturday morning, my wife informed me of a new shopping centre that opened that morning, so we had to go and take a look. It seemed like the rest of the city had a similar idea as it was packed. After buying a few items from the large supermarket and taking a look around the rest of the shops we took our son into a play area and he was happy to jump and run around (he stayed in there for the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon). He only stopped for his lunch, but by mid afternoon he was ready for his afternoon nap.

During the walk about around the shopping centre, somebody from a language school approached my wife and I asking if I was available for work! I never say an outright no, as you never know what will happen in the future, but that same evening I had already been scheduled to do a recruitment drive for hopefully getting more students to enroll at another language school. That recruiting session didn’t go quite as planned as it was outside and heavy rain arrived in Yingtan that evening. I held a class inside, and am hoping to attract new students to my classes through a wechat group.

Sunday evening saw me getting the sleeper train back to Wuhan and ready for another week of work before returning back to Yingtan on Friday. As I boarded the train on Sunday evening and found my sleeping berth, there was somebody already on the one reserved for me. I quickly woke her up and informed her to move, I had reserved a bottom bunk, hers was the top of three, hoping, I guess that the bottom bunk would not be used. This has happened a few times now, and is usually not a problem. This morning I bought my train tickets for next weekend, some trains are already sold out, and this weekend the only sleeping berths available were at the top, so maybe I will be trying the same trick to sleep on the lower bunk.