This is definitely the conclusion I've come to, as beside the evening dancing in every park in the city, there is a traditional dance outside Carrefour every night:

A number of the larger restaurants and hotels also have group exercises in the mornings, which are fun to watch. I have a video of one of the larger ones down the street from the school, but unfortunately it won't upload at the moment.

Actually, there are a few other times worth noting. This morning I noticed that instead of the traditional qi gong exercises, a largish group of young people were dancing to techno music in the park. Sounds like an interesting way to get up!

Last weekend we took a trip to the beach, which was about four hours away. At the moment, most of the teachers are in peak season, which means quite a few extra hours a week, so they were all very happy to have some time off. I'm also just gettting used to teaching, so I appreciated the opportunity to leave the preparation and teaching for a while. It was good to have plenty of other guys around who enjoy playing sports for the first time in a while; I had my first game of rugby in about six years and my first game of cricket in almost ten! The beach itself was interesting - it's quite far from anywhere and just has three hotels and not much else. As you can see from the pictures though, it had some good sand and warm water, although the fake palm trees looked a bit strange! On the second night we heard music and fireworks coming from the area around the third beach picture - an insurance company was having an outing and everyone was dancing on the square in the middle of the picture. Of course, as this is China, not just the teens and twenties were dancing, but also middle aged people and young children. We were made very welcome, and myself and another teacher went up to the middle to join the group. We were practically dragged on stage and everyone made a circle around us and started clapping. We figured that they either wanted us to fight to the death or break out our dance moves, so we jumped around a bit until everyone realised how bad dancers we were. Alongside the dancing and fireworks setting-off (dangerously close to the crowd, so more impressive) they had different races between the groups, including a relay race, which we fielded a team for. Unfortunately, due to some undisciplined fumbling of the baton (twice), we gallantly lost.

I must say, it's been a lot of fun so far teaching the young children (5-8 year olds) and older teenagers or adults. Although I can't say the same for those in between, this is mostly because I'm still working on games that will interest them and hopefully teach them some English. With the young kids, it isn't too difficult to make anything fun, including acting out the Three Goats Gruff, complete with scary halloween mask! (we've been working on size vocabulary, such as too big, too little etc., so it's not too hard for them to grasp the few phrases they need for each character). Apparently the adult classes have very little structure, so the best plan is just to work on something that intrests you that you can just discuss or raise a topic to debate. So far I've had a pretty good class on origami, and another on wierd news stories. Often the classes are three or four hours long, so it can get very boring if you don't latch onto something that interests everyone in the class!

Apparently on arrival in Shenyang, just about everyone gets sick sooner or later, but within the first two or three months. So far after a month and a half I seem to have avoided it, but mainly through looking out for the copious quantities of oil that people put in all of the food here - if you ask for a salad with your meal it's usually glistening with it! This is most of a meal I had with a friend from work - a couple of tiers of dumplings with some gu ba rou (sweet and sour pork) and an egg plant dish. Together with starters, tea and a couple of bottles of coke (for Charlie) it set us back less than £3 each. I recently managed to find a restaurant with a menu in Chinese, pin yin (Chinese with phonetic transcription) and English, so as the dishes are quite similar wherever you go, I should be able to try it out whenever I go out next.

I leave you with a picture of a restaurant/bar that I must visit sometime - the 'Honored Marine Grogshop'. I don't really know what it's like inside, but I'm hoping it's something like an upmarket Skumm Bar.

Actually no, I'm going to leave you instead with the discovery I made today that you can actually make pretty good Mexican tortillas with cornmeal and dumpling flour, which are both readily available here. Also readily available are tomatoes, peppers, chillies, chicken and just about everything else needed to make Mexican food! More on this later...