The Calm After

On Wednesday we woke up to blazing sunshine and a place transformed.  The beach WAS just outside our doors.

Wednesday was our day to take the students out of their comfort zones and into some water sports.  Cue opportunities for my non-sporty Asian girls to feign periods, stress, I-forgot-my-bathing-suit style complaints.  Into the water they went.

Unfortunately for us still though, the waves were too unpredictable to surf and too big to get sailboats past.  Thus, we pool surfed and sat under some trees learning how to tie bowlines by two tow-headed rah boys, Callum and Callum, only Callum the second went by K2.

I was grateful for sun; this is the closest I've come to summer holidays this year.

Wednesday came and went without major incident and we rolled onto the promise of Thursday with even better weather.  We tried our hand at a bit of geocaching up to a temple and viewpoint before reassembling at the sailboats.

                

Before the wind died on a catamaran on the South China Sea, one of my students, a particularly quietly arty Asian girl with glasses and a long fringe, decided that temple walking in the baking sun was for chumps, that she was sick of me, that she was going to slump up three hundred steps and murder me with her eyes at the top.

But she made it to the top; it was my biggest accomplishment of the week.

 

Thursday evening took us to the beach, where I stole a few spare moments to salute the sun, amongst other yoga poses, whilst our students built sand castles in some style of uber competition.

Our holiday sort of ended there, except for the next morning's 7am beach meet up, the 3-hour near death ride experience to the airport and the gigantic cluster (add another word to the end here) that was the China Eastern Airlines check in desk.  There, I experienced my first China Day, a day so bureaucratic that it defies logic, before getting 20 kids through security, around the airport terminal, onto a flight, off a flight and through another airport before hopping on another bus and sitting for two hours in gridlock traffic before arriving back at school.  

Seeing my patience at its limit, Karen and Clare took pity on me and delivered my aching body to Yasmine's, a delightful Jinqiao steakhouse that does wine, gimugous onion rings and the odd salmon steak.  We talked it out over wine, bottles of, and struggled back to our respective abodes.     

I think it may take me a year to recover.