On Friday afternoon, I received a text message from Joe in which she told me that she couldn't give me a teaching job. Bummer. I asked her if I could become a Volunteer Teacher at New Start in return for accommodation. She texted back that she could put me up in one of the school's apartments in return for joining English Corner two nights a week. Deal! Unfortunately, none of the school apartments is available at the moment, so I'm still staying at an hotel.

Barry and I had dinner at '7th Heaven' on Friday night. You'll find a lot of 'love & happiness' here in China - on T-shirts, keyrings, hotels and restaurants. I'm not so sure about the presence of love and happiness in daily life. The people in Yangshuo (Chinese and foreigners) seem to like alcohol a lot and as a result, there are quite a lot of fights as well. Not last Friday, though. Barry and I were enjoying our food when Sinan, Kathy, Johnny and their kung fu teacher George sat down at the table next to us. Kathy and I agreed to meet each other at New Start College at 9.30 pm, so we could go dancing. Some of Kathy's students went with us as well. The first bar we went into, had horrible music and the second wasn't much better! When we were walking in West Street, Yangshuo's main street, a Chinese woman stopped us and asked:'Do you have a moment, please? I'd like to introduce you to my friends. Is that okay?' Sure, why not. Her 'friends', however, turned out to be 4 slightly older Chinese men who were hoping to get more out of us than just a friendly 'hello'.... Kathy and I accepted a drink from them and finished it quickly whilst keeping the conversation as general and polite as possible. We ran into the first bar that we saw and there, they played music we could dance to - at last! Some kung fu moves would have been useful to keep the Chinese men at a distance (can anyone please tell them what 'personal space' means?!?), but at least we were dancing!

I woke up late on Saturday. I'd agreed to go to the Yulong river with Kristen, Johnny, Tom and Tom's Chinese girlfriend Nimbo. Johnny and I went on a motorcycle taxi that took us to the river in about 20 minutes. The Yulong river is surrounded by mountains and absolutely beautiful. There's bridge you can jump off from, you can swim in the river and you can bask yourself in the sunlight on the river banks. Tom (Englishman) made a comment about my extremely white legs, but his girlfriend said that she envied my pale skin! At the end of the afternoon, we all went back to the center of Yangshuo. Johnny and I had dinner together and then we went to The Alley (bar) to watch the football/soccer match between Arsenal and Wigan. Across from The Alley, Tom was having his farewell party at bar Looove, so after the first half of the match, we went to Looove and stayed there for the rest of the evening. At Looove, I had an interesting conversation with Stephen, an Irish architect, who had just arrived in Yangshuo. He's been travelling for 2 years (!) and had fascinating stories to tell. I went to bed late again (or actually, it was early...), and even though I had set my alarm clock, I didn't wake up until 12.30 pm. I went for a long walk this afternoon, bumped into Stephen twice, went back to the hotel to have a shower (it's still extremely hot here) and had dinner alone. I'm typing this from the computer in the lobby of my hotel. On my way to the hotel, I bumped into Tom, Naomi and Kathy and they asked me to meet them downtown later, so I'll be going back in a sec.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend and I hope my ex-McK colleagues had fun during SAFE!