Well, well, two blogs in a week I bet you think that's pretty clever, don't you boy?
And if anyone get's that obscure reference, I'll buy them a chupachup.
A few days ago Caroline's bike got a flat tire.
Another beautiful feature of life in Beijing is that handymen hang out on street corners. They have little mobile workshops that can cut keys, repair shoes and other leather goods and fortunately for us; bikes too.
After spending about 45 minutes wheeling Caroline's bike all over the 'hood past three unoccupied handyman sites, I found one approximately 5 minutes from the door.
Anyway, he deftly identified the problem, whipped the valve out, shortened it with a very sharp piece of metal and pumped the tire back up again. He wanted something that on two hearings sounded like baisa, he must have had a strong provincial accent I guess. So I gave him Y20 (take off a zero for €/£) note in the hope it wouldn't be too small. It wasn't, he asked if I had anything smaller, so it must have been less than ten. However I figured since I was happy with the job and would have paid more, Y20 was a fair price.
Anyway, just a little detour to explain how easy it can be to get some otherwise awkward tasks done when there is a huge amount of labour knocking around.
I am currently toiling away with 3 jobs, so free time is scarce, hence the reduced number of blog posts. 2 Universities and 1 micro finance / sustainable enterprise if you're interested.
I had lunch with a student last week, during office hours when we meet up to talk about any academic questions they might have.
However, when we actually met she'd worked out the questions for herself and generally just wanted to gossip.
There was some vaguely salacious rumours about other lecturers, but I'm not too interested in that stuff, so mostly dismissed it.
However, she did mention something I thought that was quite interesting.
The students at my college have a lower college entrance exam score, so essentially their parents have to pay to get them on a course that includes foreign study.
So these kids tend to be the progeny of the relatively / very wealthy.
Sometimes see them driving round in luxury 4x4s, don't forget that for the many, China remains a developing country.
The rest of the students at the university are considerably poorer, representing as they do a cross-section of Chinese society.
So, apparently the rich kids think that sometimes when they go in the lecture theatre after the 'poor' kids, it sometimes "smells a bit funny".
However, they also know that all of those kids are there on merit and scored considerably higher in their exams.
It kind of levels out the playing field I think and stops the rich kids from being too snobby.
You should see the blackboard sometimes when we have a class after the boffins (that ones for you dad :-)
I often can't understand a word that's on there.
It is in Chinese of course...
No I jest, last week sometime they had been teaching astrophysics, in English! Measuring quarks, black holes and cetera.
So I'll end on this happy note:
The people with the top 5% of IQ in China outnumber every single person in the UK.
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