oh man
just saw a Michaek Jackson feat Akon video on MTV, for Thriller's 25th anniversary
Bloody depressing
The man was the King of Pop-I don't think there's ever been anyone like him
and now, what has he become?

holy shit i cannot access my emails or facebook; am cutoff from the world except here, and since the people im trying to communicate with are french, they dont read this. and i didnt give my parents the address either. and theres no msn here. damn damn damn, i really needed to talk to ;y mother. shit. i hate the internet here.

a Chinese Tall story

yay, finally got internet!
well, been here for a few days now> spent the first three in guangzhou, and now am in Hengyang.Having a good time, except that I fel terribly lonely at times, what with not understandng what people are saying, and being stared at all the time. I am not an alien, for gods sake.
enjoying the food, although it takes time to get used to, and blessing the guy who invented aircon. it is sooooooo hot here.
and managing a chinese keyboard is complicated.
unfortunately i cant upload my photos here, because im in an internet cafe, but thats life, itll have to wait.
i think a more detailed account of the trip might have to wait until I get home, which isnt for another four weeks or so,we re the 24th and im home on july 19th
i dare say itll be a relief to be home, because not understanding anything around you is extremely tiring. at least it s a motivation to study more :)
QUite pleqsed, becquse I found an electronic dictionary in guangzhou, and shuangs boyfriend bargained so i got it 140 yuan cheaper :)
hopefully hell be coming bqck from his job in guangzhou for the holidays pretty soon, because here weve only been seeing shuangsdd mother and her aunt, and were going out with her mother and her friends for lunch. i think shuangs mother, athough shes very kind, has written me off as a lost cause. i need to find someone around my age (or around shuangs, shes 6 years older than i am) who doesnt speak french or english and wholl b patient enough to listen to me stuttering and to explain what theyve just said!
ah well, we ll see

Waiting until it's time to go

has to be the most boring thing ever.

Well, vaccination sorted, I don't think the doctor was impressed when I told him I was leaving tomorrow and so needed it done today.

I haven't actually done any of the things I need to do yet. My bags aren't packed, I haven't called the friend we're staying with, come to think of it I haven't called Shuang either.

In the meantime, reading too many expat blogs makes me worry about my weight. I'm not exactly small here,a lot fo my friends are shorter (and slimmer) than I am; I shall be a giant in China.
Oh well.

I should really start doing useful stuff.

I was happily watching Grey's Anatomy; but then...adverts, so I changed channels and became absorbed in a program about Japan.
All I shall say is that they are completely nuts.
But I'd love to go there one day.

Pictures!

I've been fiddling around with Google images (that's what it's called in French) looking for pictures of the first few places we're going and I'm all excited again :)

Hunan

Huizhou

Guangzhou

Hengyang

Hunan

I must say, Guangzhou Baiyun airport looks very...glassy

Guangzhou

Guangzhou(This picture is amazing).

Guangzhou

Hunan.

Hopefully I'll soon be posting the pictures I'll have taken.

Well, On Wednesday I'll be making my way to Paris with Shuang, spend a night there with a high school friend of mine, and then off to Guangzhou airport on Thursday.

I'm panicking.

Off to the doctor's tomorrow because i just remembered a few jabs might be in order (he's going to have a fit and slay me).

Oh, and there've been floods in Hunan, Shuang's region (where we are GOING) but apparently not in her town (big sigh of relief although wish there'd been no floods, no earthquakes, and all that)

Now, only hoping that there'll be no strikes of trains, airplanes or anything when we try to leave. Please please please please.

Well, yeah, because everyone's striking right left and center at the moment. I think the journey will be the most stressful part of the whole trip. I really hate France sometimes.

Hah!

I finally found out how to add the blogroll.

I'm so lame.

I am

so sick of this m'f'ing storms.
Although the view can be pretty good.
This is where my parents live.
The stream on the photo? it's a PATH

Expats

Hah. That's what I am, supposedly, but I have so little of the English left in me, except the language, that I've never heard the term applied to me.
I mean, seriously.
I don't like British food and groan the rare times my mother brings out mince pies, christmas pudding, mint sauce and all that stuff (luckily, she's just about given up on it)
I don't like McDonald's.
I don't understand British girls walking around half-naked, and I find British boys shy.
Stephen Clarke makes me laugh, but I often find his views caricatural.
I don't like British people complaining that the french never pronounce English names properly (although it does sometimes set my teeth on edge) when their attempts at pronouncing French names are at best risible, and most often non-existent.
I like eating meat rare and not overcooked as my aunt, uncle and cousins do.
I find many Brits either overly reserved or terribly loud.
I still have a British sense of humour which can be quite confusing if associated with the french one (this often leads to my laughing all by myself)
I don't have the problem of pronouncing my name in a different language since it's easy in both. It's impossible to tell from my accent whether I'm english or french. A frenchman could tell that I live in the south of France, an Englishman might be able to tell that my family originates from southern England.
I never have to wonder about the gender of an object.
All this puts me pretty far from the usual expat concerns.


Now, I don't like expats much. I'm sure they're all very nice people, but in my experience (which is mainly that of my parent's friends, etcetera) a lot of them, while often marrying french people, pretend to stay quintessentially english. Which is absolutely impossible.
Take my mother, who unlike my father, my brother and I, isn't quite such a mess and is English born and bred. Even she thinks that she doesn't have much in common with english people after fourteen years of living here.
And all the expat moaning gets me down. Go back to England, or the US, or wherever, if it's that bad, and quit moaning.
The only expat friend I have is JC. He's English, looks impossibly like prince Charming, and hates England for a set of reasons i have not yet fathomed.
And out of the thousands of English or english speaking students in our town, I'm the only Brit he talks to, and the same goes for him.
we're a pair of weirdoes.

Right.
For whatever reason this started underlining all I was writing, it has stopped.
Back to my ever increasing boredom, which was slightly slaked this morning by being woken up by an old schoolfriend of mine having an English lesson with my mother in the romm next door. So I toddled over to annoy him.
Apart from that, I am sick of french TV going on about that new movie about Françoise Sagan, played by that silly blonde ferret Sylvie Testud. As if it was going to have as much success as La Mome.
As far as I'm concerned, all Testud wants is to go the Marion Cotillard route. Which isn't likely, because as far as I'm concerned, she sucks. But that's just my opinion.

I am

SO BORED
I am no good at doing nothing.
I think I've read about six books since friday evening, have perused many many VERY long blogs, such as petiteanglaise(very entertaining, although don't always agree. But have a very different perspective), stuff white people like(stuff white liberal americans like. some things quite to the point, and very annoying commnters), a modern lei feng why the fuck is this underlined?
anyways. Jesus it's going on, I am stopping this RIGHT NOW.

well, I'm finally on holidays, exams are over and all that. Most happy.
Now of course I have to sort out a few minor details like getting a ticket for the train back from Paris when i come back from China-i'm leaving in less than two weeks! absolutely terrified, but terribly excited.
Am seriously considering going to China the year after i get my degree (which is next year, if all goes well) as a teacher, and taking chinese classes at the same time; my latest aim was to perfect my chinese up to the point where I could come back here and swan my way through one of the translation schools. I'm already bilingual; i just need to get a third language perfect, and I chose a hard one.
Believe me, six months in Italy would've made me trilingual-five years of it made me excellent between twelve and seventeen, but I gave it up at university.
Sometimes I wonder why I chose chinese, except for the reason that i decided i wanted to learn chinese when i was about eleven. But although it's terribly complicated, I enjoy it, so I'm going to have to knuckle down to it a lot more seriously. A month in China should be a good start.

I should be working right now, I have exams at the moment, but I'm a lazy person and I just can't get round to it. Which will fuck me over tuesday because I have four speeches to prepare for chinese expression (oral) and we have oral translation that day too. and grammar on wednesday. I'm going to die. And i can't get down to it.
Of course, the week after I have four english exams, law, economics,and one on computers, bu I'll worry about those later.
Like, never.

Well, China has been praised for its response to the earthquake...while Burma has only just let foreign aid workers in, finally. Hopefully not too late.
In the meanwhile, the world goes round, people are striking all over the place here because of the price of petrol (as if the government could actually do something about it)
And France lost the Eurovision again apparently :) although they'd actually sent someone quite funky, that nutjob Sebastien Tellier

ouch

well, these last ten days have been a bit of a disaster, haven't they?
A hurricane in Burma, an earthquake in China, a tornado in the US, bobs in India...christ.
I just hope Burma will stop being a jerk and all the people in Sichuan get through this.

Just fell in a love with this
But then I've been an expat, sort of, since the age of five.
And i have no intention of returning to the motherland any time soon.
And in a couple of years I might be gone from my terre d'accueil, who knows.

On an entirely different note, I picked up my visa for China on Friday.
Nothing will stop me now!
And I've been out of touch with the virtual world for two weeks which might help.

I just have to get through my exams first, and not meltdown, oh and finish the projet tutoré shitshitshit I'd forgotten. Shudup girl, you're talking to yourself (oh yeah, and don't make me believe it never happens to the rest of you)

New precisions on Ms L's CV in life ; she got sent to China by the French government in 1964.

Nineteen sixty fucking four. I mean, Jaysus. That's the year France actually recognished the PRC. She must've been among the first french people, perhaps even the first european people, to go there and learn chinese.
When I was saying she was crazy!
And she comes out with this like it's perfectly normal. And she gets all excited over the electronic dictionary her son brought her from China.
And that's who we've been learning chinese from (mostly) for the last two years.
(Now I get why our Uni's Chinese department is so well-rated in France)

okay, I don't post often. But then, I don't actually have any readers, so does it matter? I'd say not.

But whatever.

So, halfway through a five-day long weekend (you've got to love may when the 1st falls on a thursday-last weekend was four days long, this one is five because it's Pentecost or somesuch Christian fest few people of my generation actually care about except for the free time it generously offers us), enjoying the warm weather that comes from living down South- and realising that i have exams at irregular intervals starting next saturday and ending on June 6th.

Ooohh yeah, I am in deep trouble. Right now I'm suppose to prepare a global analysis of China's geopolitics, learn it, and spit it back out for the exam. Like last year, althoug I can't remember last year's subject.
it's HELL.
I am considering running away to some tropical island and living on the beach there. Fishing or something. Alhough I'd have to remember to take a fishing rod.