Along with lies like it has clean air, it’s beautiful and it’s clean in general, another apparent lie told by the good people of this town, is the weather extremes.

“Oh, behing located nestled in the mountains, Shiyan has fine weather. In winter, it doesn’t get that cold and in summer, it doesn’t get that hot.”

To be fair, in winter, it didn’t get that cold, I think the coldest day might have been -5 or -6. However, the ‘not so hot’ was vastly understated, or, like so many other things in China, is a matter of opinion.

This past weekend was rather toasty and I didn’t venture outside of my home that much. Once, perhaps, I made the short distance to the office to connect to the internet, but quickly returned to the relative cool of my apartment. Eventually, this was at about 5 o’ clock in the afternoon, I ventured as far as the front gate to see what the temperature was.

It was 40 degrees celcius.

I’ve been in hot places before. My hometown has summers around 30 degrees and, having spent time in Malaysia, I’ve seen 33 and 35 degrees. It’s hot, but manageable.

Over the last week or so, I’ve slept practically naked and not under any cover. I would have slept completely naked if it wasn’t for the mosquitos in my room. I don’t fancy having to scratch myself in an embarresing place. Anyway, so if, for instance, I crossed my legs, where my legs touched would sweat immediately.

At first, I couldn’t explain it, although it was hot, I didn’t realise how hot. So I nearly fell over when I saw the temperature.

This is officially the hottest temperature I’ve been in. Now, if this isn’t that hot, I think I will stay out of the places that are that hot.

In the meantime, the time to depart is drawing near. Some of my classes have been cancelled this weeked (yah!) which means it will go even faster. On Thursday I’ll buy the train ticket to Guangzhou. The trip itself, looks like a 24 hour affair. Sigh.

Then, just to pick up my ticket and… Bon Voyage!

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I can appreciate the value of the grass on the sport fields here at school.

Not only is it the biggest patch of grass in the whole of the inner city of Shiyan, but it’s the only one I’ve seen at a school between the 6 or so schools that I have been too. Sure, the university almost has a grass sports field, but soon even the brown shoots will have died and, like the majority of the field now, will have been replaced by dusty earth.

The other thing that is very valuable about the grass, is that it’s the only grass in Shiyan that you are allowed to interact with, ie. play on, walk on, sit on, etc. There are several small patches of grass in the People’s Square, but you’re not allow to touch or sit or walk on those. It’s the people’s square, not the people’s grass.

That is why, when our school’s management recently decided to water their precious, parched grass with several kilotons of tap water, that they felt it was justified. It hasn’t rained for about 3 weeks and it’s H-O-T.

On Friday mid-day, in the heat of the day, they first started. Initially, they used a very, very long garden hose, which was unsuccessful beyond the few square meters they could water every hour. nevertheless, they continued with this effort deep into the night, and again from early Saturday until all the way up to dinner.

It was at this point that somebody figured that using the fire hoses located in the stairwells of our dormitory would work better. I was glad to see these actually work, as I had my doubts.

At an exponentially increased rate of dispensing water, the fire hoses were used to wet the entire field again. This took the rest of Saturday night and the whole of Sunday. They wanted to let the hose run throughout the night, but after I finished with my late-night Internet session, being the last one awake, I took the liberty of turning it off. Nobody noticed.

I’m all for green grass that you can sit, walk and play on, but I was told when I got here, keep your showers short, because the water is precious and expensive, with which I agreed. Obviously the grass is more expensive and precious than the expensive and precious water.

And, after having poured millions of litres of almost-drinkable, precious, expensive water over grass that wasn’t even turning brown yet, what did it do (and still is) all day today?

It rained.

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With two of my three big tasks completed and the third having to be completed in another country, life here, goes on as normal. Slowly.

I’m still struggling to maintain enthusiasm in my classes, but it’s important that I do so. As K rightly said, she will stay behind and she doesn’t want to hear people talk about how I fell apart in my last two weeks. Neither do I.

Valid point I guess, but it’s difficult to tolerate the complete non-co-operation of your students when you don’t have to. In my one grade 7 class, the only real problem class, where the students could really not care less, I have given myself to playing games with them. At least using language from their lessons. But even the games they find uninteresting. It’s a problem class though, because the exact same lesson works very well in the other grade 7 class. There are several peer groups in that class which are just too cool to co-operate, and they’ve convinced themselves that the foreign English class is a waste of their time, because it doesn’t count towards anything.

So, the World Cup started two days ago. I’m not really a fan and have even less interest in it because South Africa couldn’t cut it. In fact, that’s a little embarrassing, but the way they played prior to their failure to qualify, should have alerted everybody to the inevitable.

Having said that, I did stay up to watch the opening match between Germany and Costa Rica. It started at midnight here and the first half was sufficiently exciting. But, by half-time, with Germany leading 2-1 and Costa Rica clearly loosing momentum, and my eyes weighing the weight of a football team, I couldn’t justify watching the second half.

Ironically enough, when I woke up the next day, they were showing the match again, and I woke up just before half-time. So, I could watch the second half, but as I thought, it was predictable, Germany ending up winning 4-2. No great surprise.

Anyway, now I’m off to capture some photos with the lovely K. It struck us the other day that we don’t have any photos of each other or together, so we will now go and remedy that.

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“I know you’re an honorable man…”. That phrase is going to influence my life for some time to come.

In light of being that honorable man, you know, the one that I am, I faced the demons of my second task. Yesterday, I tried to get the attention of the Money Man’s Right Hand early in the morning. She was flustered about something; looks like the teachers were crapped out again about the poor performance of the students in pre-lim tests running up to the big, fat, final exams looming just a week or so away.

After she took the punishment from the HoD, they came looking for me, but then the Money Man was off on some or other errand. “What’s wrong?”, she enquired. I didn’t feel like telling her and let her break the news to him without me. “It’s ok, we can talk later”, I said ending the conversation.

A little after lunch she fetched me from the office. “He’s there now”, she said and walked to his office together. He was reading the newspaper. He’s a busy man. “Sit down”, he said in Chinese, patting next to him on the wooden bench he was sitting on to invite me over. Oh, how fatherly, I thought to myself and wondered if he was suspecting what was coming.

I sat down and looked at him while I said it in English, even though he doesn’t understand. “I have some family issues, and I can’t stay”, is how I bluntly put it. I’m South African. It has often been said South Africans get straight to the point. He watched his eyes as The Right Hand translated. He didn’t even flinch. I was a bit disappointed.

I continued to explain the issues around seeing my son and wanting to be there for him growing up, but the restriction with travelling and his mother, etc. The Right Hand has a boy exactly the same age as my son, so I know I had a little of her empathy. Her eyes were a bit watery. Not sure if she was sad for me going or if the heat of the day was getting unbearable. Maybe it was the stress of now having to try and find another teacher.

They didn’t argue, they didn’t protest. They did ask if there wasn’t any way I could stay though, but I said I have been thinking about it for some time, and this really is the only way. They complemented on how my teaching has improved over the year and I thought that from nothing, it is easy to improve to something. Then they asked if I had any suggestions. I have tons, but it’s not my place to deconstruct their entire way of working.

So, I commented on how I would like to see them take English out of the classrooms and introduce it everywhere - where the kids eat, sleep and play. I also said that if I stayed, I would have liked to have a dedicated English class, so that the kids had to come to me, and not like it is now, me to them. It would be a little more interesting for them, and get them excited when they had to come there. Also, it would be possible to make the room into something nice, with English and stuff on the walls, and a storage place for all the props for lessons.

They nodded. The way you nod at a suggestion somebody made, not because you will follow it, but because you want to be polite in their presence.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” the Right Hand finally asked, having translated what the Money Man had said. “Nah”, I said thinking a bit, “I only really need two things. The one is to get all my money paid, including for the return flight.” She translated. “Yeah, no problem”, said the Money Man very enthusiastically, as if there has never been any issue with paying money due to me.

“The other thing”, I continued, “is that I need to leave a few days earlier. My contract ends 30 June, but I need to maybe leave around 27 June”. Again, she translated, and again the Money Man nodded with enthusiasm. “That’s it”, I said finishing off the conversation and aiming to leave.

As I stood up to leave the office, they asked if I had any contacts for people who might want to come work there. Ha, I thought, if I had, would I really recommend them to this school? “Not really”, I said, “but I will email some friends and see what I can find.” I lied. “But I can’t promise anything.”

“Sure”, said the Money Man. “But try anyway”, added the Right Hand. Getting teachers for this school is not that easy. I think, and King agrees, they will struggle to find a replacement.

And that is how I managed to tick off task number two on my devilish list. Now remains only the most horrendous task of all. Facing the Banshee.

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