So it was my birthday on Monday. Didn’t do anything special, spent most of the morning sleeping as It was the first day in over two months that I haven’t had to get up at some ghastly hour in the morning. 

  Did receieve a very nice cake from the department and a free meal - a very nice touch and somthing that I didn’t expect.     When I went downstairs they actually knew it was my birthday and congratulated me, I was taken aback.  I would never have expected this, not in China.  

Organisation is hardly a stong point of Chinese universities – At a previous school the administration didn’t even know my name – even after working there for a year!  I assumed it was the same everywhere, how wrong I was.    

The class I had that evening pleasantly surprised me by singing a rendition of ‘生日快乐’’Happy Birthday’  when I entered the classroom.  Which made my day!!       

Moving on –  I haven’t been able to post on-line for a while due to the university internet connection firewalling this site, so I’m currently writing from my local internet bar.  It’s really frustrating but I’m told that it’s because the uni doesn’t like people looking at external sites as they pay money for the amount of bandwidth they use outside Chinese IP addresses.  It’s nothing to do with the government clamping down,  it’s simply a cost-saving exercise!   Fortunatly the students have set up a system whereby they publish daily lists of available proxies on the internal BBS system.  When the uni finds these they block them, then some new proxies are published and then blocked and so on and so forth…. 

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