Wow, here goes...

Dental stuff: face swelled up after second cleaning on Friday/Saturday, went back and had some horrid stuff removed from under gum, more cleaning today, final bit due Tuesday... Oh, and in keeping with my renewed obsession with all things hygenic, bought new electric toothbrush, mountains of floss etc. etc.

School: couple of dire and very frustrating classes at the end of this week (my lack of patience became very obvious. If nothing else, I'm learning that I really am sure of wanting to keep more dogs in the future and not children!), then a couple of better classes, but severe headache from having a desk surrounded by kids for 8 hours a day. No other language schools in Huwei expect that and it's v.tiring to say the least (woe is me etc.).

Saturday night: went with new dentist friend Paul, Todd (Yankie boy) and Philip (cool new housemate) to a Taiwanese auction in a warehouse about 40km away. Lots of tat (and I MEAN tat!) for sale, lots of Bettlenut-chewing/spitting locals and just three of us weirdo foreigners. Very interesting, I felt like Michael Palin or something. I learnt bits of Chinese, got given tons of free food, and learnt some essential Taiwanese phrases (like 'big schlong' for instance!), but very tired due to early Saturday start at school.

Today (Sunday) - back to dentists for more work (not too much pain, more Chinese taught by dentist, Paul, he really is a great guy. Then took Philip to Taichung City to try and find footie-playing foreigners. Due to unannounced cold weather, that didn't happen, so we wandered around, laid in the park, found some school kids to confuse with our attempted Chinese. They then helped us get a bus (free!) across the city to the bus station and the bus home, at which point we also bumped into my student Eddie who told us all kinds of dodgy 'cultural' (i.e. laddish) information I simply can't publish here and then bought us fried chicken and sweet potatoes.

Bizarre, like I said. Laters.