Where In The World Is Evan?

Sorry for the long delay in updates, however, life has been somewhat distracting these last few weeks (or should that be months?). I could offer many and varied excuses for this, but the legitimate ones alone would end up comprising the bulk of this post, so I’ll leave it at ’sorry’.

To give you all the highly abridged version of events: life is good, beer is cheap, and I have a well paying job and an apartment in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan Province, People’s Republic of China.

To wind back in time a little, after stating my intention to remain in China I received a generous offer from a beautiful French woman (hello Anne!) to come and stay with her in the 5-star hotel where she worked and lived (in Chengdu). At the time we were in Xian, where we had meet at an Arab street market a couple of days before, along with Dave, a Canadian I had met in Beijing and had been traveling with for over a week, and Olen, an American that Anne had meet earlier that day. Nonetheless, and having no real plans for finding work to rejuvenate my now overdrawn bank account, I traveled 16 hours across China on a hardsleeper train to take up this hospitable offer (Anne told me later that the flight took about 2 hours). I suspect that if Anne had known how long I’d hang about she might not have been so quick with her generosity.
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Sorry about the delay between posts, however, my teaching schedule has been surprisingly tirering and it’s been a real struggle to make the time to go to an internet caffe. The recent St. Patrick’s day celebrations and my birthday party haven’t helped with my seemingly chronic tiredness (I’ve only had a cumulative 6.5 hours sleep in the last two days).

My birthday celebrations at my new apartment went quite well. As my birthday fell on a Tuesday, and I had to leave for work at 7:30 am the following day, I didn’t do too much on the day itself (just had a quite night in with my late-fifties flatmate and a couple of bottles of bad Chinese wine - unfortunatly the Chinese don’t make any other kind). I did, however, have a great birthday party last night, with much drunken shenannigans and enjoyment had by all - at least all those that could still remember in the morning
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