Thanksgiving and Apartments

22nd November
Today I made it to class after only 4 hours sleep!! Got my reading exam result in class which wasnt great, and then in speaking I found out I got 89 which is a miracle cos it went so badly.

Sarah has a teaching job, which is teaching business english and this afternoon we went to her class to help. The people in the class got put into groups of 4 and we each had a group and we had to ask them interview questions and correct their english. It was quite fun and my group were really good and spoke amazing english so it was pretty easy, and then we just ended up talking about music and films.

This evening we went out with Justin for a thanksgiving meal. We went to the spot bar and the food was soooooooo good. I had a massive main course and I was so full afterwards I could hardly move, but I still managed to eat a pudding. All that and half a litre of beer was only £10!!! Amazing.

23rd
Nothing really happened today. Went to a nice Uygur restaurant for tea and then we watched the dvd that Justin brought round. It was really good, its a Michael Moore film called Sicko. I would recommend it.

24th
This morning we went to look for apartments and Sarah asked one of the chinese guys from her class to come and help us. We went into the first estate agent and it was far too expensive and they were blatantly just trying to rip us off because we're foreign. So we went to the estate agent just further down and they arranged 2 places for us to see. We had a bit of time before we were going to see them so we went for lunch. The first apartment we saw was really nice and very spacious, and the one after was really good. So we decided to go for the first one, and sarah and fran would have the other one. I had to go and teach at half 3 and it was really crap today because I didnt have an assistant for the first half of the lesson and the children were just going crazy and shouting. After class we went back to the estate agents to sign for our apartment and vanessa came to help us and be our translator. But we had to wait for 2 hours and they kept telling us that the landlord was stuck in traffic. And then at 10pm they told us that he wasnt going to come and sign the contract unless we paid more rent so we said no, and it was really annoying.

We later found out that the first estate agents we went to had followed us to see which apartments we were going to view, and they had contacted this landlord and told him they they could get someone to pay more than us. Its really annoying especially since sarah and fran had signed for their apartment, and we were hoping to get 2 close together.

25th
Today I got up and went to the antiques market in town and got a few christmas presents. It was so hard to find, and I managed to walk all the way around it before I actually found it - my map reading skills arent good. I went back to the estate agents in the afternoon because they had arranged for 2 more flats for us to see. I got there a bit earlier than everyone else so I just went and sat inside the agency and the woman who worked there insisted on showing me pictures of loads of flats, even ones that were for like 8 people. It was a bit strange.

The first one was saw was a definate no, it didnt have a good vibe and was really minging. The second flat was really nice tho and so we decided to go for it and it was in a good location too because its near a metro station. So we went back to the estate agents and signed for it and we move in in 12 days!!!! Also, I got to ride on the back of a moped to go and see the flats which was most exciting!!! And because we had just signed for our flat we went for a celebratory meal at KFC.