Back to Urumqi

And so we were back in Urumqi for life to continue as normal. But things had been changing in our absence! Before going away, Tobin had written a pretty forceful letter to the powers-that-be at our university, demanding better standards or a refund on his tuition fees. The teachers then had finally listened to our complaints about the Kazakh students paying no attention and disrupting the class and had decided to split the class on technically politically incorrect and very clearly racist lines: one class comprised of Central Asian students, and the other the British: me, Liam, Catherine, Rachel and Tobin, the Koreans: Xuyingxi and Peixiangfeng, and the solitary Russian: Galina.
Our very tightly strung reading class teacher was off on some kind of mystery sabbatical (my vote goes to complete nervous breakdown) and we had a new teacher for this class. This teacher seemed to be a better teacher in terms of technical teaching standard, but clearly hated us and we're to this day not sure why.
They had also changed our books at long last: we finally had an acceptable reading book! Naturally, for this is the Chinese way, we didn't actually have it in our possession for the first class, so our brand new teacher had to make up a class on the spot. She opted for telling fairytales from the countries we're from, which made for a pretty good class. They also changed our listening and speaking books too, but instead of giving us the new books, they gave us photocopies of the chapters they taught from. Not ideal, but at least the standard was a little closer to what we needed. I say a little closer because the standard was really very low; so simple in fact that it got dull at times. Plus our teacher still didn't know how to teach, which meant the change of book was pretty useless.
So it was all change at the university! I'll tell you more about what my classes are like sometime when I have the willpower to wade through the frustration that is discussing/dealing with our university in any way.