Zhuhai Adventures

The plane touches down, we are at Hong Kong International Airport on Chek Lap Kok Island; straight off the plane, we wait for our luggage to be loaded onto the bus, we journey over the Hong Kong Zhuhai Macau Bridge, filter through the Zhuhai passport control and then into a taxi heading from downtown Zhuhai to Tangjia the district which will be our home.
We check into our hotel where the reception staff are very efficient but which doesn’t extend to helping with our massive and numerous bags, nor to showing us how to get to the lift. The hotel restaurant only serves breakfast and we are very hungry, it is 8pm Chinese time and the last time we ate was breakfast on the plane.
Rob has found a local expat group on WeChat who have all sorts of useful recommendations. Rather than try to negotiate a restaurant at this early stage: ‘We don’t eat meat or fish, we eat like Monks’ we set off to find Mr Pizza run by an English-speaking couple and frequented by expats. He has also downloaded a Chinese map App, is there no end to this man’s skills? It seems not, as within 10 minutes walk, he spots an Italian awning in a row of Chinese shops- it’s Mr Pizza! The owners, Jonathan and Evie are very welcoming. They recognise our fresh-faced naivety and immediately introduce us to almost everyone else in the restaurant.
There is Dave from Sunderland and his Chinese wife and her sister, they are enjoying cocktails. Jolene and her husband and young daughter are sitting with a colleague of hers, Sabrina. More names are thrown our way and friendly faces turn and give us a wave – some people are sitting in the cool of the air-conditioned restaurant, but others are sitting our front risking the mosquitoes in the humid night air to have a beer and a cigarette. There is a very friendly ‘end of a busy week’ kind of atmosphere.
We chat with Dave and Jonathan, and the universal language of football teams is a useful way in. Once we have ordered, we get talking to Matthew, he works at the same University as we will be joining, which is more than a coincidence, as Zhuhai has over 2 ½ million inhabitants and at least 6 Universities of one type or another.
I pal up with Jolene, she is Vice Principal of an International School with entry from Kindergarten to High School Level. She is in charge of the little ones this year and very soon we are sharing teaching stories, she wants to introduce more Drama into the curriculum this year, would I ? Could I? Help? She calls Sabrina over, she is the second Vice Principal at the school, she wants to workshop ‘Othello’ with the sixth form students in October, shall we meet to discuss the possibilities? We all chat comfortably for another hour or so. Then the jet lag begins to kick in, Rob and I head back to the hotel, but not before sharing WeChat numbers with our new-found friends. Is this really our first night ? Seems like I’ve just been offered two jobs?
Back at the hotel we shower in the enormous ensuite and fall exhausted into bed, where we lie wide awake for the next few hours.