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So I’ve not been getting much sleep over the last few nights, though i have been unable to keep awake for the evening games - 3am kick off - as I have to get up at 6 for work.  Next week I think i’ll do an ‘allnighter’ as england are playing in the evening. :) 

Chinese TV is usually pretty awful, game shows, talent contests, and ‘historical’ sitcoms from the Chinese Civil War/WW2, depicting the communists as savours.  They love their adverts too, sometimes the breaks can last for ever and with (i suspect) no laws regarding what can be advertised, they try to plug some weird stuff.  From the local hospital, to strange weight loss techniques that are nothing but a fraud (one such is a patch that one puts on the bottom of the foot, clearly a scam)  to herbal teas and medicines.  So I was expecting the football to be interrupted at the very least, but to my surprise, CCTV have done a decent job. 

The coverage is actually pretty good, all of the games are shown live (KO 9pm,midnight, 3am) and full recorded replays the following day.  They have extensive analysis, pundits etc, and seem to know what they are doing.  Most of the games are show on CCTV 5, which is the state run broadcaster’s dedicated sports channel.   Of course everything is in Chinese, which is fine, but it can get tireing after 90 mins of listening to Yue(4) Wei(4)Offside, Tou(2) qiu (2) Header and  jing (4) qiu (2) Goal!

I’m stil trying to figure a way of getting the UK commentary over the web, but as i’m outside of the  UK I need to connect through a proxy and I’m yet to find one that is reliable enough for 90mins 

Just found out how to get this  -  http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/live/surestream.ram 

I think the rain season is here, the air is really damp there’s been some flash floods and the odd electrical storm. I like storms, and the storms here are great. I remember last year being caught in a storm that began with rain then moved on to hail stones. The hail became larger and more intense, I was forced to take cover, and it intensified to lumps of ice about the size of one of those large marbels that children play with. This only lasted for about 3 minutes, but it was so hard that when it stopped, the ground was white and covered with little balls. I foolishly tried put my hand out of the window to catch some of the hail, but It just bounced off my hand and hurt. If I had got caught outside, It could have caused some nasty injuries. This was a really strange experience and extremely localised (some of the students I was with said they had never seen anything like this in Changchun ) - this only affected part of the campus I was on, other parts were totally dry.