Meeting some new friends

Today we spent most of the day looking at apartments and discovered that Hangzhou is quite expensive from this point of view. Of course nothing compared to my native London, but more expensive than my wife's Taichung. Actually renting in Hangzhou is almost twice as expensive as Taiwan's Taichung and English teaching salaries are almost a third of that in Taichung, so on discovering that, we started to get more and more nervous about the viability of staying in that city.

We met up with some local foreigners in an "Irish Pub" (They sell Guiness and play the Pogues very loudly) and sat in the smoke filled bar for a couple of hours shouting at each other over Shane's dulcet poptones, such pleasantries!

What we did discover however that work opportunities are quite limited in Hangzhou and that Shanghai was the best place to search for work, but with rents being twice the cost of Hangzhou the viability of us being able to set ourselves up quickly and easily on a limited budget was rapidly becoming a remote possibility.

Back to the drawing board perhaps?