Internet!

There's this thing in China called 关系 （guanxi) and it basically means relations. I'll never fully understand it but lately my understanding of it is: I agreed to tutor the new Director of Foreign Affairs and voila, high speed internet is hooked up in my house and I am getting tennis lessons. Works for me! Funny, Peace Corps is the first time in my life that I live in a gated community and have private tennis lessons. So what this means for you guys, all 3 or 4 of my loyal readers, is hopefully it won't be such a pain to update my blog and there might be more updates.

Since my last post, I went to my host sister's 12th birthday party. The great thing about little kids is they speak Mandarin (yay some Chinese education policies) so I could converse with them a lot easier than older Chinese folks. I get aggravated that I have such a hard time with the locals who speak the dialect but when in Sichuan, speak Sichuanese. I got annoyed with a postal worker this semester because I couldn't understand him and I snapped, "Why can't you speak Mandarin?" I felt so bad that day I couldn't sleep and since then I've resolved not be such a self righteous jerk. It's not like I can speak Mandarin well anyway (not even close), so who am I to start making demands.

I also attended the opening ceremony of my school's "Sports Meet" which was all the departments of my school sending Freshmen representatives to walk through our stadium and do some kind of show. It's like the Parade of Nations in the Olympics. Department of Foreign Languages were show stoppers! In my very biased opinion. The Sports Meet by the way is a weekend long event of different events. Kind of like Track and Field day in Elementary School in the US.

And last weekend I went to a Mountain, 天台山 (Tian Tai Shan) with two of my students. Three days with students is a lot but we were on the same page about being as frugal as possible so it worked out pretty well. "Ms. Jeesun, would you find it agreeable to leave at 5AM so we can sneak in before the gate opens and not pay the entrance fee?" "YES." We had a great time. One bummer about China's parks though is that there are steps everywhere, so you never actually get to walk on the dirt. So hiking up the mountain was more akin to walking up flights of stairs.

And now for all you poetry lovers, two Haiku's my students wrote last week in my Writing class for our Poetry Unit. Wonderful and hilarious.

You are so noisy
Can you just shut your pie hole?
Then I can do work

Sonnet is too hard
I cannot do it quickly
Dear god assist me


My colleagues told me although Chinese students love poetry, they are never asked to write their own in school and my class was probably the first time in their lives they were asked to compose their own. Go Peace Corps Go! Rent this if you don't get that reference.

I was planning on including pictures for your edification but I think it's too much for my computer to handle right now. Hopefully later.