busy busy bees

i am so sorry it has taken me almost three weeks to post again. i have been so busy. china is like that. activity comes in waves. i think i am again, easing my way off the crest, and into a trough, but i can see the next rise. i have been occupying my time with classes and students, learning chinese, spring cleaning, learning to cook chinese food, travel, and trying to plan a week long trip for the labor week break.

chinese class recently has been challenging. i am really getting a handle on the reading and writing, but my listening and speaking isn't very good. the biggest problem i have is that i don't need to say a whole lot. i have been dealing with the same people for two years now. i have my favorite food stands, stores, and restaurants on the campus, and i have been going to them since the very beginning. i didn't speak any chinese in the first few weeks so we worked out a system of communicating and nothing has changed. i could say more, but since i am a little shy, i am content to leave things as they are. but not really. amy is really having to force me to do listening and speaking. i'd like to think i am not as reluctant and difficult as my students, but i am resisting some. duff's listening comprehension and speaking is coming along very well. i think we should strike a deal where i do all the reading and writing and he does all the listening and speaking.

amy has started teaching 1/2 the class in chinese and 1/2 the class in english. i can tell i am getting a lot better. my brain hurts when i leave lesson. she is a really fantastic teacher and i will miss her and her instruction terribly when we leave.

in the next few days i will provide an account of our trip to phoenix city in hunan province. we had an amazing time, and relaxing travel thanks to carol, our friend who took us.

we have one more week of classes and then we start the may break. the may break is a national week-long holiday in china. it is their week-long version of labor day. i am always getting frustrated with my students because they haven't a very good concept of the individual, they always think of themselves within a group. this is great in many ways, but when it comes to tests and copying homework.....

china has a very uniform society. we can see this every day. everyone does the same thing at the same time. this makes traffic easy, and the high hours at restaurants. everyone gets a two hour break at the university in the middle of the day. from 12:00 to 1:00 the restaurants are packed. everyone is eating. from 1:00 to 2:00 they are deserted. everyone is taking a nap. everyone goes to work and comes home at the same time. this makes traffic a nightmare, but the timing of traffic jams is very predictable. the whole country is on the same time zone. everyone goes on vacation at the same time. this makes planning a trip a horror.

katie and lindsay are stopping through china at the end of their india trip. we are going to spend the may break together. our plan is to go to yunnan province in southwestern china. getting tickets has proved almost impossible. the air tickets seem to go up exponentially in price day by day. we cannot afford them, so we are going to risk getting train tickets. the problem with purchasing train tickets in china is you cannot purchase tickets departing from any city unless you are in that city. we meet katie and lindsay in macao, and we want to take the train from guangzhou to kunming. we cannot buy tickets departing from guangzhou in wuhan, so we are trying to get a chinese friend of ours who lives in guangzhou to buy them for us. the most challenging part is going to be finding tickets back to wuhan. oh, china. you are so complicated! yet so much fun.