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This week was a little weird.  My apartment has 2 gates, one in front and one in back.  The front one IS LOCKED!  The back one has a wall built infront of where I need to go; it was just built.  So now, if I am walking, I need to walk for an extra two minutes to get to where the front is.  What do I do?  I ask for it to be open.  They say, “No, theives can come in and steal e-bikes.”  but… 1, i don’t have an e-bike, 2, last semester the gate was always open, why not now?  So I went to my boss about it.  She told me to go to another boss.  I went to the next one, she told me to go to another boss too.  I finally went to the 3rd boss and she said… no.  It’s a “policy”.  I think that’s pretty dumb.  A policy that the gate is locked.  So dumb.  None of the teachers want it locked.  There are 45 teachers here.  I typed up a paper saying that we would liked the gate opened and that we take responsibility for our bikes.  I got all of the teachers to sign their names at the bottom (except for 4 who refused.  1 is afraid, 1 thinks it’s better this one, 1 thinks it’s disrespectful, and 1 thinks… he’s not interested.)  I was going to give this paper to the lady on Thursday, but she left for vacation early.  It’s October, the national holiday.  Everyone was kind of afraid to sign their names at first because they all thought they were going to get fired.  I’m just interested in what the result could be.  Oh yeah, I bought some chocolate for her as kind of a bribe.  I won’t call it that though, i’ll call it… a National day gift!  haha…

We had to have class on Sunday… because we didn’t have class on Wednesday.  Wednesday was the Mid-Autumn festival.  So… they took away a day and made us make it up.  hmm..

Another thing… the weather is about 18 C everyday, which is great, but the mosquitoes have come out in a big number.  A really annoying thing is that I go to sleep…  and it seems like out of no where, they just appear everywhere.  I wake up at 3 in the morning to a buzz around my head, and then I hit myself, trying to kill the mosquito.  I turn on the light and just wait… after 20 minutes, nothing, so I shut off the light again and almost immediately that buzz comes back.  I’ve got bitten in some really strange areas too.  I figured they might be coming out of the air conditioner, so I put bags all around it and inside of it…

Another weird thing is that I was just eating dinner one night  and I got a message from Ao Qing, my friend who lives in Beijing.  he said, “Hey I’m in Wuxi, at your school”  It was like a weird dream, just something appears and changes everything.  He also told me that Hu Yuxi, a guy from Troy, lives in Wuxi!  I guess i’ll get to see him more often. 

Ok!  Here’s all of my students!  There’s probably a picture of one missing because they didn’t come on the first day of class.  They were smiling for their pictures because I made them introduce themselves in English and their local languages.  They laughed when people spoke in the local languages; I guess that was the hardest part for them.  I was surprised to know how many people from Wuxi couldn’t speak the Wuxi language.

Here’s my 3B1 class.  They’re a nice bunch, but a little quiet.  I tried to put the names and student info up, but something went wrong and it won’t let me post that.

I uploaded some new photos that I took while at the Shanghai expo.  If you didn’t go, I don’t think you missed out on much.  Kelly and I went there just recently.

Everyone told me it was so crowded there.  At first, I couldn’t see anybody though.

Later on, when we got to all the pavilions, then we could see more people.  For the small pavilions, you could just walk right in without a wait.  For the big ones that are worth something, you’d have to wait a while.  We got there at about noon, and we planned to leave at about 7:00, so that actually didn’t give us a lot of time to see very much since one pavilion could have a 2 or 3 hour waiting line.  We went to the Asian section first, where there were not many people.  I only wanted to see one place; North Korea.

(looks like i need to start running and using that new sit up bench that I bought more often…)

I knew it was going to be small, but it was just a one room pavilion.  There was a fountain with statues of children dancing and holding up a dove, I guess symbolizing freedom.  There were TV screens holding performances from North Korean people… playing flutes, singing songs, showing children dancing.  Did it show any of North Korea?  No. 

There was a statue and some books from Kim Jung Il.  There was a little fake cave with some fake artifacts in it too.  That was it.  I knew that it was going to be like this, but it didn’t just give me a strange feeling about the North Korea’s pavilion, but it gave me a fake picture of all of the countries represented in the Shanghai Expo.  The fact is, you’ll only ever see the good things which that country wants you to see, not the reality of their country.  That wasn’t just North Korea, that was several other countries as well.

We wanted to see Egypt.  It was small, just one room with some fake relics.  We saw Saudi Arabia, which had a 1 hour line.  It was alright, just showed some movies about how they were poor until everyone found their oil.  I didn’t know that they were big on diving for pearls though.  We were going to go to Germany, but it had a 3 hour waiting line.  We saw Africa…  haha..

Ok, so last, we saw America.  I didn’t want to go there at first, but since we were close by at the time that we were going to leave, we went in.  I’m sorry to say, but it was embarrassing to me.  Outside near the waiting line were some rappers called “Black violin” who were rapping, and that was ok. There were 4 sections to the pavilion.  The first one had an American guy who could speak Chinese ok, but he kept on introducing things about himself, people would ask him questions and he would only respond, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand”.  In Chinese he said, “Are there any Americans here?”  I threw up my arms and said “me”!  He said, Where are you from, and I said Alabama, then he blew me off and said, “I’m half Chinese… no wait, no… I.. I used to go to a university to learn Chinese”  …???  Weird guy.  He was only speaking Chinese.  Then in that room it showed videos of random Americans on the street trying to say Ni Hao and “welcome to the American pavilion”.  In the second room, there was another video screen.  Hilary Clinton, Kobe Bryant, and Tony Hawk said hello… haha… Nobody in China knows Tony Hawk, why did they have him talking?  The video had “people trying to make a difference” in their countries.  It showed a lot of stuff from school, teaching their children how to have imaginations and think freely.  It ended with a video of Obama saying… welcome to the American pavilion… and had some music playing in the background like what you would hear at the hall of the presidents in Disney world.  “Thank you, Chinese citizens, for coming to the American pavilion, I hope that our relations grow strong together in the future and that we can do business together in the future” and all that crap, was what he was saying in the video.  The 3rd room… had another video.  It was a girl living in a bum neighborhood who had a dream to plant a flower and make a little garden in a dirty run down corner of the side of one apartment building, but she was met with a lot of disagreement.  Finally, she spread her idea around to some people who helped her out, and the happiness from that place spread to another, then another, then everywhere.  The 4th room was just a shop.  So in summary, the American pavilion was just saying, “Hey China, we want to have good relations with you.  You need to understand how to think freely and don’t discourage ideas, even from people who you wouldn’t expect good ideas to come from.”  But my overall impression was… all the other pavilions just wanted to show parts of their country and wanted to do fun and entertaining things, but the American pavilion felt more like going to school.

Last… We bought a train ticket back to Wuxi 8 hours in advance.  I forgot that the train back was 8:22, i thought 8:32.  We got there just in time to see the train doors close right in front of us and drive away slowly… The last fast train to Wuxi… so we changed to the slow train, which was just 1 hr and 45 minutes to Wuxi.  Not as bad as I thought it would be.

 

 

I was walking around yesterday because I felt like walking around, and I saw the stadium with people!

 

 

This is the first time that I’ve ever seen an event being held at the stadium.  Everybody was wearing orange, except for a few green shirt guys.  I kind of stood out in the bleachers for a couple reasons.  For one, I wasn’t wearing orange.  Some girls came out with pompoms and did some cheer leading.  Another group of girls came out and did the same thing, so I figured it was a cheerleading competition.

I tried to use my FreeU proxy in China.. and it didn’t work!  In fact none of them do in China anymore!  I don’t know what happened.  I guess i’ll just have to wait until someone finds a way around it.

I was looking through my videos yesterday and noticed that NONE of my videos from last years travel were there!  I looked everywhere, even tried to restore old lost files through a file recovery system, but nothing worked.  The only good thing is that I posted them all on youku and youtube.. so I can download them from there, but they aren’t as good quality as the originals.  I think I still  have all the original single files that I edited to make these files, but… that’s a lot of work.

I’ve been walking around the campus more as of yesterday.  Just walking around listening to Chinesepod on my phone.

It’s hot here.  Not as hot as it was a week ago, but still hot.  I wake up in the morning and sometimes, I can see a dead mosquito on the ground!  I guess it died from the heat?  I hope they don’t die from some disease or something, because that would suck if I got bit! (literally).

I finished reading the book of Matthew in Chinese.  It was hard.  I have a little notebook almost full of words that I wasn’t familiar with.

The only thing left for me here is to … study for a big test that’s coming on November 28.  Gotta read… gotta write.. and apparently I don’t really have to practice speaking, but of course I will.

No one here seems to know when the semester will begin.  I heard September 3, September 13, or even 1 or 2 weeks after September 13.  I don’t know what i’m teaching either.  I don’t think things here are well communicated or organized, but it is the most organized and well communicated school i’ve worked for so far (no offense to ECIT)…

I went to the cafeteria again and this time 2 girls at a table smiled and waved at me.  I thought, “Oh, good, now I can go sit with someone who’s friendly”.  I got my food, and as I was walking over there, another guy who I recognized waved at me.  I couldn’t just go sit with those two girls who i didn’t know when I’ve got a guy who I do know waving at me, so I went to sit with the guy.  He’s a nice guy, but he’s one of those guys kinds of guys that I talk to every now and then who just want to talk about stuff that’s a little bit confusing to me, plus he’s got a slight accent.  He talks to me like Chinese is my first language, and while I can carry on conversations with people… this guy… he likes to talk about Iraq, politics, and stuff.  Even if it were an English conversation I would just be nodding my head the whole time.

There was a Chinese program for the iPod touch called Pleco.  it’s really good.  There were a lot of features that were disabled on it though.  For the first time, I purchased something from the appstore for Pleco though, and i’m a little mad at myself.  This whole time, I’ve been trying to go into their programming and see what it was that disabled the programs (that were already built into the phone) from working instead of buying it.  I finally broke down and bought one of the offers.  I guess i’m not nerdy enough.  Maybe I’ll be able to play around with what it enabled to get the other disabled stuff to work.