Yeah...
God... I feel so nostalgic and depressed right now. China's been relly great and I have a bunch of lifelong friends that I can alwayys share something great with but I miss my friends back home. I've been reading Livejournal for a while, And Liz hasn't posted in month, (and neither have I I know, and I just feel so shitty. Reading tricias and vio's blog I just feel like everyone's changing and I'm not around. Tricia has really changed from the highschooler that she used to be back at Dobson and I just wonder about what has happened to all of my friends. Where are maria, erika, marta, sarah, ivan, megan, teena, Erik, Carl and matt, the other matt and chris, Kevin, Juan, keegan and John.. all of those people!... Where are they now? pff....
This program on the other hand... hah... it's such a joke... We've been in class for three weeks now, now let me explain why that is stupid! The biggest and most festive day of the year is spring festival, 春节, Chinese New year, The first day of the first month of the Lunar calendar, when everyone turns one year older, no matter what. And every school has a nice vacation in that time. Nanjing University of technology has one that is forty days long and started it one week before our classes began, so for a little over a month of the four months we will spend here we will have little to no contact with chinese people on campus... so much for emersion... hah... but the semester started off okay. It's so strange to be with a new class of students that knows nothing about china, not that I'm an expert, but God this country is vastly different than anything you get to hear about in the US. The new students are so... strange too. I think all but one of them is white, so as two mexicans left last semester there is only me and Rossil left for this semester. and I can't stand her sometimes because she's so mean to people. She hated pauline now she hates my new friend Leslie from florida. They fired the best staff member I think under the recomendation of Fu Laoshi's mom. And there is a whole deal going on there. Fu Laoshi is working on her doctorate, I think in syracuse, but took this year off to be the coordinator of chinese language program here, basically shi laoshis job. NAd she is getting married to the Henry the dude on the brochure, the director of all of the academics here... unethical??? well two of the teachers from last semester quit because of it and now we have one teacher to replace them. Who is quite cool. she is Gao Laoshi, speaks some spanish and prolly has better english than the other two put together. So you might think isn't there a lackage of teachers? of course!!!! So Dong Laoshi, my teacher and the only teacher left from last semester, besides fu, teaches the 403 class and the 201-202 class and the 202-403 class. This last one is the most interesting because the people in it--and this is my major point of grief--have to take 403 with evryone in the regular 403 class, and have to take the 201-202 class. So right now they are doing shit that they cannot hope to comprehend without 202 in their background, and they will not start 202 until halfway through the semester, at which point it will be so fast they will be learning about 100 new words a week in adition to the ones we learn in 403.... For me this means that our class is slowed down for them and I get to stick my finger in my but more... Other than that things have been as usual. Bad planning and scheduling causing havoc all around...
I should tell you about our trip to meet the bnew students, though. so we started with plans for jan 13 to go to Huang shan, Yellow mountain in Hebei province about 10 hours and 200 kuai away. It was gonna be fun, but cold. Huang shan is one fo the most famouse mountains in china and we would hit it off tourist season. It was me Pauline, Noel and his gf Honey (yes, don't let the name confuse you she is chinese). but honeys parents didn't want her to go because of ice/snow, cougars, noel, or bandits, one of those or maybe a little of each. So Noel didn't want to go... well huangshan with us two just didn's seem as much fun so we rea arranged it to go to honey's hometown Zhenjiang, the capital of vinegar for china, and then to Suzhou, The venice of china. We went to Zhenjiang and looked around, it was cool but when we were going to Suzhou Honey told Noel she wasn't going. So Noel was angry and didn't come out of his hotel the whole time we were in Suzhou. Me and Pauline walked around the city bought a shirt for me and a qipao for her and ate nonstop. It was great! By the ay the city looks nothing like venice... but it is a great city. So afterward we headed to shanghai to meet the new students. it had started to rain in suzhou but not hard. Shanghai, however was awful. If the summer with the humidity and heat and vinegar and sweat and smell of nast evrywhere was bad, at least it had beautiful views. This was just depressing. Hard rain nonstop, cold and awful. The fog never lifted when we were there. but one night Jason, the oldest guy in the program, 30ish (we have an AfAm mom here who is 50), used to be a bartender at Bennigans in Florida and was also in the Navy, took us to a bar. Now Jason is cool. He's into Taiqi andhas at least one friend, usually a girl, in every major city in china. He did it through myspace and connections in order to... always have a friend in every major city in China! Brilliant. (see him here http://www.jasoninchina.com/ )
Well he took us to this bar under the bud, called I (heart) shanghai. Run by filipinos, it was cool, 100 kuai got you all the low end beers and mix drinks you can handle from 8-12 or 150 for all alcahol available from 8-2 am. so pauline got really drunk, and she got all violent with noel and tried taking his hat off all the time and trying to drink his whiskey and coke after 12.. and eded up spilling a lot of stuff on him and crying a lot. It was so cute! I laugh now when I think about it, but I was pretty scared then. Then we played rummy for a couple hours until she started sobering up (which she cheats at even when drunk!). All in all it turned okay. But o yeah, These new kids haven't stoppd drinking since they got here. A few of them we know have alcohol problems... but eh, when in China!god, well I wanna hear from the few of you that read this gove me a message or soemthin...
This program on the other hand... hah... it's such a joke... We've been in class for three weeks now, now let me explain why that is stupid! The biggest and most festive day of the year is spring festival, 春节, Chinese New year, The first day of the first month of the Lunar calendar, when everyone turns one year older, no matter what. And every school has a nice vacation in that time. Nanjing University of technology has one that is forty days long and started it one week before our classes began, so for a little over a month of the four months we will spend here we will have little to no contact with chinese people on campus... so much for emersion... hah... but the semester started off okay. It's so strange to be with a new class of students that knows nothing about china, not that I'm an expert, but God this country is vastly different than anything you get to hear about in the US. The new students are so... strange too. I think all but one of them is white, so as two mexicans left last semester there is only me and Rossil left for this semester. and I can't stand her sometimes because she's so mean to people. She hated pauline now she hates my new friend Leslie from florida. They fired the best staff member I think under the recomendation of Fu Laoshi's mom. And there is a whole deal going on there. Fu Laoshi is working on her doctorate, I think in syracuse, but took this year off to be the coordinator of chinese language program here, basically shi laoshis job. NAd she is getting married to the Henry the dude on the brochure, the director of all of the academics here... unethical??? well two of the teachers from last semester quit because of it and now we have one teacher to replace them. Who is quite cool. she is Gao Laoshi, speaks some spanish and prolly has better english than the other two put together. So you might think isn't there a lackage of teachers? of course!!!! So Dong Laoshi, my teacher and the only teacher left from last semester, besides fu, teaches the 403 class and the 201-202 class and the 202-403 class. This last one is the most interesting because the people in it--and this is my major point of grief--have to take 403 with evryone in the regular 403 class, and have to take the 201-202 class. So right now they are doing shit that they cannot hope to comprehend without 202 in their background, and they will not start 202 until halfway through the semester, at which point it will be so fast they will be learning about 100 new words a week in adition to the ones we learn in 403.... For me this means that our class is slowed down for them and I get to stick my finger in my but more... Other than that things have been as usual. Bad planning and scheduling causing havoc all around...
I should tell you about our trip to meet the bnew students, though. so we started with plans for jan 13 to go to Huang shan, Yellow mountain in Hebei province about 10 hours and 200 kuai away. It was gonna be fun, but cold. Huang shan is one fo the most famouse mountains in china and we would hit it off tourist season. It was me Pauline, Noel and his gf Honey (yes, don't let the name confuse you she is chinese). but honeys parents didn't want her to go because of ice/snow, cougars, noel, or bandits, one of those or maybe a little of each. So Noel didn't want to go... well huangshan with us two just didn's seem as much fun so we rea arranged it to go to honey's hometown Zhenjiang, the capital of vinegar for china, and then to Suzhou, The venice of china. We went to Zhenjiang and looked around, it was cool but when we were going to Suzhou Honey told Noel she wasn't going. So Noel was angry and didn't come out of his hotel the whole time we were in Suzhou. Me and Pauline walked around the city bought a shirt for me and a qipao for her and ate nonstop. It was great! By the ay the city looks nothing like venice... but it is a great city. So afterward we headed to shanghai to meet the new students. it had started to rain in suzhou but not hard. Shanghai, however was awful. If the summer with the humidity and heat and vinegar and sweat and smell of nast evrywhere was bad, at least it had beautiful views. This was just depressing. Hard rain nonstop, cold and awful. The fog never lifted when we were there. but one night Jason, the oldest guy in the program, 30ish (we have an AfAm mom here who is 50), used to be a bartender at Bennigans in Florida and was also in the Navy, took us to a bar. Now Jason is cool. He's into Taiqi andhas at least one friend, usually a girl, in every major city in china. He did it through myspace and connections in order to... always have a friend in every major city in China! Brilliant. (see him here http://www.jasoninchina.com/ )
Well he took us to this bar under the bud, called I (heart) shanghai. Run by filipinos, it was cool, 100 kuai got you all the low end beers and mix drinks you can handle from 8-12 or 150 for all alcahol available from 8-2 am. so pauline got really drunk, and she got all violent with noel and tried taking his hat off all the time and trying to drink his whiskey and coke after 12.. and eded up spilling a lot of stuff on him and crying a lot. It was so cute! I laugh now when I think about it, but I was pretty scared then. Then we played rummy for a couple hours until she started sobering up (which she cheats at even when drunk!). All in all it turned okay. But o yeah, These new kids haven't stoppd drinking since they got here. A few of them we know have alcohol problems... but eh, when in China!god, well I wanna hear from the few of you that read this gove me a message or soemthin...