Blog entry 10/5/2009

Hello from Wanzhou China. I'm sorry I'm so late in writing this blog entry. I've been waiting to write something until I had a solid idea of what I'm doing here as well as solid employment. And as of now each of these two things are a bit hazy. Things in this country are as organized as a headless chicken (i.e. things get done but you have to run around and wait for a long time), which can be quite frustrating. As of now though I have started Chinese classes several times a week and am supposed to begin teaching English to Business majors and Literature majors (which should be very interesting).

Aside from the frustration of not having a teaching schedule things here are going well. The town I live in is called Wanzhou, which is three hours away from Chongqing (these are in the western/central part of the country). To find it on Google maps type in Wanxian, san xia institute/three gorges institute (that’s my school), or follow the river north from Chongqing until you hit a major highway. It is a smallish town with close to one million people! There is a downtown area but it is also very easy to walk to the countryside and get almost completely away from the town. Being a small town the pollution is not bad either (we actually have fairly consistent sunny days!).

I would definitely say I am in the middle of China both physically and culturally. The only western restaurants here are McDonalds and KFC which means for me there is Chinese food every day for every meal (which isn't bad because I like the food here). With the exception of some of the students, the people here either don't know any English or very little and are perfectly happy to speak Chinese as fast as they possibly can.... there are many times when I'm wearing a confused look on my face when I talk with people.

Currently I'm on National Day/Mid-Autumn Festival break for this week. I was able to see the national day parade in Beijing (well, on TV that is) and eat some Moon Cakes (which are the traditional snack people eat during the Autumn festival). The people here celebrate holidays by seeing relatives, eating meals together and compulsively shopping. I expected the town to be pretty quiet on the holidays but, in reality, you can hardly move in some places so many people are out shopping (its almost like the time period after Thanksgiving).

Aside from that I have eaten some interesting things in meals with Chinese people. No dog meat but I have ingested cow tongue, cow stomach, pig ears, pig tongue, and my favorite (and by that I mean most disturbing) pig brain!

At the school there are six foreigners. Five other teachers from the US and one student from Poland. I live in my own apartment which is nice (although I have no motivation to clean not having any sort of room mate).

So in all things are going pretty well except for the confusion about my position and this @#$!&*#@ing firewall which is still blocking Facebook and BlogSpot.
Hope everyone is well.