Let's see so it has been about a month now since my last post. I guess that means I am due for one again.

 

Things are going alright here. To not bore you, or at least bore you less I will not say anything about what I did this last whole month. Instead I will tell about the last few days. On Friday night I went to our school's foreign language corner. This is normally English corner since everyone comes and speaks English. However ever once in a while they make it larger and include the other languages studied here. When these larger corners (I am not sure what to call it) happen it has English, Thai and Vietnamese. Well then you can add Chinese since all of the shy and nervous students only speak their native language instead of the one they are studying. In the English section many students simply circle around the foreign teachers and try to listen to them. While this is all good the whole point is that they should be speaking with each other instead of simply listening to the foreigners. This day out of the four foreign teachers I was the only one who was there. This meant that I was not lacking in an audience no matter where I went. While this is great for an ego boost it can get tiring.

 

On Saturday I went with a friend from the town here and a friend of hers to go swimming. We went to a lake about thirty minutes drive away tucked into the mountains.This was my first time swimming this year so it was really nice. We rented a small bamboo raft and then paddled to the middle of the lake and jumped in swimming around the raft. After swimming for some time we got back onto the raft and ate lunch. One part of the lunch was a sweet roll with a chicken meat patty along with a sweetened fried egg both inside. While this sounds strange and possibly horrible let me tell you about the most ridiculous part. When we bought these rolls they were not being refrigerated. There was no attempt at any part of the life of these little buggers to keep them cold. This sounds so unsafe to me. Yet I am still alive today (Tuesday) and the Chinese seem to live through it (remember it is the most populace country in the world, they know what they are doing.)

 

On Sunday I went with some people to take a river boat cruise down a local river. Along with about twenty Taiwanese tourist (or should I say Chinese tourist, hmm politics) we went down river for an hour and a half. The final destination was ancient cliff paintings besides the river. They are interesting considering what it took to make them and how they could paint something that would last thousands of years. Why is it that with all the advancements in technology our paint only lasts maybe five or ten years in the sun while these people's paint is working thousands of years so far? What are we paying these scientist for?

 

On Monday I had classes. Umm. Enough said I guess.

 

On Tuesday I had no classes since the van we normally take to go to the other campus was needed else where. The other campus is over an hour away so when the van is not available I do not teach there. I then went on a bus adventure on my own. I went to the bus station and got on a bus knowing only the name of the destination city. The city is called Ningming and is 1.5 hours and $1.25 away from Longzhou. While there I wandered around and got plenty of stares and random hellos. There was nothing really amazing there that I found. Yet in spite of this it was fun.

 

If you want to put an image with what I have talked about you can go here: