A few weeks ago, I was giving some students advice on improving vocabulary and pushing them past their basic English skills. I told them to read the world news and to give them an example, I opened up www.cnn.com and clicked on the first article that was related to China.
This is what came up:

An Article on Pollution and Cancer in China

After reading it, one of the students gasped in astonishment and then said “That’s the river that runs through my hometown! It’s very close to my home!”

I guess that was a good lesson on why people should keep up to date on the news.

So I finished writing my Brit Lit midterm. I’ll post it here after I give it this week. I don’t think any of my students know about my blog at all, but it would be a terrible thing if one of them happened to run across it and I had posted a copy of the exam!

This weekend was the English Department sports meeting.
Kate and I hung around in the morning on Saturday and watched some of the students compete. I went around and took some photos and talked to several students. It was fun to watch them win, but I must admit…it was a bit chilly and it started to drizzle and that took a lot of the enjoyment out of it. We stayed around for pretty much the whole morning bit, but we decided to stay at home and bake brownies instead of going back in the afternoon.

In the evening, we went out with some teachers to a restaurant out the front of the school gate…the menu had a lot of animal guts and some things with blood and parts of frogs. It certainly made our choice of dishes pretty simple! We had a good time talking with our colleagues though. It’s nice to get off campus, even if it’s not far at all.

Today Kate and I went to Luo cheng, a city about an hour from Yizhou. Actually, I was informed that it is technically a part of Yizhou. I don’t quite understand how these Chinese cities work!
We went to visit a school where some students are doing their teaching practice. I’ll post some more and some photos about that tomorrow.

In bad news, I bought a big mirror today- I have only had a tiny mirror the whole time so far, so I was really excited about this one! Well, before I even got to use it, it fell on the floor and shattered. I know it’s just a mirror, and in US dollars it cost me very little, but I was actually quite sad/disappointed/upset about it. Alas. I was kind of excited.
However, in order to put the mirror up, I had to take down a poster I bought at church. I thought about a sermon the pastor gave not long ago about how we shouldn’t be vain. I thought it was kind of amusing that I was taking down a Christian poster to put up a mirror. I guess the shattering of the mirror is a sign that I should work harder not to be vain.

I don’t usually believe in bad luck from silly things like breaking mirrors, but just a little bit ago, I tripped over my computer cord and nearly broke the bit that attaches to the computer. I think I got it back together okay, but to be quite honest, I’m not sure how long it’ll hold out now. I’ve already got to replace the battery on this thing asap (well, with a price of something crazy like $100, it might be a long time) but if the cord goes, I’m completely done for. Well, I’ll just use the library computer, which means I’ll be online for something like 30 minutes a day.
Maybe it would do me good to spend less time at a computer anyway…..
maybe.

This past weekend, I traveled south to Longzhou to visit Kyle. The weather there is unbearably hot compared to Yizhou. We have been getting a significant amount of rain here, but apparently they haven’t gotten the same there.
One thing that Kyle’s city has to relieve the heat that we don’t have here in Yizhou is this strange kind of frozen juice drink. It’s possibly the most delicious thing I’ve ever had. They take fresh fruit, juice it in a blender and add a few things (sugar cane juice and something else I didn’t recognize), then they pour it onto what seems to be a wok that freezes instead of cooks! They move it around on the wok until it’s frozen, then they put it into plastic cups and it costs a meager 2 yuan. Unbelievable.

On Saturday, Kyle and I took a random bus trip to a small village nearby. There really wasn’t a whole lot to see there- I suppose that doesn’t mean much to anyone who hasn’t lived in Guangxi. It was just like every other little village in Guangxi- gorgeous mountains, a rainbow assortment of butterflies, talkative ducks, and curious children.
So, in all honestly, it was absolutely fantastic.

While I was visiting, we also took a bus for half an hour to get to a pool in another village. The water in the pool comes from some local natural spring I guess. The water was nice and cold! Well, that would have been nice, but on our way there it began to pour! There was rain, thunder, and lightening while we were swimming. Perhaps not the safest circumstances to be swimming outside, I suppose. The lightening didn’t seem terribly close though, and I have to admit that one thing that China has done is change my perception of what is dangerous and what is not.
Buses speeding and driving all over the road, riding a motorbike with two other people and no helmet, sitting on the back of a bike and riding in the road, eating in restaurants that are obviously home to cockroaches and mice, eating questionable food: These things are all okay.
It’s crazy to think what I’ve adjusted to in just one year here!

In other news, when I was visiting, Kyle introduced me to this amazing website and I just have to share it with all of you-
www.kiva.org.
It’s a site that allows individual people like you and me to loan money to people who really need it. It’s seems like a great way to help someone if you have limited funds. It’s not really a donation because they will be paying you back, but you’re not earning any interest on it. There are people who want to buy cattle or supplies to start a small shop to support their families. It’s definitely worth a look- I think it’s a great thing to do and a way to have a connection with someone in another part of the world. In this increasingly global world in which we live, it’s getting easier to help people every day, so I don’t see a reason not to.
I didn’t see any people in China listed, but I’m hoping that they can eventually expand to include some folks from the rural areas in southwest China. It sure could help quite a few people.

** Sorry for putting up multiple posts in one day, but my internet was out for a couple of days after I got back, so they piled up.

Ah, so it appears that The Great Firewall of China has struck again.

My photo hosting site, Flickr, has been blocked in China. However, it is a strange sort of blocking. I can see my site, but I can’t see any of the photos posted there. Extremely frustrating. As it turns out, my year-long contract with Flickr runs out in a couple of days, so I now have to decide if it’s worth $25 dollars for me to pay to keep the account. If the block continues, I will be able to upload photos (hopefully- unless more of the site is blocked, which could happen) but I won’t be able to see them.
I suppose that if folks outside of China are enjoying my photos, perhaps I should continue to subscribe to Flickr’s services.
If you want to see a bit more about this situation, you can read about it here.

It could be a situation that will sort itself out soon, or it could simply stay this way for the remainder of my time in China.
Granted, it’s not any sort of dire situation, but I certainly hope that something is worked out rather quickly.