My blog is getting spammed like crazy every day.
I get loads and loads of comments about stuff that I really don’t care to get messages about. Ugh.
Good thing I moderate all the comments before they go up otherwise you’d see 29 comments a day about getting cheap prescription drugs.

In other news, my Nanning photos are now up. Huzzah for that! I’m actually keeping up to date on one small part of my life.

Next week Kyle and I are going to Vietnam for a few days. I’ve managed to rearrange three of my classes so this week I don’t have my usual Friday off and next week I don’t have my usual Monday off. I’ve got classes all morning tomorrow and then afternoon on Monday. However, it’ll be worth it to have an extra day in Hanoi.
I’m really excited. I thought Hanoi was quite lovely last year, but there were a few things we missed…well, many things that we missed. It’ll be great to get to see what we didn’t see before.

As far as things go here, we’ve got what apparently seems to be Yizhou’s spring right now. It’s a strange mix of heavy rain, cloudy skies, and warm sunshine. Sometimes one of those will stick around, but often we get all three in a day which is, to say the least, confusing.
However, it can stick around for as long as it wants! I definitely prefer this to the summer weather that’s just around the corner.

Well, time sure flies.
I haven’t written in a while and you may have noticed that some of my posts of ‘disappeared’.
I’ve got to be a bit more careful about what I write, so that had to be taken care of.

Anyway, I’m back once again.

For those of you who happen to check out my Flickr photos, you may see that I’ve been uploading (more to come) photos of all of my students. I just had midterm exams, so I’ve gotten a picture of each of them. Labeling them to post them up has been quite helpful as far as getting me to remember names and faces. Too bad I don’t have much time left.

Thought I’d share a quick humorous exam story. The freshmen, as one part of their exams, had to give a short (2-3 min) speech about themselves.
I was listening to one girl’s speech and suddenly she surprised me with this sentence:
“I’m not very good at intercourse.”
I’m sure that she didn’t mean it as I heard it, but wow, it was terribly hard not to laugh out loud at that one. I wrote in her comments that she might want to rethink that phrase, so I’m sure she’ll be asking me about it later this week.

This weekend, Kyle and I met up in Nanning. We’re planning a (very!) short trip to Vietnam at the end of the month, so I had to pick up my passport and visa.
It was incredibly hot there (I am absolutely dreading this heat…I despise humidity) and it seems, now that I am back, that the heat has picked up in Yizhou as well.
I had a fantastic time. We met up with other teachers that we know for dinner, we walked around the city, found real ice cream, (No joke! New Zealand ice cream for only 6 yuan per scoop. Anyone who’s in Nanning should look for it. It’s amazing.) working on wedding/marriage planning, and we visited the medicinal plant garden.
I’ll be posting photos on Flickr sometime this week. Perhaps tomorrow, if I get around to it.
One of the great things about the weekend was attending church this morning. We went to this church with other teachers last year and it was quite similar to other Chinese Christian churches. However, this time it was different. They had an English translation of the service! We got a headset and the translation was broadcast over the radio and into our headsets. It’s such a fantastic thing to know what’s going on rather than constant guessing. This is the first time I’ve sat through a service in Guangxi and had the whole sermon translated for me. I loved it.

Speaking of churches and China- I don’t think I ever remembered to post this article from last fall. I was contacted about the use of some of my photos for an article about Bible printing in China. It’s definitely worth your time to check it out:
http://shanghaiist.com/2008/01/03/godless_china_t.php

Ah, yes- and the BIG news-

I finally have plane tickets to go home! Huzzah!
On the morning on June 26th, I will be flying from Nanning to Beijing, then Beijing to San Francisco. I will stay there for a while and then on July 8th, I’ll fly from San Francisco to Texas (strange layover, if you ask me!) then from Texas to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
It feels good to know when I’m getting home now.
To be honest, simply knowing that I have a flight makes me itch to get out of here.
It’s probably for the best that I didn’t have tickets earlier.

It’s going to be really hard to leave China, but for the moment, the idea of seeing people that I haven’t seen in nearly 2 years over-rides all of that.

Two posts in two days!
Now I’m making progress.

It’s yet another dreary type of day here. Last week it was all sunshine and cerulean skies peppered with white, fluffy clouds. As soon as Thursday afternoon crept up on us, so did the rainclouds. Most days since then (it’s Monday afternoon here) have been plagued with gray skies, sprinkles, and showers. Naturally, this is the kind of weather that is conducive to staying indoors and getting things done…right?

Alas, it is not always so for me. Somehow, I find the endless thick clouds distracting and melancholy. Therefore, instead of staying in and actually making progress, I’m staring at book covers and pondering the existence of the word “towards”. (That dilemma is solved, thanks to my trusty friend www.dictionary.com- Usage Note: Some critics have tried to discern a semantic distinction between toward and towards, but the difference is entirely dialectal. Toward is more common in American English; towards is the predominant form in British English.)

There are things to be planned and finished. There are things to be sent, taken care of, and applied for. I am certainly well aware of these things. They eat at my inner stomach lining like soft, black leeches with sharp teeth. I know I need to take care of them, but I just can’t seem to get myself to move. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be a sloth in a tree. (I was always terrified those creatures as a child…photos in science books made them look mean and dirty)

The cracks in my bedroom floor tiles are getting worse. You know, I’m not sure I’ve mentioned them before. Sometime last term, a tile developed a crack. Then it began to spread. When I came back from the holiday, the tiles had begun to move up as though some force was putting pressure on them from below. It’s really quite strange. Mary (co-teacher/friend/waiban-foreign affairs assistant) was over here today to take a look at it, so I’m expecting that it’ll get fixed sometime in the near future. It’s certainly not life-threatening, so I’m not terribly bothered about it, to be honest. Mostly I just think it’ll get worse and it’ll be more work for the school if I just let it go. For now, I just avoid those two tiles (which are unfortunately directly behind the chair I’m sitting in at the moment.

Here’s a sign of how behind I’ve gotten with my emails. My dear friend Cynthia sent me a link to download some music ages ago (I honestly don’t know the exact date) and I didn’t bother to download them until last week and I didn’t even get a chance to listen to the album until today.
I’ve certainly been missing out. It’s an album by Alela Diane called “The Pirate’s Gospel” and it’s absolutely fantastic. Highly recommended. Perhaps a bit behind the times, but recommended nonetheless.
Now playing: Alela Diane - The Pirate’s Gospel
via FoxyTunes

I just got word that a fellow Amity teacher was “was injured in an unfortunate encounter with a dog” recently. He’s now in the hospital being treated and he got the lovely rabies injections. Ugh! Scary thought. I suppose I ought to be more careful than I am currently when it comes to animals.

I think I’ll end this post with a photo from my trip in Sumatra as a tribute to sunnier days.

It’s embarassing to have written a post promising more posts and then I completely disappeared for ages afterwards.
I’m quite sorry.

Here’s a quick update…

The term ended…a flurry of spoken exams, written exams, marking, turning grades in (after rewriting them countless frustrating times- I’m terrible at copying numbers by hand), and traveling.

First, Kyle, Kate, and I met up with Andrew and Lucretia (two other Amity teachers from the U.S.- they’re fantastic) in Yangshuo (the famous tourist town outside of Guilin). It was COLD. We spent the vast majority of our time indoors eating and watching DVDs on big screens in restaurants. All in all, it wasn’t a terrible way to spend several days. I had a good time.

Then, we traveling to Guiyang in Guizhou province for my last Amity Winter Conference. It was great to see folks, but somewhat bittersweet knowing that this is the last time I’ll see most of them.
The weather in Guiyang was hideous! Seriously cold and icy.
There was supposed to be a visit to an Amity project- a biogas thing. I was really looking forward to seeing how this works. However- the weather was too bad and most of the roads were closed, so that bit was cancelled and the conference ended early. Most folks were flying out, but they got stuck at the airport for days! Well, they ended up in hotels at night. Kyle and I thought we made a good choice by getting train tickets. Boy…were we wrong.
It’s a long story- but the train station was mass chaos! Trains hadn’t gone for days. People were sleeping in the station. It was definitely below freezing inside and out. Our train was meant to leave for Guangzhou at 10.35 am…. we were lucky we got to leave at all! We were told that our train would leave the next morning (after hours of ‘it’s cancelled….maybe….we don’t know’) but then Kyle randomly showed a train security person our tickets at 1 am. She then rushed us onto a train that left two minutes later! We nearly missed it! Insane!

The train was definitely at least freezing-literally-the whole time we were on it…all 31 hours! Oh my goodness. It was not fun.
When we arrived at the station we came upon the largest crowd I’ve seen in my life! Over 100,000 people waiting and LOTS of police surrounding the building. Wow. If you look at any news article about the crazy weather in China, it’ll probably show a photo of that station.

Most of the metro stations near the train station were closed off, but we walked to one further out and made it to our hostel. We were looking forward to nice warm showers….I got in and - no hot water! I decided to tough it out and shower anyway. It turned out that for some reason the city shut off hot water or something. Really confusing. Basically, there was no hot water for our entire time there. And it was cold.

The night before our flight out, my sister and my parents called to tell me that my grandmother died. Apparently she had gotten sick and she didn’t pull through. It’s still quite a shock to me. It’s hard since I’m here and I can’t get home. Kyle and I looked into flights and it would cost me quite a bit over 1,000 just to fly into Chicago. Please keep my family in your prayers.

This afternoon Kyle and I arrived in Singapore. It’s really nice here. Raining and hot, but so far I like it. We had originally intended to go see ‘La Triviata’- I’ve been wanting to see it for years- I’m a big Verdi fan. However, I was a bit of a mess this afternoon and we got a later start than intended, so we missed it. Oh well. There are other things to do. It’s a big city!
They speak English! And it’s clean! No spitting!
We had toast with peanut butter for dinner/lunch.

Oh. My internet time is almost up.

I will do my best to write more soon.

I’ll be here, Malaysia, and Sumatra.
Adventures.

I’m cccccccold.

The mornings and nights here are extra chilly.
Truly told me last week that this winter is going to be colder than last winter.
Oh no!

I’m on a search for more layers and thermal underwear.
However, I don’t think I’m going to have much luck at all in those departments.

I’m in for a long, cold, winter.
Especially when I travel to Tibet in January/February.
I hope I survive.