Tuesday, May 11, 2010

End of the weekend

Tuesday night, and the beginning of another work week for me. We have a meeting tomorrow morning and with my changed schedule, I will have no time at home for lesson planning tomorrow at all, so I spent several much of today working.

A colleague and I are hoping to take a trip to Qingdao on our "weekend" next Monday and Tuesday and come home Wednesday, so I am also trying to get some of next week's work prepped because I have to head for class at 3:30pm on Wednesdays.

Yesterday she and I went to a local park/botanical garden here in Jinan. We were both pleasantly surprised how nice the park was, especially since there was no admission fee. It is a nice large park with a little lake, and trees and rose arbors everywhere. Most of the roses had few blossoms but a million buds, so we hope to go back in a couple of weeks when the roses are blooming like crazy. There is even a miniature amusement park inside it. I'm getting very behind on uploading photos...

As far as health goes, the antibiotic seems to have worked, the infection is gone and I have just a little irritation-cough from time to time. If I could get rid of that, I think I might finally be able to stop catching every virus in the vicinity.

Chinese language lessons are helping a lot; my vocabulary is still quite limited, but spoken Chinese is finally starting to sound like LANGUAGE to me instead of just sound, which is a huge breakthrough.

After two-plus months, I'm finally beginning to adjust to life here. The city is looking nicer with the leaves on the trees; although nothing can make it less urban than it is, the trees make a big difference. I'm now able to get around more easily by bus and direct the taxi drivers without pointing at my map.

I'm getting used to teaching children - the long hours on the weekends are still exhausting, but I'm recovering more quickly each week and am no longer twisted with anxiety at the start of each week. I sure wish I had had at least ONE class in early childhood education... I never envisioned myself teaching this age group. The kids are very cute, but they can be a real handful at times, and I'm sure there are "tricks of the trade" that it would have been useful to know.

I had a mini-scare with my laptop, I thought the sound card had died because the sound had dropped to barely audible suddenly a few weeks ago and was unable to make outgoing calls this morning. However, I had a local computer guy come out to look at it tonight, and it turns out that I had toggled a mute switch and didn't realize it. Embarrassing, but I'm very happy that my laptop is OK, as I can't afford to replace it. All's well that ends well.

6 comments:

  1. Ah, nothing like moving to an entirely new area, with novel pathogens. I ran through every bug in Guelph, my first few months here. Glad you're feeling better! Hang in there, you brave adventuress, you!

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  2. (((((hugs Catherine)))))

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  3. Good to hear you are surmounting the viral stuffs. By the time you leave you will be immune to everything, lol. I can't wait to see your pictures - you going to upload to Flickr?

    I did the same thing last night at Neveriven. Came in couldn't hear music. Relogged, still no music....then I had the DOH moment..last place I had been had me turn down all my sound settings but one... fixed that and voila...music :)

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  4. Hi Dmom! I would prefer to upload the pics here so everything is in one place, but first I have to resize them and go through them and pick out the ones that are worth uploading. Which reminds me, I need to re-upload the last batch as they don't show correctly on the page here.

    Turns out the no sound problem was only partly me. Skype will allow me to call Skype-to-Skype, but not Skype-to-phone. Spent some time with their tech support last night to no avail. Today I found out that one of my local colleagues is experiencing the same problem, so it may be something to do with the local Skype server or something. I hope they will get it fixed soon since I am paying for the ability to use Skype-to-phone to call home.

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  5. Hey girl! Missed ya last night on ym..waaaa
    Glad your settling in and feeling better : )
    Hope to catch up to you soon

    Julie/Callie

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  6. (((((hugs Julie))))) Maybe next time...

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