Sunday, August 1, 2010

Life goes on

The last three weeks have been very busy with the private lessons, as I mentioned in my last post. This past week, both the private lessons and my kindergarten classes finished, so I should have more free time from now on. This hasn't sunk in yet, I still feel a lot of pressure and it's hard to imagine not spending every minute working, but in a few days I should wind down.

As for the apartment, the toilet has been unsuccessfully repaired three times now. The poison is working on the cockroaches, and I got a twisted sense of revenge sweeping up the dead ones and tossing them in the waste basket. The water has been off since last night, so I'm awaiting a delivery of bottled water, which I will wantonly squander on bathing and flushing the toilet.

Even with the problems, I do love my new apartment with all the wood and faux-wood everywhere, and thie neighborhood is so friendly and busy.

Yesterday I was carrying groceries and a mattress pad in the rain, trying to catch a taxi, and a man in a minivan stopped and offered me a ride for 8 RMB (.5 more than the taxi, which is negligible), so I hopped in and had a comfy ride right to my door. It made my day. People here are always trying to make an extra buck, so this actually is not dodgy like it would be back in the US.

The rainstorm yesterday blew in some cool weather, so temps were in the 70's for a whole 24 hours; what a luxury. Humid as a swamp, but at least it was cooler.

Saw something weird at the produce market; while I was buying eggs, someone else wanted a chicken. The seller reached in the cage and pulled one out. Then she laid it in a box on the scale and it just lay there, panting, without any fussing, flapping or trying to escape. It didn't seem like normal chicken behavior at all. I quickly paid for my eggs and left rather than hang around to see what happened to the chicken... just call me chicken!

4 comments:

  1. yayyy... finaly some more time to relax....

    I REALLY hope you will use it :-P

    Greetings,
    Obee

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  2. Hey, I'm Owen. I was shown here by a myst community when I posted something from my blog. I too am an English teacher in China and I suggest you go visit Shilin: http://owendennis.com/blog/archives/1849

    It's like real life Myst. It's amazing. Go check it out if you're able to. I don't know what breaks you have during summer, I only work during the regular school year.

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  3. Thank you Obee. That free time hasn't really materialized as I'd hoped... but I appreciate the good thoughts.

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  4. Thank you so much, Owen! Your comment was filtered by Blogger and it took this long for me to find it, but thanks to the email, I had already checked out your blog as you know, and am planning a trip to Shilin this week. I'm so glad you posted. :)

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