The China Chronicles

Holy cow, I am sooo full. I don't think I've been this full since I got to China. I just went to dinner with Liz and we got soy beans, pork, and cabbage. And rice, of course, but that goes without saying. The best part is that we got ice cream after dinner. Getting ice cream in China is always a bit of a gamble as you might think you are getting chocolate when you are really getting red bean. If you want to go the vegetable route, you can also select corn or green pea. We spend a lot of time at the ice cream cooler picking things up and saying, "What do you think this looks like?" Anyway, I chose zebra ice cream. That's right, it was a zebra on a stick. In light of having recently read Life of Pi, it was slightly disturbing, but it was actually really good--chocolate and vanilla. I've been struggling with being depressed lately, but after having consumed a lot of food and good ice cream, I am in a stellar mood.

Not much has happened recently. Today, we helped Joni pack up her things. She is moving because the people who live below her have a restuarant, and in the winter the coal stoves vent into her apartment. The complicating factor is that she leaves for Thailand tomorrow and she hasn't quite found a house yet. She was possibly going to look at a house this afternoon. If that house works out, she will rent it and we will come help her finish packing on Friday, the day after she gets back from Thailand. If that house does not work out, she will move into the English Salon (she's the owner) until she finds a place. It's insane! Liz and I were packing up her kitchen this afternoon and rooting around in really deep cabinets. We pulled out popsicle molds...and there was a cockroach in one of them. You can imagine how happy we were about that, so we put it upside down on the counter and shrieked for awhile. Later, we doused it with bug spray and let it die. I wasn't too thrilled about sticking my hands in the cupboards after that.

In other news, I gave my listening class a quiz this morning. I'd told them very specifically what to study, and last week I gave them 45 mins or so of class time to study. I let them borrow my book, which had all the right answers in it. They should've been well-prepared for this quiz. It consisted of 5 vocab words they had to define and 8 short answer questions. They were not happy, to say the least. Theresa piped up and said, "Do we get to listen to the tapes?" I told her no and that she had to write the answers, and she said, "This is a listening class, not a recitation class." I said, "I told you what to study. If you don't know the answers, guess." This class is notorious for whining ALL the time. They kept complaining, and I finally told them that they were in college, college is difficult, and they should stop complaining or I'll make it harder next time. And the thing is, most of them got pretty high grades on the quiz--they knew the answers. They were whining for the sake of whining. Good grief. College kids.

posted by Sara @ 2:47 AM