English activity

Around the beginning of the term, I got asked/told to be in charge of the Year 10 activity for the school’s English Activity Day. It’s taken a while to sort out what this entails, when it will be held, etc. But last night we had our first meeting (as in, Monday morning Nelson said, “Rachel, [...]

The state, the money, and the life.

I moved to China without knowing very much about it at all. Most people develop an interest in a place, and then decide to go there. I’ve done it the other way round. Being in a state of near total ignorance about a place means that everything everywhere is a new piece of information.
It’s especially [...]

Photo work?

So, testing out the photo things again. Sorry this is wonky, I don’t have as much time as I would like to really tinker around with things here and figure out how they work. So it’s all rather patchwork. At least I know how to do the easy stuff (like update!).
I’m using photobucket as my [...]

In China, the debate continues…

In the new building, we have much nicer bathroom facilities than in the old building. As in, there’s actually ventilation and more than two stalls per floor. (We even have a few Western toilets now, which quite surprised me.) The signs for the bathrooms are an attempt at bilingualism: below the Chinese characters is written [...]

Indirect speech

The Year 10 English teachers (4 Chinese and 3 Western), had a meeting to go over a report drawn up by an outside consultant. The consultant tested a sampling of students in all eight classes of Year 10. The results were, by and large, not surprising.
There were two or three points in the report that [...]

Angry River

My school has an annual activity called China Week during which the students spend a week working on community service projects around China. Seeing how the other half lives, basically, and remembering that most of the country’s children do not, in fact, attend private high schools and live in gated communities and wear brand new [...]

Verb tense

Past, present, future: updates galore. WordPress and my internet connection are not friends, so there are several updates below this one of what has built up over the past few days.
This weekend:
Ate a mountain of food at a buffet, played pool with English, Irish, Colombian, American expats, found a nice little BBQ/beer garden near [...]

The surprising truth about how I make myself feel better.

Saturday October 13, 2007
Okay, after that depressing interlude, I thought I’d tell you about how I got out of my funk: I did laundry.
Laundry is great. It’s easy to do, and it’s productive, and you can do other things at the same time. If someone calls and asks, “What are you up to?” I can [...]

Downhill

Friday October 12, 2007
My grandmother had told me to stop swearing here, so I’ll refrain from the melodrama, but it’s been a rough week.
1 My uncle Mac died while I was on my trip. It’s not a surprise, but it’s sad to hear. I’m concerned most for my mom and grandparents, but I’m sure it’s [...]

The grilled cheese phenomenon.

Thursday October 11, 2007
On RAGBRAI, we have a saying: If you’re not having fun, lower your expectations. In China, I’m calling it the grilled cheese phenomenon.
After I’d been here a few weeks the school gave me a small part of my relocation/airfare money. To celebrate, I bought butter. Butter is 20RMB at my market, [...]