Some new pictures are up on the site: (http://aufrecht.org/picture/folder-view?folder_id=8229). Some are from Dad; others are of the Office for International Affairs staff and include Dragon Back Terrace in the background.

The last week flew past fairly quickly. In brief, then:

Tuesday My first class started out a disaster. We stared at each other. Nobody wanted to talk. I felt the beginnings of flop sweat. So I soldiered on, and I think things improved. My second class took the opposite trajectory. Everybody was paying attention; we all broke up laughing more than once. Then, in the last 20 minutes, just before lunch, everybody checked out. I had my first sleeper - she was taking a quick nap on her friend's shoulder, and gave me a sheepish look when I noticed her just as she woke up. In any event, I survived my first week of classes, albeit a two-day week.

Student names include. Chocolate Forest Gump (who is, just like all of the kids, very very sweet) Cookie ("I like cookies. Do you like cookies? Do you like _me_?" Newman (I can't read that name without smirking and doing a Seinfeld) Light

and a bunch of fairly normal names.

I had students in each class propose a dozen topics, and then vote. Winning topics included:

Music (3 classes) Foreign Teachers (2 classes) Friendship (3 classes) - Family (2 classes) - some of these are surprisingly touching 2008 Olympics - only once, and already I'm sick and tired of regurgitated propaganda.

My favorite losing topic was "Kent's Love on the Net," which got four votes. It's fairly clear what Kent would write about, but what could the other three possibly weigh in with?

Here's what I've learned from grading maybe 60 essays (with another 35 to go):

-- Everybody was born in a beautiful city. There are, apparently, no ugly cities in China. If you weren't born in a beautiful city, you were born in a beautiful pasture.

-- At least one student found and is reading the web site (Hello, *name withheld*).

-- With China's acceptance into the WTO and Beijing 2008, English is more and more important in China.

-- Friends are important.

I don't mean to be cynical. The overall quality of writing is quite good. I only have media-anecdotal evidence of American college writing, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was comparable. I very much doubt I'll ever master a foreign language as well as these students (sophomores) have already mastered English. And the content of many essays is excellent. A few even have good form - idiosyncratic but valid english which is close to poetry.

So mostly I'm feeling OK about these classes. I did realize that, by assigning weekly essays, I've bumped my own workload up from casual part-time to full-time - 20 hours of grading each week. Ah well.

Li Xu had to go to Nanning (6-hour bus ride) on short notice to shepard a teacher's passport application in person.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: Triple Word Score These are mostly a blur of grading, napping, and studiously avoiding important work by hacking on the web site.

Vednesday night I played Scrabble with Anita, an English teacher. Despite my lucking into GOVE(R)NED for seventy-something points, she still beat me 283-272. Great game. Too bad she just left for Xi'an to get a Master's degree in English literature.

I got an enlightening peek into her apartment. I had wondered why each of the three rooms (not counting the bathroom/kitchen) in my apartment had a keyed lock. Turns out I've got a three-person apartment to myself. And I have one of four apartments in the four-building complex to have an air-conditioned room. And internet access. I have to say that I really don't feel at all guilty about the whole thing.

Friday night the students invited Art and me to a barbeque. (Art is a genial retiree from Port Angeles. He and his wife were here last semester, and he liked the kids so much he came back for another semester. Art is the definition of unflappable.) The barbeque was held on the banks of the Li river. Said banks are very large because the Li is some feet below its usual height. The kids found a nice spot on the rocks about fifty feet out from the high-tide bank, and we watched the water-buffalo graze. Then some guy came out and argued with them for a while. He apparently has license (from the government, he claimed; self-granted, we suspected) to run a night-time karaoke restaurant on the river banks. So we shuffled down a hundred yards and, after some dangerous tricks with paraffin and charcoal, were in business. The kids were so charming that, despite the bugs, airplanes (more on that in a minute), stench of decaying river vegetation, oppressive mugginess, and (eventually) blaring karaoke music, I had a good time.

The planes: my first week or two, I thought it was odd for Guilin Airport to occasionally route late-night departures over the city. Last Wednesday, the sky was clear enough for me to spot two fighter planes. On Friday night, they were flying big clockwise circles around the north of town. They were thus in earshot about one minutes out of every five. All night. Nearly as annoying as the Blue Angels in Seattle during Seafair, but I didn't want to make my usual jokes about surface-to-air missiles. Also, I'm worried for the pilots - when will they get to practice turning left? What if they want to bomb Kamchatka? They'll have to make three right turns, and if they're not careful they might hit Indonesia by mistake.

I just gave up on the Tony Leung CD (Tony Leung from In the Mood For Love), which, aside from one or two songs, was karaoke crap, and went for disc two of the Cui Jian collection. He gets a lot of hype in the guide books, and it took all of twenty seconds to discover that it's all justified.

In other news:

A startlingly long-legged spider recently took up residence in my apartment.

I washed my laundry without incident.

I lost another water bottle, this time my San Diego Mountain Bike Warehouse bike bottle. I left it on the tennis court.

I have a fantasy. In my fantasy, I am walking up Capitol hill, maybe Pine street, and I go into a coffee shop, maybe Bauhaus, and I order baked products with chocolate, and possibly also dairy. Even though it's probably a cloudy day, I look at distant hills, and maybe the Space Needle, too. I overhear people, and I can understand what they're saying. Then I go to the bathroom, and it doesn't smell like anything in particular, and I'm not afraid to wash my hands.

Saturday

Michael and I went shopping again. We got an ink cartridge for the abandoned inkjet in the office (130 yuan - 8.5Y to $1, remember). I got a button-up shirt (65 yuan), some groceries (Y45), and two CDs and a VCD (Y45). I found another bookstore, with an impressive collection of Oxford books on research, theory, and practice in language teaching. The english grammar, 900 pages, Y91 - I didn't buy it. Anybody know where to get that in machine-readable format? RAM, by the way, is a Yuan a meg. And they bring the stick right out and hand it to you. For stick, please don't read "memory stick in static wrap inside a box." I mean they hand you the memory stick. Don't shuffle your feet too much. *zap*

The computer vendors are all in a warren of little shops. Some of them play Doom. I wonder if they have networked the warren and play doom against their competitors? They all sell just about exactly the same stuff, so I don't understand why more consolidation hasn't happened.

The new bridge is almost complete. The original bridge was declared unsafe two years ago. GUET is right on the edge of town on the wrong side of the river. Until the new bridge is finished, the bus from the school only goes to the end of a footbridge. The footbridge is just a giant, quietly rusting erector set with mad traffic.