I've attached some files from class; all students had to translate the Academic Honesty Policy into Chinese, which I then had checked. Perhaps 20 percent translated it without any errors.
Around midnight I saw a big flash through the drapes, and then a loud bang. My first thought was some sort of explosion or giant firework, then I thought maybe dynamite. When the rain started abruptly a few minutes later I realized it was lightning. Thus began rainy season.
My lamp died. The electronic control is flimsy and not properly anchored, and eventually a wire inside broke. Zhang Ming fixed it for me last semester, but it broke again and after I soldered the wire I discovered that the knob is broken. So I gave up, and was forced to use the overhead fluorescent light in my room. This was disastrous: my standard method of going to sleep is to read, with the lamp, until I drop the book on my face; then I wake up enough to put it away (usually) and turn off the lamp. When I tried this with the room light, I got all discombobulated and it took an hour to go to sleep.
After the failed repair attempt I bought a new lamp. It works fine but has only a clip attachment, and I couldn't find a convenient place to clip it. The three-foot cord limits the options. Finally I clipped it onto the neck of the first lamp, and with some fiddling, have achieved a stable configuration.
If anybody needs a science project, how about memory and chinese characters. Get a bunch of volunteers who don't know any Chinese. Have half of them learn ten chinese characters a day by copying each character ten times while reciting the meaning. Have the other half copy twenty times. Have the third half copy twenty times but not recite anything. Have them learn characters for a week. See how many they can recognize by sight right after, a week after, a month after, six months after. Variations: More or less characters per day. Test both recognition and recall (given a meaning, produce the correct character). Test review (learn ten characters a day vs learn ten new and repeat yesterday's).
Something else you can do when your music is all on the hard drive is to search for all songs with the word Soul, pipe the results into a file, and use it as a playlist:
Billy Joel: All About Soul Dan Bern: Are You Gonna Follow Your Soul kd lang: Season Of Hollow Soul Pizzicato Five: Sweet Soul Revue The Byrds: Captain Soul The Doors: Soul Kitchen Heart: Soul Of The Sea Jewel: Who Will Save Your Soul John Coltrane: Soul Eyes Loreena McKennitt: The Dark Night of the Soul Sting: Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot Sting: Island of Souls Tracy Chapman : All That You Have Is Your Soul.wav T'Pau: Heart & Soul 'Round Midnight: Body And Soul James Keelaghan & Oscar Lopez: Brave Soul
Put it on random play and you have a fairly good mix.
It turns out that John Coltrane is perfect rainy-Sunday-music-in-China music. Who would have guessed?
Head tucked into my rain hood, I was trudging back to my apartment when something honked behind me. I stopped and turned as a motor scooter scooted past and turned through the space I would have occupied had I not stopped. I made a rude gesture with my gloved hand at the driver's receding back; this was missed by him but noted with a grin and appreciatory nod by a guy with an umbrella whom the driver nearly struck as he turned.
I was at Rosemary's (the American-food cafe) eating the usual (spicy pepper pizza, french fries, chocolate cake) and listening to the music when I realized that I was hearing an exceptionally pallid version of American Woman. Later I found out it was a Lenny Kravitz best-of. The following week a woman - apparently friends with the cute waitress - who was smoking and doing a workbook tried to put Lenny on auto-repeat, but I politely intervened in favor of Odelay!
Chloe (Art's replacement from Peninsula College) and I met some of the other foreign teachers at a Sichuan restaurant downtown. We had to tromp around quite a bit to find the place, but it was well worth it. Mostly the same food as everywhere else, but it tasted really good. The spicy tofu had chewy bits that I'm still trying to convince myself were tempeh and not ground beef; the pototoes needles were spicier than usual, and a string-bean dish had loads of garlic and very little slime and was sublime.
They were closing as we left at 9, which seemed odd. Even odder was that they were cleaning the floor and tables with soap. I don't think I've ever seen soap used in public. This was the least Chinese Chinese restaurant I've ever been to in China - I felt that I could touch random surfaces and not come away greasy. In the meantime, the cafeteria trays have been getting noticably stickier.
Sunday moring, the power went out while I was cooking oatmeal for breakfast. After showering, I went out and read the announcement that it would be out until 4 pm. I tried to grade papers on the grass but it was too windy. I walked around the library and then up and down the new buildings, including skulking about the unfinished administration building. From the sixth floor walkway I watched the construction workers excavate for the foundation of the new dorm next to the teacher apartments. "Construction workers" means two guys driving diesel shovels - very, very fast, too - four trucks to haul away dirt, and lots and lots and lots of people with shovels - the hand variety - doing detail work the hard way. And brick layers building the latest round of temporary hovels.
Later Chloe and I went to check out the golf course, and enlisted Hunt's help when we ran into him on the way.
The golf course, which is a bit of a walk past the end of a bus route past our college, seemed nice from the gate. The guards wouldn't let us in to walk around because some people were playing and it would make them uncomfortable if we watched them. The idea of turning the tables and discomfiting Chinese by staring at them was intoxicating, but 18 holes costs Y2000. US$250. And it turns out they were South Korean, not Chinese.