Miscellaneous

With another teacher we threw a frisbee around by the running track around suppertime. The field was still filled with students playing soccer, and there were people walking and running around the track, but there was a space open between where the playing filed ended and the track began, and that is where we threw a frisbee. People got a kick watching us toss it around. When we would play ultimate frisbee this summer, which is sort of like football but with frisbees, people would line the field to watch. It was the evening’s entertainment. We weren’t quite so popular here, but then again there was only two of us instead of competing teams. Occasionally the frisbee would go off course and someone would pick it up and try to throw it, usually with disastrous results. At one point some little kid came over and then it was over. He just had to throw it every time. He must have been three or four and was just having the best time chasing that thing around, and occasionally getting off a pretty decent throw.

Our school is undergoing some big review, so there are a lot of big shots walking around campus, and a lot of nice looking cars parked around campus. Everyone is pretty much on edge it seems. I guess they were going into classrooms on Monday morning, and I was told I was fortunate I did not teach on Monday morning. They leave tomorrow. They’ve been cleaning up the campus quite a bit in preparation for this. They cut down a whole bunch of trees in the courtyard near our apartment, gave us a new trash receptacle and even fixed the badmitton net. Too bad they are leaving, actually.

The weather had been absolutely gorgeous the last couple of days. Sunny and pleasant, really the first of that type of days since I have been here. We had sun in the summer, but it was combined with unbearable heat. Mostly, we’ve had a lot of clouds, and the for about a six day period we could not do tai chi because of the rain. In any case, it promises not to last. It certainly looks like that time in Seattle is going to come in handy in dealing with the weather here.

Had dinner with a couple of Peace Corps volunteers who have just finished two years in Fiji. I ran into them while they were with a China 11 (someone who has already been in China for a year; I am part of China 12, the twelfth group of China volunteers). The China 11was in town because she had been bitten by the kittens of a cat she is keeping. So she needed to take an overnight train into Chengdu to get the rest of her rabies shots (we got three rabies vaccines this summer). The two volunteers from Fiji have an interesting story. They had booked a ticket with a third volunteer and were supposed to travel around Asia, but at the last moment the third volunteer pulled out and it turned out she had booked them to stay in China for two and a half months. So they somehow got an apartment in Chengdu and will be based here.

Well, that is life today.