And that means pictures!! Lots of pictures.

Well, where do I begin? There is so much to talk about. So much has happened since we have been here.

Phil has now taught 2 weeks and I just finished my first week. It is hard to believe that I am in China, but it is even harder to believe that I am a teacher in charge of about 680 students(total). In Phil’s classes, he has about 50 students. I am a bit more lucky. At the the middle school they divide the class into two. So, instead of having 50 – 70 students, I have about 30-40 students and sometimes less than that – depending on the class itself. Teaching in China is very, very interesting, and I have a lot to say on that matter, but I want to talk about a few other things first.

I didn’t think that we were ever going to get internet, especially after we found out that the last people that lived here never got it, but I guess our nonstop, “We want internet!” finally sunk in. So, at 9:30am(Saturday the 16th) our doorbell rang. I was half tempted to stay in bed for I was very tired, but decided that who ever was ringing our bell that early in the morning had climbed our 90 steps for a good reason. And that he did. Peter said that he had come with some people to fix our internet. Peter is a teacher at the high school. His English is ok, not perfect, but we can understand each other pretty well. A few minutes later, two geeky looking China Telecom computer techs walked in. They plugged us into the wall, gave us our user name and password.  The password is so retardedly easy that we laughed. Watch Space Balls, and you will understand. After that, they left. It took them maybe 3 minutes to give us the internet we had been asking for something like 2 and half weeks. Grr. And so now, hopefully, unless China decides that they hate me, I can now post pictures and comments to this blog. That will make me happy and give someone something to do when they are bored out of their freaking minds.

Pictures. I was only able to post a few pictures of our apartment. Here are a few more. Remember that there is another floor below us, but I haven’t gone down there to take pictures yet. And thinking it not that important, I may not.

This our dinning room table. The door leads to our balcony. The entire wall is made of windows. This in turn will probably make it very cool in our apartment come winter. I am not looking forward to winter. Not at all.

This is our living room. The sofa and chairs are very comfortable. That is Tim standing in the picture. He lives across town. He is jealous of our living room furniture because he does not have any. I don’t know why he was not provided any. The flowers were a gift to us from the school. I got some more flowers when they took us to the banquet. They laughed at me because I am not a drinker. I mean it. They laughed at me. Grr.

There is a little room dividing our bathroom and our kitchen. Our refrigerator is in this room.  The freezer is on the bottom and the refrigerator is on the top. I keep out of habit, opening the bottom. Hehe. You can see in the picture that there are two types of toilets. I told Phil he no longer has an excuse to leave the toilet seat up ever again. So far, he has been good.

Here is a picture of the walk way on the way to our apartment or to the high school depending on which way you are facing. I really like the trees. They remind me of Charleston in the way that they are all wavy and stuff. It sucks that we have to walk all the way around the wall in order to get to the school. There is no way to get there unless you walk all the way around to the front gates. I’ve been tempted to swim through the lotus pond.

I am going to go ahead and post these and then write a new blog. I don’t like it when my blogs get too long. I hope you enjoy them. And remember – post comments. They keep me alive!!