Frack, I am tired.

So... classes today.

......

The 8am kids were alright. Not the best, but they did the work. My 10am class makes me want to rip my hair out. I actually had to say to them, "This is oral English class. If you do not even attempt to open your mouth to speak English I will FAIL YOU!" (Insert appropriate swear words here.) It's just such a shame because I have about ten really great speakers in there, and the rest of them just..... don't care, don't try, don't want to be in class.
Gaaaaaaaah. Semester must end now.

Had a good afternoon though. I rented a bike from the school then Cary and I biked out to Jiujiang University. The campus is gorgeous! It backs up to Lushan and there isn't too much around them except the campus. Saw a ton of the Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani students, but they were too busy playing cricket to take much notice of us. Ran into Stan the man. Cary and I will probably check out the bars out there sometime in an effort to run into more of the other foreigners. They have a lot of grates out there and when I went over one too fast my water bottle flew out of the basket on the front of the bike, over my shoulder, and I ran over it with the back tire. Oops. Pretty spectacular move though. I think I will buy a bike... although it only cost 2 yuan to rent one for a couple hours, not shabby. Now I can say I've survived a bike ride through the mean streets of Jiujiang. Score.

Nathan is having a 'boys weekend' this weekend in Shanghai, but my friend Cici will be in Nanchang so I'm going to go stay with her. We're spending the night at the Agriculture University for some reason, so I'm hoping to meet the foreign teachers there. Then on Sunday I'm meeting with Pearl to have a Reiki lesson. Pretty neat. Home on Sunday night, must plan my lesson tomorrow so it's all set for Monday so I needn't worry about it this weekend.

I finished my first water color experiment, however the pictures I've been taking of it are muting the colors, so I shall try again tomorrow and post pictures later. It's... eh, okay I guess. A pretty fun experiment to see how these water colors work.

Over and out.

Sanqingshan

Look! Look! I'm updating!

Thursday evening I trained out to Nanchang, not getting there until around 10pm. Nathan met me at the train station and we headed to his place, I was beat and wanted an early-ish night.

On Friday we woke up around 5:30am, got ready, and headed to the train station to catch our train which departed at 8am. We found a reasonable mien bao che driver, picked up a few more passengers along the way, and were dropped at the station with plenty of time to spare. We were on the express train which is quite posh, so it was a very comfortable and fairly short ride. The city that our train dropped us off in is still a fair distance from the mountain, so we found another mien bao che driver to drive us to the mountain for a reasonable price.
The drive was gorgeous as we made our way through mountains, countryside, and along lakes. The drive itself took about and hour and a half to two hours, not too shabby. Our driver dropped us at the north-eastern side of the mountain where we decided to catch the cable car up instead of walking along the road trying to find the stairs. It was around 12:30pm then, and the light wouldn't last too many more hours.
The cable car ride was pleasant and short, dropping us off near the Goddess Rock. We slowly made our way up and down many stairs, weaving along narrow pathways, until we came to Sun-Rising Mountain Villa. We were disappointed to discover they had no rooms, mostly because we were tired from getting up so early and for hiking with our backpacksfor so long. After a couple trips up and down some of the paths we found a hotel, the Heaven Gate Mountain Villa. We were wiped and crashed early.

On Saturday we abandoned the bags in our hotel room and made our way back up to the Sun-Rising Mountain Villa. After talking to one of the porters we decided to take the path leading west, and also what turned out to be the longest way. However, the views were breathtaking and we were spit out at a nice lake and the Sanqing Temple. After looking around that area for awhile, we decided to head for Yujing Peak and along a different path which would take us back to the Sun-Rising Mountain Villa. Despite my protesting legs, Nathan and I climbed to the top of Yujing Peak, a whopping 1819.9 meters tall. Unfortunately a thick mist and rain had settled over us, so the views were mostly of the gray clouds that surrounded us.
We headed down from the peak and back along the alternate pathway where we discovered a great bridge and a place where there were glass tile so you could look down at the drop, eventually ending up back at the SRMV. We were both soaked from the rain, tired from the climb (stairs) and hungry. At the hotel we made instant curries, took hot showers, and collapsed into bed, falling asleep around 8pm.

Sunday morning we departed the hotel around noon, carrying our backpacks. We were ready to go home. We took the cable car down the mountain, found the bus, and hopped on. It was a two hour ride to the bus station, then a half hour taxi ride to the train station which we arrived at with plenty of time left to get snacks and relax before catching the train.
We arrived in Nanchang around 9pm. Cary managed to find us at the station, so he and I got tickets back to Jiujiang together. Nathan headed off to meet Nick so they could share a cab ride back to their campus together, while Cary and I went to McDonalds for some dinner. Cary and I caught our train and spent the ride playing Cribbage. I still don't quite get it.
I finished up my lesson plan around midnight-thirty and crashed into bed by 1am.

Today my kids were great! I made up a lesson plan where I spoke as little as possible and they spoke as much as possible, and it went amazingly well. The 10am class was a little painful, and most of the boys in the 2:30pm class didn't do their homework (to punish them I made them stand up and come sit in the front of the class, which actually forced them to participate). This is a good lesson, but kind of tiring for me since I have to stand up there like a cheerleader trying to get them to talk. It takes about half an hour, but they do open up eventually. We'll see how tomorrow goes.

Pictures for Sanqingshan can be see here.

Not much to say...

There isn't much going on here at the moment. We have Friday off due to a workers holiday, so Nathan and I will be spending the weekend climbing Sanquingshan. I'm pretty excited, but I know I'm going to come back super sore. It's pretty on par with Huangshan, so I know the views will be spectacular.

Aaaaaaaand, that's all. Sorry. I wish I had more interesting news to report on.

Folks in America, don't get swine flu.

Well then...

Okay, I've figured out what I want to do. I'm definitely going to work on/start a magazine. I've already started to figure out the content, my customer base, who to sell ad space to, etc.
I would like to find an internship in Beijing this summer for a magazine if I can. I may have to wait to find that until I can get to the city though.

I need to buy Adobe Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, an external hard drive, and a Nikon D4.
I've figured out that a 160G external HD will be about 420 yuan, a Nikon D4 will be around 3500 yuan, and the Adobe Pagemaker and Photoshop I can get for about 10 yuan each at this dvd place I know. Haha.

I may give private English lessons this summer while I'm in Beijing so that I can save up for these items. Not sure about that until I get my courseload. May be too busy studying the Chinese.

Summer school is all paid for, I got the reciept in my inbox a few hours ago. Glad that's taken care of, it's really a load off. I used my paypal and wiped out my checking account, so now I'm left with about $40 in there and all that RMB I have saved in my secret hiding spot. I ended up having to pay an extra $54 to use the paypal, but I found out it would have been almost 500rmb to transfer that much in RMB if I had opened a Chinese bank account. I figure the $54 is worth it.

I found Bank of America being shady with my savings account today. I was checking to make sure I had the funds to pay all of my tuition with my checking account when I noticed that there was money missing from my savings account. In order to keep Bank of America from charging a 'bank maintanance fee' I have to retain a balance of $300 in my savings account. Well, after I got my nice tax return from the government, I made sure that the balance in my savings was exactly $300 so Bank of America would stop charging me. Today when I checked the balance it was at $292. For some unexplained reason there was a $3 'bank fee' and because that brought the balance down to $297, they had charged the $5 'bank maintance fee'. What the hell? I got on the customer service chat thing that they provide so I could chat with a representative. When I asked what that $3 fee was for I got this message, "I've got some good news for you! Because we value your customer loyalty I can reimburse those fees to you. All of it should be credited back to your account in the next business day." She wouldn't answer me when I asked why they had charged the $3 fee. I know, I just know, it was so that they could bring the balance to below $300 and have an excuse to charge me that $5. If you have a Bank of America account, keep an eye out for that stuff. I'm thinking of shutting down my Bank of America savings account when I return to the states. There have been a few strange incidents like that, and I don't trust them anymore.

That's all from me. Laundry to do, then sleepy time. I should really tidy up the house, but I'm having too much fun with my magazine project. Whee!

My China Career Goals...

Some of these are serious, some are just for fun (but I wouldn't pass on them if they came up):

• Be a model for the home shopping network
• Be a regular on a Chinese soap opera
• Work for a magazine in Beijing or Shanghai, preferably Elle or one of those types
• Club promoter
• Own a bar or club
• Own a restaurant
• Front Desk manager at a hotel in Beijing or Shanghai
• Write a book or two

I've pondered grad school recently. I could easily slip off to Korea for a year, earn the money, and return to China. However, I have also realized I have NO IDEA what I want to be when I 'grow up', so I guess grad school should probably wait until I figure that out.

Teaching is not my future. I need to figure something else out.

Crap Weather

Nathan and I didn't do much today, but yesterday was pretty okay.

We woke up late yesterday, got ready, and dinnered at David's pizza place. His dad wasn't there, but it was sooooo nice to have pizza after all this time. We walked around downtown despite the rainy weather and found some shops I didn't know existed. I found a few gorgeous LV purses I plan to go take a look at again tomorrow or Tuesday. They're too lovely to pass up! Haha.
On our walk back towards the school we passed this lit up building on the lake and went to have a look. It turned out to be a nice little area where you can drink tea and watch a show for 15rmb each. We bought tickets and spent about an hour enjoying the nice outdoor atmosphere and music. It started raining harder while we were there so we cabbed home.

I'm teaching interviews this week because I can't get karaoke videos since youtube is STILL BLOCKED! BAH!

Nathan and I are going to San Qing Shan for our may holiday, I think it will be lovely.

Here is my hair, I hate it:

I'll probably like it in a couple week when it's a bit longer.

Things I did today...

• Taught a class about American universities.
• Got my hairz chopped the heck off. Pictures later when I am not so sleepy/having a bad skin day.
• Ate baozi.
• Watched a singing competition.
• Came up with the idea to have a karaoke class next week since my students are willing to sing but not to speak in class....?
• Bought a Japanese fashion magazine.
  
• Bookmarked all the clothes I want to have made in my various Elle and other fashion mags.

That's all.

Tomorrow... more of the same.

Edit:// So when Mom was here, on our way to catch the train to Nanchang I had to run through the train station with no shoes on. I got a small cut on the bottom of my foot, but I got it all cleaned up and band aid-ed. Well, all this time later it still hadn't healed and was somewhat sore... so I decided to get a pair of tweezers out and have a dig around in there... I just pulled a rather large piece of glass out of the bottom of my foot that had been in there this whole time. D'oh. Guess it'll heal now.