In 2 months (minus 2 days) I will be returning to the good ol' U.S of A. I'm ready. Things here are definitely winding down. There are only 6 more weeks of school and most likely 2 of those weeks will be mostly spent doing final exams. I find that my students are desperately sad at the prospect of my departure and this puzzles me. Many don't understand why I am not wanting to stay here forever. I have simplified things by saying I want to go back to America to find a husband and start a family - this is something they can understand. By their standards, I am quite past my prime for marriage and the such. My classes are going so-so. I am pretty sure all my juniors all cheated on their midterms. The most blatant cheaters threw temper tantrums saying they weren't the only ones cheating, just the only ones caught so now I have to retest all of them. This is also apparently incredibly unfair. They then proceeded to tell me that it was partially my fault they cheated because I didn't take away their books/bags/papers/etc. My bad. Cheating is widely accepted here in China but if you ask any teachers or department heads, they say to the contrary. All of my high school students cheated on their exam and their head teacher said, "Maybe they were too busy studying for their other exams to study for yours." Oh, yes. Well then, let's just let them cheat. Not. The Oral English classes are so much easier - you can't cheat when you are just talking. Thank God for that.
The weather here in Pingxiang is quite miserable and reminiscent of Seattle, which is slightly comforting, all at the same time. It rains almost every day and when it storms the rain comes from all directions and floods the roads. The skies are often gray but the rain clouds make it the most dreary. After the rain it often turns into a sauna and I am sure we are breeding half of the most dangerous/annoying bugs in the pools of water outside our doors. Despite being wet, sticky, and generally uncomfortable, the weather also makes me quite lazy as the idea of running in torrential rain inside a steam bath isn't high on my list. Speaking of running, my marathon is next weekend. I am excited to go but at the same time think I am perhaps not fulling realizing the incredible physical toll this will take on my body. I mean, its only 26.2 miles, how hard can it be? The Great Wall is only super steep in some places, not the whole route. I'll be fine...
Last week we had a 3 day holiday, which Andreana and I turned into 4 days and took a little trip. I mean, we're American - we don't work on Sundays! We went to the last real "top" destination in China - Guilin. Its views are written about in poems and its scenery is famous among painters. The beautiful Li River that runs though the city is surrounded by strange limestone karsts that are all mostly covered in trees. The whole city was covered with trees of all kinds - it reminded me of Seattle - the Emerald City of China perhaps.Most of everything there was to do was climbing to the top of the peaks and seeing the river or going to the river and looking at the peaks. We did do a pretty cool night tour along the rivers and lakes through the city. The next day we took a 4 hour cruise down the river to a small town called Yangshuo. The scenery along the way was amazing. It was pretty touristy but the only real thing to do was nothing. So we did a lot of that...and some shopping too. We stayed there for one night then went back to Guilin. Part of what makes the scenes of Guililn so nice is that it's so wet. Our last day it poured but that didn't stop us from visiting out last places of interest - a cave full of stalactites. Apparently it was once used as a air-raid shelter but now its just full of pretty lights and ancient rock formations. All in all the trip was pretty relaxing and a nice break in scenery from PX. I put new pictures up at:
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/tarshor/ChinaGuilinAndYangshuo
The next adventure is of course this silly marathon and Beijing next weekend. Fingers crossed...
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