The name bestower

My head is about to explode with all I've seen and I'll the information about my new life that I'm trying to absorb. Tomorrow I'll begin teaching on the new campus (I live on the old campus) and I'll be teaching several classes of Freshmen English and Business English. Because most of my approximately 200 students will not have English names, that means I have the honor of bestowing them! For some reason that seems like a very weighty honor.

Yesterday we had a full-fledged tour of the new campus of our university, a 15 minute drive from the old campus. The buildings were constructed in just 10 months and they are only 4 years old. We drove through China's largest university gate, where people in uniform saluted. It is a pretty campus, and very large. There is an artificial lake and a big park. The buildings are very futuristic-looking even though they don't have air conditioning or heat. That isn't too fun on a day like yesterday when the heat index was 107 and the humidity was about 90 percent. I'm glad to see that they sell popsicles in a little shop by our offices. You can do so many things like that on a Chinese campus-- eat popsicles, buy cell phones, or mail a package to Beijing.

Our foreign affairs officer then took us to the huge and very chaotic teacher's cafeteria to eat lunch. In the midst of the chaos I ended up with sweet potato chunks and a pile of pig's bladder on my tray. The pig's bladder remained on the tray...

Today is being spent lesson planning. A couple teammates and I will soon venture beyond the old campus gates in search of lunch. Tonight we will attend a banquet that the school is giving for us as the foreign teachers. We will get to meet some exciting people and eat some exciting, exotic foods, probably similar to yesterday's lunch.

So right now I'm doing okay. I'm a bit overwhelmed and tired at the moment. Everything is so exciting, but already frustrating (like waiting a total of 5 hours sitting on a peg stool to get a Chinese cell phone). Everything just takes a long time to get accomplished, which I will need to adapt to. Can you please lift us up as we begin teaching tomorrow? We want to be truly effective teachers and truly effective representatives for our father.