June time

I warmly welcome you to the month of June! How is your month so far? Surprisingly I haven't gone insane yet, since classes are over and most of my students have returned home.

However, we are managing to find a decent amount of activities to stay busy and productive. I'm back to practicing my Chinese again, and somehow I was able to use a dance studio on new campus, which is harder to make happen than it sounds.

Yesterday it poured all day long, but it was rather enjoyable. I pulled on my beautifully shiny yellow rain boots, and had a nice trek through many gigantic puddles and on incredibly wet and slippery city buses.

I hung out with a couple of my remaining students for a few hours. They are both wonderfully talkative girls. I felt pretty exhausted afterward, but then I went to one of our Chinese friend's birthday gathering. We visited her new room that she is renting in an apartment near new campus.

There are many pink-colored apartment buildings that have a very "lived-in" appearance. The land surrounding the apartments consist entirely of vegetable gardens, women wash their clothes outside, and chickens and children run around all over the place. (See pictures).

Our friend shares a room and a twin bed with her roommate. It's extremely small. It seems like a good majority of students also have this arrangement, because it's a lot more inexpensive this way, and privacy isn't a part of the culture. The apartment itself was rather spiritually dark and creepy. One of the women who lives there plays music of Buddhist monks chanting and the smell of incense was almost overwhelming. Apparently this goes on all day and night.

Life's never dull here even on the dullest of days.

P.S. Tomorrow's a momentous anniversary of something that happened in China. (You can figure it out). Nobody talks about it here. But many websites have indeed been blocked, apparently just in case somebody does talk about it. Like I said, life is never dull.