Being a Tourist

The famously huge and expensive front gate to our campus.


Your one stop shop for quilted pajamas.


A wonderfully Chinglish sign we spotted at a bathroom around town.


Playing tennis!


Jodi and I are pretty serious about tennis, as you can see by this picture.



I don't know what to write lately. Our holiday is in full swing now, and I feel like my whole body and being has taken a huge sigh of relief. Maybe I'm a bad teacher, but I don't miss teaching. I continue to hang out with students who are still around, and that's a bit more interesting than interacting with them in the classroom.

As I'm typing this, I just got a sweet text message from one of my students: "Hi~elegent Laura, the final exam is over. i'll leave for shenzhen! hope you will enjoy yourself during the chinese new year's day!" So suddenly most of my students are leaving for home for the next month...

We have been staying busy, especially since Jodi's friend visited us for a few days this week. He is from California studying at Beijing University, and wanted to come see another side of China, I suppose. It was fun seeing our city and school through someone else's eyes, since it all seems familiar to us now.

He was most impressed/amused by some things that you don't see in Beijing:

-How the restaurants in Nanchang usually don't have real roofs or walls.
-How we pour boiling water in our bowls at restaurants to clean them, and then toss the water on the ground.
-How few foreigners he saw and how excited/scared the Chinese were when they did see foreigners.
-How people couldn't understand his northern Chinese accent here in the south.
-How our campus has the most ridiculously huge and expensive front gate in all of China.
-How our campus was the size of a small city.
-How precious and eager our students are.
-How you can see all the Nanchang "sights" in about half a day.
-How there's no central heating, and we all have to wear five layers of clothing in the winter.
-How inexpensive everything is.
-How there is a foreign goods store in a city with so few foreigners.
-How the parks here are more like creepy amusement parks.
-How babies are bundled up like balls with so much clothing.
-How you can see men and women walking around the streets in their padded, quilted pajamas.

Overall, I enjoyed running and playing all over the city with them. We also played tennis together at new campus The tennis courts aren't actually there for student use. They rent them to outside organizations, so the school can make more money. (Our school often operates more like a business than a university). And the only way we could get the key was through one of our students who found his P.E. teacher, who happened to be an athletic girl and spoke English. (Sporty girls are extremely rare at least in this part of China).

It was awesome running around and whacking at tennis balls all morning. Even though the courts are buried in the quietest, most remote corner of campus, some English-speaking students managed to spot us 100 miles away. They stood on the court trying to talk to us, while we dodged around them.

Happy mid-January everyone!