Hello

So I've been in China for about a week now, even though it feels like much longer. First we went we went around in Shanghai, did all the tourist stuff for a couple of days, before coming here a couple of hours away to Haining. I'll have pictures of Shanghai to upload at some point, but figuring out how to do that is going to be a bitch and a half. The computers here are slow, but the bigger problem is that everything is in Chinese. I can't even view my blog the regular way typing in the URL like (hopefully) everyone else can; If I want to see it I have to do it an alternate way as a pop-up window so that it doesn't have the blogspot in the URL. I had one of our Chinese assistants translate the error message I got, but it sounds like just the standard "this page is not available" message - I don't know whether or not that means it's blocked, but it happens anytime you try to access a page with .blogspot in the url. (When you just edit the pages the url is blogger.com.)

Stuff here is incredibly cheap, even if half of it doesn't work. I discovered I needed a watch, so I got a fake Omega, figuring if I needed the time I may as well look pretentious also. I paid 120 yuan (about sixteen dollars) for it...when I got back to the bus, people were telling me "man, you got ripped off, you could have gotten that for fifty." As it turned out, they were right, it stopped working the next day. So a couple of days ago, I went into a real store, and found one for twenty (which still works) - and then what I heard was "you can get those for four." Basically I guess you can get stuff arbitrarily cheap, if you know where to look.

The Chinese are very down-to-business, sometimes too much. They don't listen to people lecturing them until they show their hand, by which time it's sometimes too late. There was a whole thing going on between the teachers and the administration (and between the administration and the administration) about curfews. Hongda is a "middle school" (meaning grades 1-8), but most kids live on campus, and the entire compound is walled with security guards and such. Originally the rule was that at least two teachers had to go out together, with their assistants, and all come back by 11. Some of us wanted to stay out later, or go without the TAs. A lot of people just didn't like "the idea of it," which is kind of stupid, because you come to new countries to learn new ideas. But anyway, now two people that I know of are planning to break off early and go back home, this whole dispute apparently being a major factor. They weren't even the ones leading this revolt - I didn't even really know they had opinions on the subject. (Someone else actually stole the remote to the gate from the security guard - also not a particularly good reaction.)

I personally found the whole process of checking in and out to be kind of cumbersome, but I've also been perfectly happy to not stay out late and get rested. I also usually like having my TA when I go out to translate, so I wasn't one of the ones making the fuss. When the headmaster found out that people might be quitting, he relented on the rules, but not everyone seems to have been communicated this fact - we have a meeting with the headmaster in an hour and hopefully we will find out what's really going on. In any case, I'm still here, the food is great, though I can't quite keep vegetarian, and I'm about to go have some.