It's nice when the small routines start to develop. If I hold my kids right up until the bell, I'll be walked almost all the way home by one group of students or another. Our front doors have some stick to them: Pierce opens his with a body-check, I open mine with a hip-pop. Oatmeal in the mornings while I go over my lesson-plan for the day, beef-noodles sometime later in the day. Odds and ends out of my dresser/cupboard or the market for a third meal.

Two nights ago, David, a Chinese english teacher here who's been very close to other PCV's over the last two years, had us over to dinner. He and his roommate, a student here named Wondering, fixed us dinner in one of their bedrooms. David cooked, in addition to setting up hot-pot on a hot-plate in the middle of the room. It was awesome and we've already made David promise us cooking lessons. The next night our department took all the foreign teachers (there are about 8 of us total this year) out to dinner. It was interesting, with toasts all around, though I was a little pre-occupied with taking some giardia meds to hopefully kick the stomach-aches. Afterwards we went out with David to meet up with Cayce, a China 11, and his site-mate, my beloved Chinese class classmate, Angie. Solid night.

Today I was feeling a little alone and down in the apartment for much of the afternoon, but I met up with a student in the late afternoon for dinner. She had invited me to her aunt & uncle's home on the other side of the city. We took a bus about 45 minutes across town to the street where shops make and sell ceramic home-goods, then walked the remaining 20 min to the apartment. There I was treated to a huge dinner (including hunks of chicken breast -- chicken usually comes chopped up and on the bone here, so I was stoked), the best wine I've had yet in China, 5 hours of practicing my own special brand of Chinglish, and a beautiful tea ceremony. This family was so incredibly gracious! They made me feel entirely at home. We spent half an hour after dinner hanging out around the dinner table trying to figure out metric conversions using all the measure words we knew, both Chinese and English. My student wanted to take a shower there before we left (the dorm showers are communal and if they are anything like the toilet trenches in their dorms and by the classrooms, pretty awful), and while she was doing that, her aunt and uncle laid out a beautiful tea ceremony for me, over a special wood and clay set that they have. The aunt spent about 15 minutes telling me about different teas and traditions and how they vary regionally in China... I'm not saying I understood all of it, but I got a lot of what she was telling me. When it was time to start slurping the tea (all Chinese have the slurp down pat in order to drink down the very hot teas and show appreciation), they had me inhale deeply over it first, then roll a sip around in my mouth before slowly drinking it down. Just like a good wine-tasting.

The only other things going on right now are the continuing process of home-ifying the apartment and trying to get the rest of my semester sketched out for each class. Speaking of which, I'd just like to give a shout-out to the joys of teaching Oral English: in the last 20 minutes of class on friday, I had my kids designing alien species who live on Mars, and presenting each species to the class with mucho descriptions and their best story telling techniques (body language, facial expression, diction, pacing!). All aliens must have a super-power you know.