Saturday, March 29, 2008

nimen hao
(hey everybody)

so! been in china over a month now. the classes are coming easier, but still obviously hard. foreign language classes in that language are so hard, but so good for you. im still functionally pretty incompetant, but i know enough to get around. i can get food, i can get stuff at the grocery store, i can take a cab and a bus. i just cant have a decent conversation with people. but really, if youve heard people say immersion is the best way to learn a language, theyre right. its amazing.

not really much to tell. once you get past the whole "holy crap im in freakin' china!" thing, its just school as usual. the focus is different here than what im used to. here the focus is more on rote memorization instead of learning things and extrapolating on it. the class routine gets old pretty fast. were in the same classroom, the same seat for (on my long day) 8 hours. a silly complaint, but man the desks arent designed for someone tall. raaather cramped.

something cool tho, found out im going to be teaching a small group of kids english. theyre ages 6-8 and have never had english before. i met with the parents yesterday, and ill be having class tuesday nights for about an hour. heh, wasnt intending to get a job when i came here, but cool! we already get a stipend from the school for food. we get 1000 yuan a month, and for this month i spent maybe 150 of it. hurray for saving! (you can eat cheap in the cafeteria)

in my endless free time (meaning after ive gone to bed), ive been trying a little more world-building in this wanna-be scifi plot in my head. youve already seen three of the aliens: ( the chaedan'kai , the sunifee and the erda). besides those three there are the saurian ta'an, the otter-like sri, and the disturbingly humanoid svyati. theres at least one more species lurking out there somewhere, but i cant really see them too well (and im not sure i want to. somethings not right about them). ive written a small series of very short stories about the chaedan'kai, which im going to submit for publishing to a magazine. might put them up here tho, or at least the first couple. trying to figure out the full story here. its out there somewhere.

so! those are the tales from china. likely going to go out this afternoon and wander around. theres a lot to see.

{inu}
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