In case anyone is curious as to what I've been doing this past week, the answer is: not much besides teaching. Since our break, we have had class every day so I've been busy with teaching in the morning and working on my lesson plans in the afternoon. I haven't felt like doing much after getting home due to the drastic change in weather that occurred over the holiday. Before the Mid-Autumn Festival, it was consistently hot and humid. There's no A/C in the buildings at school so I have been doing a lot of sweating the past few weeks. But on the day of the festival, September 22nd, it turned colder and started raining. Now, there still has yet to be a day since the festival that was not cold and cloudy. But according to Romeo and some other people I've talked to, this change in weather was expected. Supposedly the weather will become warm again during the National Holiday break.

I did have at least one experience that I think is worth recounting, and that was playing ping pong with Romeo, a couple students, and the ping pong coaches at school. After Romeo finished teaching class this afternoon, we went up to the 6th floor of the main classroom building where there are two large rooms with six or eight ping pong tables each. When we got there we found that all the tables were being used by students in ping pong classes. Not long after we showed up, though, one of the coaches commandeered a table and started to rally with me. He gave me a few tips that, I think, have already improved my game a great deal. I rallied with him for a while, then I switched with Romeo and he hit with the coach. We kept switching in and out, and the coach would also have some of the students play with us. At the end, Romeo and I rallied with each other for a few minutes before we had to leave to get on the bus back to the old campus.

People say it stays pretty rainy here in the winter, so you can't play many outdoor sports. If what they say is true, then it looks like I'll have a plenty of time in the coming months to work on my game.