After class I went downtown and got on the bus to Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province, where I would transfer onto another bus to the villages. When I arrived in Nanchang, I found that there were no available buses until 6:30 that night. I decided to walk around the city and try and find a bookstore so that I would have something to read during the bus ride. As I was standing outside the bus station, a young Chinese man named Jake came up and started asking me in English what I was doing in Nanchang and where I was trying to go. I told him I wanted to find a bookstore and he said he would take me to one just down the road. So Jake and I went to a couple bookstores and I ended up buying a Chinese novel that I had already started but had decided to leave at home for the trip. As we were looking around the bookstore, Jake ran into an old classmate of his from college. I'm not sure what her name is but we talked for a while and then left the store. Jake's schoolmate also had a bus to catch around the same time as me so she and I ate dinner at a restaurant next to the train station.
I don't know what happened but as soon as we finished dinner and left the restaurant, I decided that I wanted to return to Xinyu to spend the holiday with the students and the other teachers. There were no tickets left for buses back to Xinyu that night so I had to stay in Nanchang. I called Jake and he let me stay overnight in his apartment where he lives with two other people.
I walked around Nanchang for a little while that night, then woke up early the following morning to get on the bus. Jake bought breakfast for me (noodles, a steamed bun, and a packet of milk) and took me to the bus station. I went to get in line, Jake and I shook hands, and then I went through the gate and boarded the bus.
After I had arrived back in Xinyu (about a 2 1/2 hour ride), I got on the bus to go back to my apartment. Some students from the college happened to be riding on the bus and they too were on their way to the teachers' apartments to meet their Japanese teacher and make dumplings with him. They invited me to join them so I went along with them to meet up with Fujii Takafumi, the Japanese teacher who, like me, is teaching in Xinyu for the first time. Fujii is the guy standing in the back wearing a white shirt.
After making and eating our dumplings, three of my students, Mike, Michael, and Bruce, took me to Baoshi Park. We walked and talked in the park for a while and left around 4. One of Romeo's students, Amy (I think), invited us over for dinner so she and another of Romeo's students met Romeo, Bleisha, and myself just down the street outside our apartment and led us to her home. We ate dinner that night with the two students, Amy's parents and her grandmothers.
The next morning I went fishing in another park with a student named Bill from my Business English class. This time, we went to the "Wetland Park", which has a river running through it and is dotted with small ponds. We tried rods first but weren't catching much, so Bill got out some nets he had bought the previous day. We mixed water and fish food in a bucket and dipped the nets in the solution. You're not supposed to fish with nets in the park so we tried to keep watch as we were doing all of this. But there was a light rain and it was a little chilly so there weren't many people walking around, thus we were pretty safe. We ended up catching 14 fish about 6 inches long. I'm not sure exactly what they were but they looked like they might have been a kind of bass.
We left the park, Bill went back to the new campus, and I went came back home to the old one. Later that night I took a cab to the new campus and met Bill and some other students for dinner. We took the fish Bill and I had caught and had the people at the restaurant cook them for us.
By the time we finished dinner it was too late to take a bus back home and I didn't want to spend money on a cab again so I slept in a bed in Bill's dorm.
I'm glad I came back to Xinyu and got to hang out with the students outside of class.
This is a box of mooncakes that I received from the foreign studies department.
And here is a mooncake. The inner-fillings come in different flavors. So far, I think coconut may be my favorite one.
Last thing, I've had some requests for pictures of my students so here they are, at least some of them.
You may notice that the class has mostly girls. That is the case with all of my classes. They are about 90/10 girls to guys. In one of my classes there are 40-something girls and 1 guy. I'm still enjoying class very much and I think my classes are continuing to improve steadily.
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