Not a whole lot going on these days. It got a lot colder over the past few days. Actually quite cold really. I've gotta buy some more clothes. A jacket, maybe some sweaters, and hopefully some pants that reach all the way down to my ankles. That probably won't happen.

The sun came out this afternoon. This is the view out my window. The street below, the middle school on the other side of the street, and the vendors who sell their food through the fence to the students when they have a break from class.



Here's my new guitar that I bought the other day. I've been wanting to give it a shot for a while now.


But I have been doing some things, of course. Yesterday some of my students took me, Bleisha, and Romeo to the KTV (karaoke television) downtown early in the afternoon. We stayed there for a few hours singing songs (I could only sing a few because almost all of them were either Chinese songs, which I don't know the words to, or old American pop songs that I'm not familiar with, but I did sing a few, Britney Spears "Lucky" and "A Whole New World" were my top choices) and then went on to a hot pot restaurant for dinner. If you don't know what hot pot is, it's a style of food where there's a very hot pot of broth divided into two halves; one half is spicy, the other isn't. Then you order a bunch of raw vegetables and meats and put them into the broth. You wait a few minutes and then scoop out the food with a ladle, wait a couple minutes for it to cool down, and then eat. It's really good.

And today I went to play some tennis in the park nearby the old campus with a guy I met last week at the new campus. He graduated from Xinyu College last year and was a tennis/PE major. Now he lives in Xinyu and teaches tennis. We didn't get to hit for very long because I had to string a racket first, which ended up taking about an hour and a half (it usually takes 30 minutes). The machine was a bit hard to work with and my string broke when I was right at the end of the racket, so I had to redo the second half. But we got to hit a few before he had to give a lesson to a couple kids.

And tonight we, the foreign teachers, made dinner. Romeo made rice and Bleisha and I (mostly Bleisha) made some Japanese mushroom soup with egg and broiled turnips with chicken gizzards. It turned out to be a really good meal.




And here's the hall kitchen.


I think I'm going to start using this more often from now on. It's a lot more convenient than cooking in your room or in the hall like most of the teachers do. There are no lights in the hall so you have to try and chop things and add spices in the right amounts all in the dark. Not good. Having light should be nice.