My Own Private Castle

"Your Own Private Castle: The beauty of a new home is that you don't have to see anyone." - propaganda poster spotted on the banks of the Songhua River, near school, to promote the new housing development going up.

Howdy Peeps,

Well this has been one of the most unproductive weeks of my life. We didn't have any classes (they start Monday), and we had tossed around the idea of visiting some friends in a neighboring city, but they were teaching, and we weren't sure when we would be getting our schedules, so we hunkered down in Jilin and waited out the week.

It's not like I did nothing all week. Sure I read a lot, watched some good movies, talked to a lot of you online, studied Chinese, made some new friends in my building, did some shopping, did a lot of laundry, cooked almost every day, took a few short bike trips and whatnot. But there is a big difference between being busy and trying to keep yourself busy. Boredom was an ever present threat this week, but I guess I really shouldn't complain. I know there will be plenty of times in the coming year when I would give anything for a week with nothing to do. Oh well.

Anyways, we finally did get our schedules, and things look to be pretty good this semester. For starters, Cletus has class five days a week, and four of those days he has class at 8am. He's pretty upset about his schedule, but I like to refer to this phenomenon as "Scheduling Karma." Last Fall, Cletus never had a class before 1:30pm, and he had three day weekends. Then in the Spring he only had one early morning class, and he had four day weekends. So even though I'm going to have to put up with his complaining all semester, he definitely had it coming.

My schedule is pretty decent. For the next three weeks, I only have to teach on Thursdays and Fridays. I will be teaching British Literature to two sections of Juniors. I think it will be fun, since they are the one class I haven't taught yet (I've already taught last year's freshman and juniors). Then, after the National Day Holiday, which takes place the first week of October, I will get to teach Biblical Literature to six sections of seniors. Yes, you read that correctly. The People's Republic of China, the fiercely atheistic communist government, wants me to teach it's college students The Bible, as a type of literature. Go figure.

So when it's all said and done, I will have class four days a week, with Wednesdays off, and only one 8am, and one late afternoon class. The other great thing is that I will be reunited with my beloved juniors from last year, now in their final year at Beihua. The reason I don't start teaching them until October is that they are all currently out student teaching and working other internships. I'm happy to be teaching them for two reasons: 1. They were my first students here in China, and so I am very close to them, and they to me. 2. This closeness, and the trust that comes with it, will make it that much easier to teach them this sensitive subject.

Now, obviously it would be easy to get carried away with excitement at the prospect before me. I'm not expecting that at the end of the term I will have 250 students ready to give their lives to Christ. But at the same time, obviously God has some great plans in store for these students, for me, and for China. And that thought excites me.

This will be a great challenge though. This is the first time this course has been offered at Beihua, so I'm sure the school leaders will be keeping a close eye on how it goes over. They didn't even give me a textbook to teach out of, which could prove to be a blessing, a curse, or perhaps even both. They just assumed I would come up with something, as if there wasn't already enough pressure.

Also, our school is in the middle of a national evaluation, which could determine the fate of the school itself. This has added a lot of unnecessary (and unfortunate) pressure to perform on the students and leaders of the school. This semester Cletus and I are being asked to attend bi-monthly "assessment groups," made up of fellow teachers in the English department. I have no idea what these groups will do, but I assume it has something to do with the national evaluation.

So yeah, it should prove to be an interesting semester, to say the least. I'm excited.

Let's see, what else is newsworthy....

Last night Cletus and I got invited to attend the English Corner at Brian's new university. They were supposed to send a car to pick us up, but after ten minutes of waiting we finally just had to get a cab. Then as we started to drive, it started dumping rain from the sky, and when we got to the school, the guard refused to let the taxi driver through the front gate. This meant we had a ten minute walk in front of us to the teaching building, in the pouring rain. And of course none of us had umbrellas. So Cletus, Holmes, and Doeyon (The Korean Tim) borrowed umbrellas from some students, but I had to just run, and it really didn't make any difference, because by the time we got there, we were all drenched to the bone. By the end of English Corner, we were all freezing, so we went out for hotpot afterwards to warm up.

Then when I got back, some of my Pakistani friends informed me that it was the birthday of one of the girls, so we held a surprise midnight birthday party for her, with cake and balloons. I'm not sure if this is a custom in Pakistani or what, but after we cut the cake, the birthday girl fed a piece to everyone. But what ended up happening was she just smeared frosting and cake all over everyone's face, ad so everyone then tried to smear her back, and in the end, everyone in the room had cake and frosting all over. Good times, good times.

I guess that's all for now. Like I said, I didn't really do anything this week. Not really proud of it, but that's life. Next week will be busy. Father Scott Harris is in town, so we'll be having dinner with him tomorrow night. Then classes start up, we start Chinese classes again, and I think Cletus and I are going to get memberships at the local gym. Zhang Lei, our Chinese tutor, used to be a member so she got us a discount, plus we get an added discount because we're teachers, so it looks like we're going to get a pretty good deal. It will be nice to have someplace to exercise once the weather gets cold. I think Cletus is excited for the weight machines, I'm going to enroll in yoga classes, and we both want free ping-pong and billiards.

Oh yeah, and whatever trash Brian's been putting in his blog about the Twins, just remember: if we sending out Liriano and Radke instead of Baker and Bonser, this weekend's series would be a whole 'nother ball game (pun intended).

Peace From The Far East,
Aaron