ICB Opening Ceremony 2012

I was "lucky" enough to be asked to give a speech again this year at the Opening Ceremony for incoming ICB students. (I was given lots of time to prepare, too: my boss called to tell me around three o'clock the day before!) It seems that I have become the go-to faculty member for this sort of thing. Well, lots of people seemed to like my speech, so here it is for your joy and edification.

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6 September 2012

       Vice President Wang, deans, administrators, ICB faculty, and, most especially, new students, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.
       In the 1980s, an American high school junior named Jeff Atwood had his eyes set on being a software engineer. He was fortunate enough to be allowed the chance to spend a day with an engineer who worked at a local manufacturing plant. The engineer was articulate, intelligent, and he had graduated from MIT, one of the best engineering schools in the United States. During lunch, Atwood asked him, "How much of your schoolwork at MIT applies to your current engineering job?"
       The engineer answered, "I can't think of a single thing from my MIT classes that I've used on the job."
       This, of course, was very surprising to Atwood, and I think it might be surprising to you as well. After all, what is the value of an excellent college degree if none of what you learn at university are useful on the job? Well, the fact is that any knowledge you accumulate in the next three or four years is not very likely to remain relevant during your whole career. Remember that humans can fill entire encyclopaedias with things that were once considered common knowledge but have now been disproved. It is generally assumed, for example, that about half of what medical students learn in medical school will later be proven incorrect--the problem is that we don't know which half!
       What, then, is the value of an education? If it is not in learning specific material, it must be in learning how to learn. In a world of multiple careers, rapid technological changes, and longer lives, it is continuous learning that will be the key to success. Carl Rogers, the American psychologist, claimed that "the only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change." And William Butler Yeats, the Irish writer, argued that "education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." In other words, the true purpose of one's education is not to amass knowledge but to develop the skill of learning.
       As such, education is a tool, like a hammer. And like a hammer, everything depends on how you use it. If you come to ICB as an empty pail, ready to be filled by your teachers, you will succeed in learning many things, but you will miss the most important lesson. Oh, to do well at university by the traditional measures, you of course have to learn a lot of new things. And you, your parents, and your teachers will certainly be pleased if you understand the material your teachers present and are able to reproduce it on midterms and finals. But if you succeed at university merely according to these traditional measures, the profession to which you will be best suited is being a college professor. Assuming you do not want to be a college professor, then what you need to learn at ICB is really so much more.
       So learning how to learn. How do we go about doing that? I of course have a few suggestions.
       First, ask questions. Don't be shy! Remember that most teachers are teachers because they really like to talk. We also like to answer questions because it makes us feel smart. Set yourself a goal of asking each of your teachers at least one question every week. That might sound daunting, but you can start small. Start with questions like, "How long have you been in China?" and "What do you think is the most valuable method of study for this course?" You can work your way up to asking questions about the content of the course.
       Second, be an active learner. All too often, when the bell rings at the end of class, students turn off a switch in their brain. They think--if they bother to think at all--"I'm done learning now, so I can stop thinking about this." Or they think it is the professor's job to make them learn. That might have been true in high school, but it is definitely not true at university. At the end of every class, you need to ask yourself, "What did I learn in this class period?" and "Why is this important?" If you cannot answer these two questions, you might as well have slept through the class.
       Third, surround yourself with classmates who also have the desire to learn how to learn. I have been married for almost 8 years (which is not at all difficult when you are married to someone as wonderful as my husband), but I still remember the sermon the minister gave at our wedding ceremony. He said that choosing a marriage partner was so important because to whom you are married to does more to shape who you are and who you will become than does any other factor. But the same is true in many realms. Whom you study with, eat with, chat with, and live with does more to shape your learning than will any other factor.
       This is my challenge for you, not only for today, but for the next three or four years: Understand that the most important lesson at university is learning how to learn. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Be an active learner. And choose your friends wisely. Then, when you graduate, you can call yourself truly educated.

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Jiankou Great Wall

Eastern Qing Tombs

On April 9 we took a day trip to the Eastern Qing Tombs. It was an excursion arranged by the school, so it was full of its own little unexpected twists and turns.

We left around 7:30, and because Seth has gotten to be quite the night owl, I had the foresight to bring a pillow along. He and I both slept for part of the way. We arrived around 11:30, met up with a local tour guide, and had a lot of fun walking around. There are five emporers, 15 empresses, and hundreds of concubines buried at the Eastern Qing Tombs. The most well-known of all of these is Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled China from 1861 to 1908.

When we got back on the bus around 2:30, I thought we would munch on some snacks the school had thoughtfully provided for us as we made our way home. We were pretty hungry from all the walking and with it being mid-afternoon. Imagine our surprise when our tour guide told us that our next stop would be a porcelein factory, followed by an earthquake museum in another city altogether.

We drove for about half an hour and then stopped. I was pleased; I thought I must have misheard when the tour guide said we would have an hour and a half drive. But what we were really doing was eating lunch! Too bad I had just stuffed my face full of snack food because I was so hungry from skipping lunch. This is where I started to get a little annoyed. Would it really have been so difficult to tell us ahead of time that we were going to be fed? And it wasn't just because my Chinese is horrible; my co-worker Terry who has amazing Chinese (a la her Chinese husband) also didn't know, and she and her two kids did the same thing we did as soon as we got on the bus. So we all sat down at this table full of food and hardly touched anything on it.

Back on the bus, pretty much everybody dozed off except for Seth and Terry's daughter Sarah, both of whom I seemed to become responsible for. (Oh wait, I was responsible for Seth before then, wasn't I?) We arrived at the porcelain "factory" around 6:00. The tour guide made a big deal about the fact that the factory was normally closed at that time, but that they had agreed to remain open just for us. We went inside, and it wasn't a factory at all--just a porcelain shop. If we wanted to we could paint a large serving bowl, have it fired, and get it shipped to us for 7,000 R.M.B. (about $1,000). No one did.

Got back on the bus around 7:00. Thankfully the earthquake museum was out of the question because of the lateness of the hour, and we headed back to Beijing. We were all glad to be going home, but I have to say that I was more than a little annoyed. Had we just driven an hour and a half out of our way to go to a porcelain shop? And does the school really think they pay me enough money to buy a $1,000 bowl??

Most of the ride back home was occupied with playing referee between Seth and Sarah, both of whom wanted the single pillow I had brought along. We got back to campus at about 10:30, walked home, and fell asleep 23 seconds after walking through the door.

But, hey, I got a lot of cute pictures, and that's what matters, right?

Christmas Cookies

We spent the weekend putting our oven to good use by making Christmas cookies. Benjamin started on Saturday morning with no-bake cookies; then we made some sugar cookie dough; then we made peanut butter blossoms with Hershey Kisses my mother had sent from the States; then we made chocolate chip M&M cookies (again, the M&Ms were from the States); and finally I made a batch of toffee bars. Today we rolled out the sugar cookie dough and baked some cutout cookies.

I made some buttercream frosting that--get this--used both butter and cream. (In my experience, most "buttercream" recipes contain neither.) Benjamin was in heaven. I frosted the cookies and Seth and Benjamin decorated them. Seth did a good job for the first 7 seconds, but it didn't take long for him to disregard our instructions and start dumping on the sprinkles.

Tomorrow we are hoping to spread some Christmas cheer by handing out cookies to our bosses and their bosses. On Wednesday evening we will have a work Christmas party. Then on Friday we plan to have a nice family meal (just the three of us), read the Christmas story, and open presents. I have two classes on Christmas day, but Benjamin got lucky this semester and doesn't have classes at all on Fridays, so he has the day off. But I will be home by 4:00, so we'll have plenty of time to celebrate.

2009 Christmas Newsletter

The season between Thanksgiving and the New Year is a time of looking back and looking forward. We look back on the things we are grateful for and remember the previous year. We look forward to Christmas (you know, Advent) and look to the promises the New Year brings. We are first of all thankful for all our friends and family in America who remember us every day or week. Whether sending an e-mail or a message on Facebook, mailing a Christmas card or calling us on Skype, we feel your love and appreciate your thoughts on our behalf.

We are also very thankful for our new apartment. There has been a lot of drama concerning this apartment (check out Laurie’s epic posts below) but we are finally getting settled into our new place and making it home. Seth has a ton of room to run around in and has his own play area. We finally have a full-sized kitchen with a very expensive oven that we had to purchase ourselves. It has totally been worth every dollar as we’ve had cookies, cakes, brownies, and casseroles, and for Christmas dinner we’ll have home-made manicotti and New York style cheesecake.

The best part of the new apartment is that it has allowed us to actually have guests over. Our old place was small, dirty, and had a gatekeeper downstairs to keep all non-teachers out. We were in a “guest house.” Not so here. In fact, we had several Chinese friends over to a Thanksgiving dinner. Laurie did a fabulous job getting it as close to an American dinner as possible, only with chicken instead of turkey. We even went around the table to say what we were each thankful for.

While Laurie has taught previously, Benjamin is finishing his first year teaching. It isn’t something that he chose as a career, but he has adapted fairly quickly and is enjoying it, especially teaching business math. Both of us seem to like it here and plan on staying for awhile, though Laurie finds routine job searching cathartic for dealing with the pressures of the job. Seth continues to grow and learn. He is always amazing us with the things he understands and is able to do. We are grateful for his experience growing up in two cultures. It won’t be long until he surpasses us in his Chinese, though right now he is still simply processing the dual language environment.

As we look to the next year, Laurie and Benjamin will be celebrating their five-year anniversary with a trip to Sanya in Hainan Province. (Hainan is called “the Hawaii of China.”) Seth will start pre-school in the fall and hopefully make a lot of new friends. We also hope to continue with our teaching jobs and, most importantly, develop more and deeper friendships with both Chinese and foreigners.

While many American Christians complain about the secularization and commercialization of Christmas, here in China we are thrilled to see any signs of the holiday. It’s hard to believe Christmas will be here next week when, unlike most of you, we haven’t been looking at apartment store decorations and listening to carols played over loudspeakers since October. We have to remind ourselves every day that the season of Christ’s birth is upon us, and in the spirit of joy and peace that our Savior has brought us, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and the happiest of New Years.

Reverse Trick-or-Treating

The Chinese are very aware of the holiday of Halloween, and they think the traditions of carving jack-o'-lanterns, wearing costumes, and trick-or-treating are interesting and quaint, but that doesn't mean that they have adopted the holiday for themselves or that they encourage their children to gorge on chocolate once a year. In fact, last year we had a really difficult time finding a costume for Seth, so last summer when we were in the States I made sure to buy one for him. Though Halloween isn't until tomorrow, we put him in his costume today and had him pass out candy at the ICB offices. He was the cutest little dinosaur I have ever seen. (I guess that isn't saying all that much since I've never actually seen a dinosaur.) Its been a hectic couple of days with our move (we've been walking things over to our new place, but the school has hired movers for us for 8:30 Sunday morning) and still teaching full-time and trying to celebrate a holiday on top of it, but it was worth it to see how happy he made everybody.

The Housing Crisis Ends

Benjamin and I were given the keys to our new apartment a matter of hours ago! The school finally lowered the price so that we are now paying about $300 per month--a very reasonable fee, in our opinion--for either size apartment. (We chose the bigger one.) The lower price generated enough interest among the faculty that the plan was given the go-ahead. We already took a load over (meaning four or so bags that we could carry on our person) and checked it out.

Though the the place is furnished, it is still a little sparse, so I will have a lot of fun fixing it up. And there is some furniture we still want to buy, such as dressers, a china cabinet, and some shelves for Seth's toys. We're also considering buying an oven, though they are crazy expensive here in China. The cheapest I've found is one at IKEA that measures 2 feet by 2 feet by 2 feet (on the outside!) and costs $1,000. Then I will get to work decorating: hanging pictures on the walls, picking out curtains and carpets, arranging knickknacks, and so forth. It's going to be a busy but exciting couple of weeks, and I hope to have everything close to done by Thanksgiving so that we can invite a few people over.

The Housing Crisis, Part 2

Is anybody still reading? Yikes! I bored myself with that last spiel. But I might as well finish the story, right?

So we went to Dean Feng to let him know that we were planning to move off campus, and lo and behold, he tells us that the price of the apartments is 50 R.M.B. per usable square meter versus overall square meters. This lowered the price of the apartments significantly, though they would still be more expensive than the off-campus apartment we had found. The big plus was the convenience. I have four eight o'clock classes this semester, and if you know me at all you know that I'm not Miss Suzy Sunshine in the wee hours of the morning. The apartment we had found was north of campus and about a fifteen-minute bus ride away, but that was once you actually got on the bus and didn't count the fifteen minutes or more you could spend waiting for it. And if traffic happened to be a lot worse on any particular day, that could lengthen the drive as well. So suddenly I am having to leave home at 6:45 to be sure to get to school by 7:30. And we like living on campus. As much as we complain about not having a kitchen, it really is nice to just be able to walk over to the cafeteria for lunch or dinner. It's easy to get to class and meetings; my boss is always calling me to her office to pick up or drop off this or that, and doing so would be so much more difficult if we lived off campus. The higher price tag on the on-campus apartments was starting to appear more reasonable.

So we finally decided that, yes, we would live in the school's apartment if we could get one of the smaller apartments. It would be plenty big enough for our family and easily twice the size of where we are already living. Plus there was the possibility that we wouldn't have to sign a lease, so we could move out at any time. Now all we had to do was pray for patience!

The semester started and we attended another new semester orientation meeting. Dean Feng announced that the apartments would be finished within a week and that we would be able to move in by the end of the month. Why the delay? Well, the Chinese believe that when a building is built, there are all sorts of dangerous chemicals and toxins that go into the building and get stirred up in the air inside it, so after a building is finished, it has to simply sit there for two or three weeks. It's kind of funny; I don't know how they know when the poisons and toxins are gone, or where they go, or what would happen to you if you moved in before they had "settled," or why it's okay to move into a building full of toxins as long as you wait two or three weeks first, but that's beside the point. There is simply nothing we could do about it, and we had to wait.

On Friday of last week, Benjamin and I both received e-mails from our respective bosses telling us that anybody who was interested in living in the apartments should come to the office on Sunday morning to take a tour of them. In the afternoon we would have a meeting on housing allocation. Now to me, this sounded like the school was saying, "The apartments are ready and you will be given your keys on Sunday," or at least something along those lines. I'm sure you can imagine my response: this is going to be my best birthday ever!!! (Yes, Sunday was my birthday, or as Benjamin put it, the second anniversary of my twenty-ninth birthday.)

Sunday morning we did indeed take a tour of the apartments. I took a camera along to snap pictures so that I could start decorating in my head before we actually moved in. Overall I was very pleased. The furniture is a little on the cheap side, but it is all brand new, and whoever chose it did a good job picking out neutral items. From the moment I stepped in the door I was dreaming of where I would hang art and photos, where I would put candles and tablecloths, how I would arrange the kitchen, how many trips to IKEA I would have to make, etc.

So I went to the afternoon meeting with a happy heart. Benjamin and I had already spoken with many of the other teachers, and it seemed like most people did not want to move into the apartments on campus. We knew there were only seven of the smaller apartments available, and that we were about middle of the patch as far as seniority, but we didn't think we really had any competition. The teachers who were already living off campus didn't want to move back, and the teachers who were living on campus in the guesthouse for free (like us) didn't want to have to start paying rent.

Now here's the thing: the guesthouse we are currently living in is not ICB's guesthouse. We are actually living in the China-Israeli Center for Agricultural Studies. ICB's guesthouse, which is a stone's throw from where we are currently living, was evacuated with plans for demolition before the 2008 Olympics. (Apparently you could see the ICB guesthouse when a camera did a pan of the Olympic wrestling stadium, which is on campus, and the Olympic committee thought it looked tacky on television. It was in pretty bad shape.) But it never got demolished. In fact, last spring when Dean Meng was making us his promises about the on-campus accommodations he also informed us that the ICB guesthouse was going to be rennovated and every teacher was going to get a shared office space. (This was welcome news as well, but I was much more excited about the apartments. I will, however, enjoy having a work office as Benjamin and I currently share just one desk in our apartment, and we don't have anywhere to meet with students for our obligatory office hours. The supposed deadline for that project is the end of October.)

After informing us that we would have to pay rent for the on-campus apartments, we were given a second option: to move into ICB's new guesthouse--the one our offices will be in--for free. However, the rooms are smaller than they are in the China-Israeli guesthouse, where we have the biggest of all the rooms, so living in the new ICB guesthouse wasn't really an option. Benjamin and I would each be able to get a room, but they would be smaller (about 200 square feet each), and we still wouldn't have a kitchen. Basically, it would be a huge downgrade for us. For the single teachers living on campus, however, it would be a lateral move.

So at the meeting on Sunday every teacher interested in on-campus housing was asked to fill out form to let the school know where they would like to live. We handed in our forms and waited while Deans Meng and Feng counted. As it turns out, Benjamin and I were the only ones willing to pay the price the school had set. Everybody else wanted free accommodation in the newly-renovated ICB guesthouse.

Sounds good, right? I mean, if we are the only family who wants to move in, then we would have our pick of apartments. Not only would we be able to get one of the smaller apartments, but we would also be able to choose which floor we wanted to live on. But as it turned out, there are not enough rooms in the ICB guesthouse to accommodate everybody who wants to live there. Their solution: we have to get China Agricultural University to drop the rent on the apartments so that more of our teachers are willing to move there.

That sounds good, too, right? I mean, in my mind I'm thinking, "Great! We can move in, pay the higher rent for a month while this gets settled, and then start paying a more reasonable amount." That's what a normal person would think, right? Wrong. Since I am middle of the pack for seniority, Dean Meng wouldn't let me choose an apartment. He said, "You will just pick the best apartment. If the university lowers the price and other teachers with higher seniority choose to move in, they should be able to choose before you do." Dean Feng was actually on my side. He said it was reasonable to allow our family to move in ahead of others with higher seniority because we were willing to pay a higher price. Dean Meng countered with "But Seth shouldn't be living in that building with all the bad air anyway!" I stifled a scream...

So that's the story of why we're still waiting, why we can't move next week while we are on vacation, and why I am so angry with ICB that I am thankful for gun control laws. Hopefully...hopefully...hopefully it isn't the end of the story and we will be moving soon. Even if CAU lowers the rent on the apartments, we think we'll still be able to get one. There simply aren't a lot of teachers who sound interested. Most of the teachers here are single and only stay for a year or two, so living in a little room and eating at the cafeteria isn't all that bad if it's free and if it isn't for the rest of your life. We, on the other hand, might grow old in this stupid apartment; it does seem to have some kind of magnetic power over us. But hey, at least we're not breathing all that bad air. No, we just have to live with smog as bad as this:

The Housing Crisis, Part 1

It's a really long story, and you certainly don't have to read it, but if you are at all interested in why our family is still living in a 500 square foot apartment, with only one bedroom and no kitchen, read on...

When we first came to China fall of 2008, we planned to live in our school's guesthouse for a month or so while we looked for our own place. The room we were given in the guesthouse was bigger than average, but it was just a sitting room and a bedroom. The bedroom had room for one double bed and space to walk next to it. The sitting room had a couch and a wardrobe. It wasn't a place we wanted to live long-term.

Two or three days after moving in, the school offered us a larger apartment with a decent-sized living room and a much larger bedroom--room for a bed, a wardrobe, and a crib in this one. I was hesitant to take it since we were planning to move off campus within a couple of weeks. I mean, the apartment they showed us was a big improvement over the one we were already living in, but it was still pretty yucky and tiny, and I just didn't think it was worth it to move everything. Well, Benjamin was pretty convinced that it was worth it to upgrade to the larger place even if we would only be staying there for a couple of weeks, and since he said he would do the moving while I worked on lesson planning, I agreed. (Incidentally, this was an act of submission on my part; yes, feminists in egalitarian relationships can and do practice the fine art of submission!)

Well, it turned out to be a smart thing to do because moving off campus was going to have to be postponed. We found out that landlords in China typically require tenants to pay three to six months' rent at a time, in addition to a hefty security deposit. We had only brought enough cash to China to make it to my first pay day, which we had misunderstood to be the twentieth of the month. (Actually, it turned out to be the twenty-eighth. The Chinese accent makes it really hard to distinguish these two numbers.) Then when I finally did get paid we squandered pretty much all our money buying a washing machine since we had previously had to wash everything by hand or take our clothing to a shop off-campus where they charged us per item to launder our clothes for us and our clothes came back with tags stapled into them that hurt like the dickens and were really hard to take off, too. Oh, yeah, and we bought a microwave and DVD player, too.

After that, we thought we should be able to move out between semesters. I had a month off starting in mid-January, and we thought that by then we would be able to save up enough money. I mentioned this to my boss and she discouraged us from moving off campus since (a) it's a big hassle with loads of paperwork and oodles of long lines to stand in and (b) the school was working on getting us better accommodations. Plus we were getting kind of used to where we were, small as it was, and liked the idea of saving so much money (where we live now is rent-free), and we thought we could stick it out until the end of the school year.

Spring semester began. All the teachers at ICB were invited to an orientation meeting. At this meeting the dean of our school stood in front of us all and gave us this speech:

"It really is a shame that our teachers, some of the best teachers in Beijing, teachers who have come to Beijing from all over the world, are living in the accommodations we have provided. Our teachers are living in single rooms while teachers at other universities are given entire apartments. Our teachers don't have kitchens; they have to eat in the school cafeteria with the students or go out to eat every single day. Our teachers don't have the quality of life they would have if they worked in their home countries or even at other universities in Beijing, and for this I apologize.

"Building 41, on the north side of campus, is an apartment building recently constructed for full professors at China Agricultural University. CAU has allocated twenty-one of these apartments to ICB. Two teachers will share each apartment, so there will be room for forty-two full-time teachers. The apartments are 1300 and 1500 square feet in size, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a spacious living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a study. The apartments will be ready for you to move into on May 1."

(Okay, so it wasn't nearly as eloquent as all that. Imagine the above with lots of inappropriate pauses, a really, really thick accent, tons of grammatical errors, and none of the big words, and that's what we heard.)

And then they showed us these gorgeous computer generated photos.



I was thrilled to pieces. Benjamin was thrilled that I was thrilled.

May 1 came and went, which wasn't really that big of a deal. I mean, in China deadlines are understood to be flexible, and though it frustrated me because I thought Dean Meng should have known better than to promise us the new apartments by a certain date, I knew that I simply had to be patient. You simply can't rush the Chinese.

Near the end of May we discovered that Seth could climb out of his crib. But we had a problem: no room for a toddler bed in our little bedroom. We went to the dean in charge of the apartments, Dean Feng, and explained the situation. We told him that we appreciated that the school was getting these apartments ready for us but that if they couldn't be ready in a couple of weeks we simply had to move off-campus in order to have a safe place for Seth to sleep. He promised us that the apartments would be ready by the time we left for the States mid-July. Benjamin and I didn't really know what to do, but ultimately we stayed put. It seemed silly to move off-campus for a couple of weeks and have to pay rent over the summer when we would be gone. We moved Seth into our bed (which he didn't mind one bit!) and started getting a lot lower quality of sleep.

As we were getting ready to return to the States for the summer, we made a point to speak with Dean Feng and ask him about the progress on the apartments. He said they would most certainly be done by the time we returned from abroad.

Then, one week while we were visiting friends in Kentucky, I received an e-mail from my boss Joyce. She wrote that she had finally been given the price of the apartments. I cannot stress to you enough that we had no idea before this point that the apartments would not be included as part of our compensation. No one had told us or even hinted to us otherwise. In fact, the exact opposite had been implied, if not expressly stated.

Furthermore, the price of the apartments was outrageous: $900 and $1,100 per month for the smaller and larger apartments, respectively. Many of our fellow teachers were already renting apartments off campus, and they typically paid $400 to $500 per month. The apartments on campus were larger, but we certainly didn't need 1300 square feet of living space. After all, our apartment in Kentucky had been only 750 or maybe 800 square feet.

Now we were filled with questions. Why was the school charging us for the apartments when at the new semester orientation meeting they had been presented as part of our benefits? Why were these apartments so expensive, to the degree that they were priced about twice as much as we thought would have been reasonable? And most of all, why had we been discouraged from moving off campus if we would have been better off financially that way anyway? The amazing thing about China is that we will never get an answer to any of these questions. Saving face is an important part of Chinese culture, so we can't simply go to Dean Meng or Dean Feng and accuse them of trying to exploit us. We can't even really ask them any pointed questions. All we can do is speculate with our colleagues, which we have done aplenty.

We returned to Beijing determined to find our own place off campus. After toying with the idea of me quitting my job (I hadn't signed a contract, Benjamin had, and we could live off his salary until I found something new) we realized that it would be better to continue working while looking for a new position. I started looking online for apartments, and we visited some rental agencies in some areas where we would like to live. After looking at ten or so apartments, we found one we were very happy with--the rent was about $450 per month--and we told the realtor that we would be back the next day with a Chinese friend who could help us communicate. If we received favorable answers to our questions (for example, we wanted the landlord to replace or at least remove the couch, which was gross), then we would sign a lease. But before doing that we thought we would go see Dean Feng and let him know our plans. After, we had been bugging him for months regarding when the apartments would be ready, and now we weren't even going to live in them. As angry as we were, we thought it was a good idea. I think we also felt the need to tell him that we were disappointed with how the situation had turned out, even if that did mean that he would lose face.

I told you it was a long story!! I'm going to have to take a break because Seth needs to go to bed. I'll try to finish up the saga soon!

End of Semester

To celebrate the end of the spring 2009 semester, our college took us out to eat at a really, really nice Italian restaurant today. It was a three-hour European dining experience (and I thought the Chinese ate slowly!) with six courses. Remarkably, Seth was very well behaved. Benjamin still has one more exam this week, but we are really starting to feel like we are truly on vacation. One more week before flying out!

Wandering Around Campus

I haven't been doing a lot of blogging lately--not because I am too busy but because I am not busy enough! I usually blog to procrastinate doing actual work, but other than giving and grading one final exam (on Thursday) I am completely done for the semester. I've even turned in my students' grades for classwork and attendance. Benjamin also has one more final exam (a week from Tuesday) and still has to finish up his grading for the semester.

On the day that I took these pictures, Seth and I went outside in the early evening just to wander around and get out of Benjamin's hair while he made dinner (BLTs--yum!). In the first picture Seth is standing in front of what will be our school's new basketball and tennis courts, the old ones having been paved over a year ago to provide parking for the Olympics. The other pictures were taken in front of our school's gymnasium, where the Olympic wrestling matches were held.

The End of British Culture

Last week marked the middle of our spring semester, so Benjamin and I have been busy holding office hours, proctoring exams, and grading midterms. It's nice to be over the "hump" of the semester, and the weeks before we fly back to the States will speed by. My British Culture and Literature class was only half a semester, so instead of a midterm they took their final exams last week. I really enjoyed teaching culture classes (I do have an MA in Cross-cultural Studies, after all), though it was certainly a challenge coming up with all that material! I got to know quite of few of my students rather well, and I have to say that they were a pleasure to teach--for the most part.

To celebrate the end of British Culture classes we went out for Indian food with Erin, the other professor who taught it. We thought we should have British food, but we didn't really know where to find it, so we settled for the food from another Commonwealth nation. The pictures below are of my two British Culture classes (they were small--only 19 students each) and Seth and Benjamin the night we went out for Indian food.