What I've been doing while not blogging

Life here is turning out to be constantly busy, such that new adventures and stories are always happening and I am finding very little time to write them all down. I know it's important that I record my thoughts and experiences, both so all of you can know what is going on with me and so that I can fully process them and have something to look back on one day when I get nostalgic about it, but doing everything tends to take precedence over writing about it. It's hard to chain myself to my keyboard when there are journals to grade, lessons to plan, delicious meals to eat, Chinese classes to attend, buses to ride, people to talk to, ping pong and badminton games to play, mountains to climb, English speaking contests to MC, etc., etc.. (Admittedly, I've also spent a lot of time on my computer reading the AV Club, No Impact Man, and things sent to me by DailyLit, but I digress.)

I've been doing the math and it turns out that though I'm only teaching 10 hours a week, there are 40 scheduled hours a week in which I'm required to be somewhere:

• 26 hours on or traveling to or from the new campus:
• 10 hours teaching
• 6 hours on the bus
• 4 hours of office hours
• 2 hours eating dinner with students
• 4 hours of lunch and doing whatever we want in the foreign teacher apartment (which for several weeks included at least an hour of tutoring a few of my students for speech competitions, but those are over now)
• 14 hours of Chinese class

I started going to the Chinese classes offered for the international students at NPU a week or two ago after realizing that I wasn't really learning much Chinese on my own due to my lack of motivation to sit down and study. In fact, I was probably a lot better at Chinese right at the end of June when my intensive course at CSU ended. Since then, characters have been slowly slipping out of my brain, and then I got to China and realized that everything here is written in simplified characters anyways (I learned traditional). I didn't go to the classes here for the first few weeks because they started at the very beginning and I didn't want to do that again, but I think starting a few weeks in was a good choice. The pace here is much slower than the pace of my intensive course this summer, but we've been spending a lot more time on tones and pronunciation, which is helpful, and we're using a different book with different vocab in a different order, so I'm still learning new things. Most of all, it's just helpful to have Chinese study time in my schedule, and going to class is inspiring me to spend some more time studying on my own as well.

I still feel like my Chinese is abysmal, but I'm learning and people generally understand what I'm trying to say. One of my students told me the other day that my pronunciation of Xi'an was perfect – I was speaking English and saying something about being in Xi'an and he stopped me to say that I sounded Chinese when I said it. Of course, I'm still waiting for the day when my Chinese gets good enough that people stop complimenting me on it.