I think my hubris regarding not getting mosquito bites caught up with me, b/c for every bite I got during my first day teaching, i've gotten one right next to it, to match of course. There is a guy on the program who claims he never gets an mosquito bites....his blood must be haggis-flavoured or something....and mine mint-chocolate chip.

Chinese class is shaping up to be pretty hard and I feel like I am not able to give it my full attention (read: any attention) b/c I'm really focused on teaching right now. However, the only thing that makes me feel better is that everyone else in my class feels and is doing the same. The morning class, with the distinguished professor is great, it's just the drill class in the afternoon that is truly terrible. We all just kind of sit there sometimes and stare blankly, part out of not understanding and partly out of being tired, haha. I'm guessing I didn't realize just how esteemed this particular professor was until yesterday. There is a girl in our class who is not going to Shenzhen and I asked someone about her and her story and this is what I found out: she is Chinese and her parents live in America and she goes to an American university but has been teaching here in China this last semester. Well she is staying on as a TA for our program in Beijing in exchange for being able to take our two hour lesson with this particular professor each morning....kinda cool that we've got him for three weeks I'd like to think.

Tomorrow Tom and I are going with our students to hotpot for lunch....should be good, as they are very excited. It's weird thinking of them as students b/c some of them are law students at Qinghua (think Yale or Harvard) and others are equally intelligent. We're teaching i think the oldest class, so we're having to tailor the lesson plans to cater to a higher level. We spent today talking about newspapers and using new vocabulary like columnist, editor, financial section, news flash and my favourite, scoop. Scoop was kind of hard to define, but fun no less. We also taught them about the 'advice column' of the paper b/c there was an example in their textbook and decided to make an activity out of it: We started a letter to "Stella" for them and they had to finish it, creating a problem for Stella to solve. It was: Dear Stella, My name is Frank and I recently bought a brand new shiny truck.......Their problems were quite creative and finally at the end of the period we as a class came up with a classified ad to sell the truck in question, as it was causing 'Frank' too much trouble. Hahaha, teaching is pretty fun. tomorrow i'm teaching them about American holidays and they're going to work in groups to develop their own holiday b/c "the government has found a surplus in the budget and can afford for its citizens to take some additional time off." They're going to petition the gov't to pick their holiday...I think it'll be fun. Tomorrow will be my first day teaching on my own and being observed by instructors....i hope it'll go well.

My favorite student picked his English name yesterday. His Chinese name is Gao and so he decided that Gump, after Forest Gump was a good name. We have a new student in our class too, he joined today and is attending the Police university here in town. The class helped him pick the name Arthur after King Arthur (one guy really wanted him to be Lancelot, but he could not pronounce it). However, the best names have come out of some of the other classes, like "Superman, also known as Hercules and sometimes Hero" teehee. His best friend was Cinderella.

Well, there must be two bazillion people on the Beida campus right now, b/c the time Tom and I got to the front of the lunch line after teaching today, all the good food was gone...all that was left was steamed lotus root in a ketchup sauce (mmmm tasty minus the freakin ketchup, gross!) and rice.....so I quite astutely supplemented that interesting lunch with a Magnum bar afterward.

We had a guest lecturer come and speak (woohooo for making my day even longer) today. He is actually a student who was recently admitted as a freshman at Beida for the fall and he came to give us insight about the life of chinese high school students. It was actually a really cool lecture.

So on to my adventure. I met a really awesome girl here from Hawaii who went to UVA and she's been running here every day and she heard that I used to run a lot in America, so she asked me today if I wanted to go with her on a run after we got home today (today was perfect running weather b/c it had been raining all day and the temp. was low). I agreed and we set out and ran for about 25 mintutes and came upon this beautiful park in between some really awesome buildings and posh apts. and so we ran through it and came out the other side and figured we'd just make a huge square and run home. So we kept running and running and running and nothing looked familiar. So finally we admitted that maybe we didn 't know exactly where we were and so we asked a women how to get back to the beida medical campus (she speaks chinese too). Well the lady didn't know, but she said that the regular beida was in the direction that we were going, and that's good, b/c theoretically we'd hit our campus first and then if you went on further you'd get to beida. So we kept going and about 15 minutes later we were still facing unfamiliar territory. So we asked a security guard and he didn't know, so he radioed his friends to ask and they had an idea but weren't sure, but then he said to ask the taxi driver who was getting a soda from the street vendor. We asked and he immediately knew and we asked him to point us in the direction and he asked if we realized that we were kinda far away. He said he'd take us there but we told him we didn't have any yuan on us, but he said not a problem...he'd take us to our campus and one could wait with him and the other could get the money. We agreed even though we were still convinced we were close to where we lived. Well, it took us 15 minutes by taxi to get there....somehow instead of going in a square, we ran in some sort of weird trapezoid. But we were never worried as we both spoke Chinese and were together. As it turned out...our dinner party (who we were supposed to have met at 7:30) were outside the campus and a friend of ours lent us the money to pay the driver right away.....needless to say we probably won't live down our adventure for awhile...haha, oh well....it sure was fun and I made a great friend out of it.