A good day in China...

is not characterized by a tremendous amount of amazing things occuring, but rather, just the simple pleasures in life being realized. For example, today I was sitting in my nice clean apartment alone, save for my beautiful (if not a little sickly) cat, writing lessons plans and listening to my newly purchased Ben Fold Live with the Western Austraila Symphony Orchestra DVD. I had a very productive morning washing and hanging my clothes, taking a nice hot long shower, and lesson plans when I started getting hungry. So I phoned up the local dumpling shop, spoke the "signal" words to them, and a mere 15 minutes later was enjoying a hot bowl of pork dumpling soup. Yum yum! Then I take a stroll over to the TPR HQ and check my email and write this blog before I head out to Gong Bei and teach my adult class for 2 hours. Tonight I may go have a potluck dinner with some of the foriegners, or go out with some chinese girlfriends to listen to live music or maybe a nice dinner with this guy who wants to "learn english" :)

Last night I enjoyed mexican night and South Park with Daniel and Julie (I love cooking, they didn't mind cleaning) then went to have a few drinks with my chinese friends and james at an outdoor BBQ where we talked about all sorts of funny girly things.

The weather lately has been beautiful as well. The hottest days of summer are gone and autumn is creeping in. I hear winter gets a little frigid, but it can't be anything too horrible because it doesn't snow.

AND on an exiciting musical note, I found the most beautiful Yamaha silver saxophone here. Out of my price range, but I'm glad to know there's quality here when I get ready. Until then, I'm still going to purchase a cheap sax, because there's a few people that I've met that want to get a band started. Two chinese guys, a New Zealander and myself. Piano, sax, drums, guitar. It will be interesting. Also exciting, they sell vandoren reeds here :) when I found them I was terribly excited. I think I really confused the music shop people.

So it's the little things, like being able to afford a maid once a week (10rmb), ordering delivery (3rmb) listening to my favorite music (5rmb) having a beautiful cat, living alone, but not without plenty of new friends... that's what makes life in China good to me.

And in unrelated to me news... two new teachers from Austraila had a hard time adjusting and are heading out this weekend after classes and thus, Kevin got re-hired at TPR.

Soon the October holiday is coming where I have an entire week off. I'm going to travel to the hometown of my one of my TA's and live in a smaller town for a week. Should be interesting. More details and pictures to come!