Low Flying Dragonflies

Some one once told me that if you see Dragonflies flying really low that it meant that it was about to rain. I've seen a bunch of dragonflies and they were all flying pretty low and as far as I can tell there is no correlation between the dragonflies and the weather. I'm told it's still the rainy season though it hasn't really rained much more then it would have in DC. It was still really hot today, probably upper 80's with a ton of humidity. I've been pretty bored lately I just want classes to finally start. I could go to Suzhou but I'm not sure I really want to go by myself as I still know about 6 words of Mandarin and half the time when I say them people can't understand what I'm saying. I'm sure some one will want to go with me eventually but they all have classes right now.
I've talked some about what I like and don't like here in China but I thought I'd do some posts on the things I really like and the things that really annoy me, so first up today is some of the things that drive me crazy here.

The first and most obvious is the language barrier, now to be fair the fact that I knew about this one going in makes it less annoying. It's not really the big things, like not being able to have a conversation with most Chinese people it's the little one's like it taking 15 minutes to try to mime what an umbrella is when I want to buy one in the rain, or having such a hard time with street signs and restaurant menus. Also while sometimes it's fun having everyone stare at you gets unnerving after a while. I see six students walking along one sees me and stares for a minute then says something to the others then three heads turn then all of them look over for a minute. I'd call it a sort of paranoid feeling, but I don't think it's paranoia when everyone is watching you. China is also a pretty dirty country. I knew about some of that but all the spitting and the children going to the bathroom in the streets is pretty hard to stomach. I wash my hands a ton over here. There was a big thing of soap in my bathroom when I came and I've gone through about half of it in about two weeks. The food is another one I didn't really expect. I'm pretty good with liking unusual foods and new things but a lot of the food here is just weird and tastes really bad. Also we were warned a lot about it but China is a place where no one likes to give you a lot of information. They'll vaguely describe when things happen but won't really spell things out for you unless you really press them. For example there are in the classes class monitors who are students who have some role in monitoring the class, no one's ever really explained who they are and what they do though and the other teachers tell me sometimes they can't even tell if they have one for every class. Also things here just never seem to quite work right, the direr takes 6 hours to dry cloths the washing machine never really gets anything clean and my shower takes forever to drain. Finally there is the smell, Changzhou just smells bad. Not all of the parts smell the same mind you but they all smell pretty bad. Well that's it for today's list tomorrow will be things I like.