Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Dark of Night

Well you have to hand it to them the street vendors come out no matter what the weather is like. It was raining really hard on and off today. I get the impression that it probably rains a lot more around here in the summer since even though it was coming down in sheets if I came out a hour or two later it would be almost totally dry. The drainage is really impressive especially when you sort of expect everything in China to only sort of work. I got something smaller at the noodle shop today because they were out of rice. I eat a lot later then most of the students do, they seem to eat at about 5-5:30, so when I go to the restaurant some times they are out of things. It's actually pretty impressive that she was able to communicate that they were out of rice with just some hand gestures. I pointed to one dish and she shook her hand no, which happens some times for lack of some ingredient, so I pointed to another dish with rice in it at which point she shook me off again and pointed to the fired rice and shook no. I gathered from that that they were simply out of rice, which made sense when I pointed to a noodle dish and got it.

I was working on planning my first lessons today and I'm sort of terrified that I'm going to have no idea what to say to these kids. Everyone else seems to manage so I guess I'll probably be all right but I just have this image of them not understanding any game or activity and just sitting there staring blankly at me. They actually have a lot of English already at this point, though not as much as older students. I also have one class which is very small, apparently something like 7 students, who are going to study abroad. I have no idea what there level is or what they expect from me though. Maybe I'll spend a lot of the first class with them trying to figure out what they want from this class.