What's Next

Well the water then heat going off isn't the end of the fun in Alaer. Yesterday, for most of the day, there was no power. There was power in the morning when I left for my first class, but almost as soon as I got back it wen out. This isn't the first time we've lost power in Alaer, it happens for a few hours about once a month, it also used to happen in Changzhou so I can't completely blame this on the remoteness. But usually when this happens it comes back on in a few hours, or once it happened at around midnight and I just went to bed. But this time it was really out. After a few hours it came back on for about 20 minutes before shutting off again. There's really not much for me to do besides read with all the power off so I mostly just sat around and did that. It was still off by the time of my afternoon class, and even after class was over it was still gone. Amazingly it came on about 5 minutes before an important international phone call I had to make, so I guess that's lucky, but it sort of kills anything I was planning to do that day when I suddenly loose power. So now that's water, heat, then power. I wonder what's next. The way things are going recently it's going to be a biblical rain of frogs or something.

Like Hell it's Spring

I was surprised this morning when the heat still wasn't back on so I texted Ma who informed me that sine it was no longer Winter the heating company had cut off the heating. To begin with it's annoying that the heating is controlled on a school wide level and only has two settings, on or off, but mostly it's annoying because it's still damn cold. It's been getting into the low 60's during the warmest part of the middle of the day, but I live in a desert and it gets down to the 40's at night. The only reason I'm not hopping mad about this is that I have my heaters, and while the school may be able to shut off my heat they are still the ones who pay my electric bill, and running at least one heater pretty much 24 hours a day can't be cheap. Also I think it would be warmer if the dust didn't block the sun so often. But I think by at most the end of April it will be pretty warm and the dust will be gone.

Water Water Everywhere

Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink. Well, not really. Shocking as this may be in the giant desert I live in, but we lose water here fairly regularly. Slav thinks its some ploy to conserve water, but I think it's just poor infrastructure. It was off most of yesterday, but it's come back on today. Unfortunately, since our heat comes from radiators when we lose water we also lose heat. This isn't as big of a problem for me since the two rooms in my apartment I spend all of my time in, the computer room and the bedroom, have there own heaters. I also finally found a heater that doesn't generate a ton of light so I can sleep with it on. Sometimes it's too hot with the space heater on in my bedroom, but with the other heat out it actually keeps it at a nice temperature. I probably won't have to put up with this too much longer, winter here is long but it will probably get warm in the next month or so, of course at that point I'll be complaining about it being to hot to sleep. I usually hate going through the day without being able to take a shower, but with all the water disruptions I've gotten more used to it. We lost water sometimes in Changzhou as well, actually the hotel rarely did but the other teachers in the little villas lost it all the time. I'd say this is just life in the desert, but its mostly just life in China.

Poor Ma

I feel bad for Ma Ming. I know I've written about him driving me crazy, and boy he does, but I still feel bad for him in this situation. Roy, an older teacher who I didn't really know that well who taught here last semester, apparently wrote a letter, which Slav has seen and I haven't, to the person in charge of all school foreign departments in China complaining about Ma Ming. Slav said the letter is on one page in crazy 5 point font and can be charitably described as a rant. Roy apparently has a long set of grievances against Ma, some more legitimate than others, he is rarely on time paying us but so was my last school and as long as I get paid all I'm owed I don't care if it's a week late. Some seemed downright conspiratorial or blamed Ma for Chinese things well beyond his control. Also it couldn't have been so bad since Roy stayed 6 months longer than he had originally planned. Ma may be a pain in the ass sometimes, and he does screw things up from time to time, but he means well. He is generally a good natured guy even if he is a little overwhelming and I feel bad that he has to deal with this. As the Chinese like to say he's a good egg, even if I want to kill him from time to time.

Eagle

One student of mine who is interesting but I haven't mentioned much here yet is Eagle. Eagle is the class monitor for one of my Han Chinese Oral English classes. Being the class monitor, which I believe is an elected position, or if the students don't actually vote they pick someone by consensus, means that he's one of the better students in the class, and all the class monitors are party members, or at least will be soon. Eagle is an interesting student though because he is by far the most up on current events. Sometimes I have a chance just to chat with one or two of the students during class, we were doing a debate game and while the teams were preparing their arguments I had a few minutes to chat with the students who were acting as judges, and Eagle will always bring up current events. This time he was asking me what I thought about the air raids on Libya, not long after they started. He, of course, gave me back the standard party line about "internal affairs," though I noted that the people of Libya had asked for the attacks. He was also the student who asked dad about the Consumer Price Index. It's always interesting to see which students are more engaged with world events even out in the middle of nowhere like we are.

March Madness

I was talking to my class today and realized that none of them knew what the NCAA Tournament was. Basketball, and specifically NBA basketball, is huge in China. All the students know it at least a little, and all the guys watch it constantly. They watch the local Chinese league also, Xinjiang has one of the best teams every year, but it's really an NBA crowd. That's why I was so surprised that no one at all had heard of the tournament. In some ways it's ever bigger than the NBA finals even if college basketball as a whole isn't as popular as the NBA. I explained it to them, and I think they understood it, but they didn't seem like they were going to go out and start watching the games either. It's very odd what catches on and what doesn't from what I understand basketball being big in China is a pretty new phenomenon as well, and I wonder if it ever would have reached its current heights if not for Yao Ming.

There is one other Chinese player in the NBA Yi Jianlian who plays now for the Washington Wizards. All the students know who he is, and I get asked about him sometimes. I try not to say too much about him because he's, frankly, not any good. If you're playing for a team as bad as Washington and not starting, that's certainly saying something. I wonder if it would take some young Chinese star going to play for a good US college to get the students here interested in March Madness. Though the problem with that would be that there is so little really high level competition in China that the player would sort of have to be like Yao, someone so tall he can get by largely on that, to be taken seriously by any good US school. All I know is that the first US school to get a good Chinese player is going to sell a hell of a lot of jerseys, even if most of them are knockoffs.

Tell the Truth but Tell it Slant

My literature class is the unique challenge of this semester. I've never really taught anything like this before. The book we have isn't bad, it's got a good cross section of American writers, but it tries to cover too much for students who have no real foundation in the subject. I've been spending a lot of time going over literary terms like alliteration or metaphor since it's pretty hard to discuss much without them. Moreover though the real problem is that the student's really aren't used to thinking critically, and I don't want to just stand up there and try to beat into them what I think the poems or prose mean. I decided to start with poetry since it's short so we can talk about a whole poem rather quickly instead of one of these random chapters the book has taken out from famous novels. I can teach them what an allusion is, I'm just not sure I can teach them how to critically analyze anything.