Happy Teacher's Day

Today is apparently teacher day, or so I was informed by a student who woke me up this morning to tell me he was coming by my apartment to bring me something. I tried to say that no I was sleeping but he was not dissuaded. I can't imagine going to one of my college teacher's houses, or any teacher for that matter without invitation and doubly so when they try to say no. But since it was Teacher's Day a holiday I'd never heard of in Changzhou he was coming. I was also wondering how he knew where I lived until Ma Ming showed up with him. They were carrying the flowers you see in the picture, one of those is now in my living room and the other went to Roy the other foreign teacher. The students were nice and didn't linger too long. While I miss how in Changzhou I was getting a better grip on what was going on, familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt, and I just wasn't as surprised or as interested in things there after two years. But here things are just as strange as I remember them being when I first got to China.

I've told people in the past that I always consider that there is about a 5% chance that any scheduled class won't happen for some poorly explained reason. Well this week I lost two classes to the Chinese black hole. One was do to a simple scheduling error with me having one schedule and the class having another. My class today was canceled since today is a Muslim holiday to celebrate the end of Ramadan, a fact that while clearly something that has been on the calendar for months was only revealed to me last night.

The other thing happening today was that my washing machine had some undiagnosed problem that Ma Ming came over to help fix. All I knew to begin with was that when I turned it on a lot of water was going on the floor but little was going into the machine. First we figured out that either the faucet or the pipe to the machine was bad because even without the hose to the washed connected there was almost no water coming out. Ma Ming called a worker to come fix it and promised to be back later with the guy. I'm writing about this because as I explained to my students traveling is often about overcoming lot of little problems and this is a fairly classic one. Ma Ming at one point started telling me how the machine worked and asked if I'd ever used one before. It's pretty amazing to me that someone, especially someone whose job it is to deal with foreigners can think that there is an American who has never used a washing machine before. Just goes to show you how far out there Xinjiang really is. He never did get back to me today about the machine so I'll keep you posted.