Raise

I got another raise at my school. So far I've made more money each year in China than I did the previous year. That's still going from a really small amount of money to another really small amount of money, but up is better than down. I'm making nearly double what I was making my first year in China. At this rate if I stay here another 20 or 30 years I'll really be raking it in. I'm probably not saving as much money as when I was in Alaer though since there was absolutely nothing to spend the money on in Xinjiang. Here in Guangzhou there are a lot more temptations. There is a nice foreign supermarket, but it's really expensive.

I also got my class schedule for the next semester which starts in a few weeks. I have some oral English classes with non-English majors, which means the level will be a lower but since I had had the same students for a year I'm happy to have some new ones. I liked the old students but I had run through every activity I know and it was getting hard. I also have a writing class. This is the first time I've taught anything like that. I hear it's actually fairly hard to teach, but I only have two classes of it so it won't be so bad. Some variety can be nice.

Winter is Over

Well it had a good run. Winter in Guangzhou started some time in December with temperatures during the day falling into the low 50's (the horror). Now, though, winter is pretty clearly over. It's 80 degrees today and I'm wearing shorts. The forecast calls for it to stay in the 70's and 80's for the foreseeable future. So that's two months of "winter" and now we head right back to 10 months of summer.

Still Here

I know it has been a long time since I updated this blog. It has been a pretty crazy semester. I took the GRE went to Japan, and Hong Kong a couple of times. And I've been applying to a ton of graduate schools. I feel bad that I haven't updated this blog more, but over the coming weeks and months I plan to try and return to once a day posting about what has been going on in my life and in China. Sorry for the absence, but I'm back now.

The Difference A Day Can Make

It's been really hazy in Guangzhou recently. Usually in the summer it rains so often that the sky is pretty clear when it's not raining. The air quality is pretty good since the rain clears it out. This time of year is nice because its still warm, hot even, but it doesn't rain very much. Unfortunately that means that the pollution builds up and gets pretty hazy. My parents in Beijing don't know what I'm complaining about, a bad day here in terms of air quality is basically a good day in Beijing. I'm not sure people back home get exactly how bad it can be here so I found two pictures taken a few days apart in Beijing. What you are looking at here isn't weather it's pollution. Now that's China.

Study Study Study

Well I guess I'm finally becoming Chinese since all I do now is study. As for what I've been up to this summer, besides a brief interlude in Beijing, I've just been studying for the GRE. I've gone through basically all the books they print at this point. The books are in some regards surprisingly different from one another. The Kaplan books just want to sell you more Kaplan products. And they have an odd habit of referring everything the "Kaplan method." As in: 1 + 1 = ? Now take 1 and add it to one to get 2! Now you know the Kaplan method for addition. The funniest though is the Princeton Review book which is really angry. I'm wondering if someone from the company that makes the GRE ran over a dog belonging to the editor of the Princeton Review. For a book about preparing you for the GRE they keep criticizing how the GRE is set up, "Can you believe it's 4 hours long?!"

Of course I feel less Chinese after Joanna told me she new someone who memorized the dictionary in an attempt to study for this test. I've been doing flash cards but I'm not memorizing any dictionary. I've also definitely started to hit the point of diminishing returns. I keep getting about the same percent of questions right. Mostly now I'm just trying to shore up my math, vocab, and spelling a little and do a few more practice tests.

One of the hardest parts about the GRE is its length. You start with two 30 minute essays, then there are five sections of either verbal or math questions, being 30-35 minutes long each. That's about three hours 45 minutes before you count in breaks. Even on some shorter practice tests, the longest I did was three hours, by the end it's hard to care if you are getting the questions right or not, you just want it to be over. Well there's only a little more than two weeks left and then I'll finally be done with it.

The Good Internet

Man who knew that all I needed to have really fast internet in China was to be the only one on the whole schools network. Well, I doubt I'm the only one, but almost all the students are gone and my internet is flying. I can not only watch YouTube videos without waiting long for them to load, but I can watch them in high definition. I used to get something around 100 kb/s during the day now I'm getting above 300. I forgot how much more fun the internet is when you don't have to wait for everything to load. I keep my VPN on all the time and it's almost as good as being in the US. This may seem like a simple pleasure to people in the US, but trying using an old dial up connection for a while to get a sense of how incredibly slow things can get in China. Now I just hope they don't turn it off or something during the summer, though I doubt it since there are a lot of teachers who live here. But until then I'll be online watching videos of cats, really quickly.

Sushi

Given how close we are to the sea and Guangzhou's long history of trading with Japan, there is a lot of sushi around. You see it not just in restaurants, but in street vendors and supermarkets. And I have to say it is awful. Like shockingly bad. The fist is tasteless, they don't put the sushi together very well and for some horrifying reason they put sweet mayonnaise on it. It is totally inedible. But this being a pretty cosmopolitan city I was sure that I could find at least some good sushi somewhere. After doing some research on the internet I found one place not to far from my favorite foreign supermarket. I was pretty skeptical about this restaurant at first also but it turned out to be fairly good. Not amazing or anything, but the fish was OK, and they didn't try to do anything crazy like but mayonnaise on it. I actually saw some Japanese people in there, and a bunch of Westerners. It wasn't great sushi, but you take what you can get.