A quick post:

This week was busy and was a turning point of sorts for me in several ways. As expected, it was tough for my students to get back into the swing of learning and in anticipation of this, I scheduled in quite a few games and energetic activities. It went over ok but in talking to the other english teachers, it sounded as if everybody was having a rough time with their classes. Some classes are great, really eager to learn, others definitely have an attitude. Frustrating, but as a friend of mine here assured me, it's tough teaching today's generation so just do the best you can and hope they learn something because the learning part is their responsibility. True enough.

I've been meeting often with my tutor and she and I are really starting to step it up as far as my expectations and commitment to learning chinese. I took a practice HSK test (the chinese equivalent of the TOEFL) and did miserably so I'm currently working on improving that score. It will be good to have some sort of certification of my ability so I hope to do well on that while I'm here. I'll probably take the higher level ones in the future. We've also been attacking my pronunciation and tones (which suck apparently) so as to make myself better understood. It's been a humbling week and even a little disappointing, but also good for me to have something to work towards. Time to get organized and serious.

Part of this ramp up in effort came after a night of hanging out with some foreign friends here. We played poker and I hung out for several hours late into the night and when i came home, noticed my tongue was black from all of the smoke that I'd inhaled. (I didn't smoke myself, this was all second hand) Disgusting. It was at that point where I was like, Jess, you're a loser, you just spent the last five hours losing sleep and killing brain and lung cells. Clean your apartment and get to work on your Chinese. No more monkey shines. Yes ma'am. So I've started spartanizing my life a little, eating better, keeping the place a little cleaner, getting to bed at a decent hour. Time to grow up and get responsible.

Things continue to be up in the air with the boy. I hate drama.

I love my grad school classes. Next semester I'm going to request those specifically. More mature and a little older, better English level so we can atually have interesting conversations and just all around neat people.

Went to the tailor to pick up some of my clothes but apparently I've gotten taller and lost more weight so he had to readjust some seams. sigh.

I'm meeting with some of my students tomorrow, they're teaching me to cook something...I'm not sure what but it should be fun. Other than that, just working away.