AHH--it has been almost a month since I have written something. Time escapes me. School has started and is three weeks in. It is a new adventure this semester. I have many new classes--British Literature (I will use some American Literature too), Reading, Culture, and Oral English. Currently I have about 8 classes a week and about 200+ students. All of the students are new also--that is something to get used to as well. The freshman have arrived on campus and are currently doing their military training.

Military training is our favorite time of year. The students get up at 6:30 am and run around campus as loud as they can and then get into their groups in their military outfits (They look professional) and practice marching while screaming (yi, er, san...1, 2,3). The crazy thing is that they do this for 1-2 weeks. It has been great to be back at school though and have the students also back. Many of them had 'boring' summers as they stayed at their homes in isolated villages without anyone to practice English with and helped family with farming work etc.

There have been a number of important happenings since school has begun. Firstly, our school is improving everything because this is our year of review. The government will come and check our school and our score affects the amount of funding we get, so they have put in new lights every 3 feet everywhere so you can play basketball all night. They put in new professional ping pong tables and a fence to go around it to "keep" the ball in (it is proving to be more of a pain, because if the ball gets out you now have to walk all the way around the fence to get it). They are repaving all of the roads and putting new windows and exteriors to make the old buildings look newish. Our building has not changed though, I believe it is on the docket to be demolished (maybe depending upon passing the inspection and funding). We have had two holidays (Teachers Day and the Mid-Autumn festival). Teachers Day is not much of a holiday, but students do nice things for the teachers and sometimes you will receive gifts. Sunday was Mid-Autumn festival and we had students over for our open house. It is a traditional time for families to get together but many students are very far from their homes, so we tried to do something special. We ate the traditional mooncakes (they are like biscuits filled with any variety of things from fruits (yummy) to beans, meat, nuts etc. which can be more of an adventure. We tried to watch the moon, as is customary through our telescope but every time I got focused on it, the clouds would come and the moon would disappear...shy.

We had the next day off of school...so we went with some students to the famous HuangGuoShu waterfall. It was everyones first time to go there even though most were from this area. As whenever you try to have a large group, there are complications. We had our number of complications. The school provided a free bus, so we were there early waiting for the rest of our group who took their time and we missed the buses. I was a little upset, but found out that this was part of the plan anyway, because we had to meet more students in town to go out to the waterfall. So we took a variety of buses and made our way out to the waterfall. It turned out that other people wanted to join us but were at the entrance to the park, 5-10 km away and would meet us soon. We waited and waited (over an hour) and they finally came but said more were still coming. By that time we had spent 4 hours and had not even gotten into the first part of the park...there are three famous places to see there and we had to catch a bus by 7:30 pm and it was now noon. We decided to break into two groups and see the park separately. The rest of the day went rather smoothly, we saw close to 100 waterfalls, a couple caves, lots of cool stones and scenery and took lots of pictures. The Chinese love taking pictures, not of the scenery as I do, but of themselves at every place. They also enjoy doing strange, unique things in the pictures (the girls at least). Us guys mainly just stood or did something funny, but the girls had a wide range of poses mimicking the Titanic or other pop culture icons. Maybe the guys could have done our Usain Bolt interpretations from the Olympics. The HuangGuoShu waterfall is the largest in Asia (I believe) and is simply an amazing thing to see. I was really impressed, even after hearing the ravings from others who had seen it before. Maybe this is a good reason to visit us in Anshun--it is a simply beautiful area with lots of caves and waterfalls as well as lots of culture. We have posted a number of our pictures from the waterfall and from our summer holiday on our flickr account. www.flickr.com/photos/24255478@N06/

We wish everyone great blessings!!