Ni hao (Marcus)

We have been so busy the last day or so that we haven't been able to bombard the blog with our lovin. Actually it was a combination of things. Firstly, I don't think we have mentioned it yet but the Great Firewall of China, annoyingly, prevents us from getting to the blog directly, we have to go through a proxy - which I wont explain here what a proxy is, just put it down to being internetmagico. It was unblocked one afternoon, which was great, but the rest of the time it has been blocked. There is another site we can update it from, www.blogger.com which is unblocked 90% of the time. So we update it there, then view it via the proxy. The reason why it's so annoying that this occurs, that if it is blocked and we use the proxy, we cant upload photographs to it, then you get hit with massive walls of text. Anyway - I am sure you were dying to know that. And secondly, we have been incredibly tired.

Teaching and the stress of being in China is starting to take its toll on us. At night, we are so utterly tired we just fall into our cold bed, lovingly clutching our micronuked ricebags. Oh that reminds me! Last night, we made another two additional ricebags from the last two remaining spare pillowcases. Now we have a total of four and can keep one at each of our feet, and cuddle another one like a super hot rice lovechild. Give us a few more weeks and we will have created an entire electric blanket made from nothing more than Rice and Pillowcases. Even Macguyver couldnt pull this shit off!

We had no classes yesterday as there was a change to all rosters. The students seemingly re-picked which Major's they wanted to take, and well, we had no classes because of it. This was good because on one hand, we get the day off, yay! But on the other hand, our freakin roster we had just got our head around is now completely different. Boo.

We were given our new rosters this morning and they're somewhat at the size we expected them to be. I have 15 classes weekly, Courtney has 14. On Tuesday and Thursday our classes are at another campus entirely - one that we had no idea existed - nor were we told of until a few days ago. The other campus is for Junior school students, around 13 years old, and their english we're told is very basic. So yeah. We figure at least these classes should be fairly easy. I dont know how it will go managing younger kids, but i think it will be a little easier than the teenagers as we're just basically doing very simple words like animals, and basic sentences - I like cheese! Here is my toe! etc etc. My last class of teenagers were little dicks. They werent super bad, but they were pissing around which in turn pissed me off. I kept on them, but there's a lot of them. Add on top of that when you try and get them to talk and they just freeze up - probably as a trying to stay cool gesture in front of the others, then yeah it's frustrating. Had some comments from one of the teachers that i spoke a little fast for them to understand in that class - likely because it's hard to keep your cool when you're dealing with smartasses. Will see how we go. That particular class i will point out, is now on Courtney's roster, so, enjoy darling :) But, her problem class, with a little pack of 'cool guys' and 'cool girls', is now on MY roster, so um, yeah. :(