Journal Entry #2: Day 2 – Saturday, May 15, 2010

It’s about 7:00 a.m. on Saturday morning and I feel pretty good.  It’s cool and cloudy here. I'm hoping with the day before us the sun will shine.  Sunny, the Chinese assistant that met us at the airport, has taken very good care of us.  She made sure we had everything at the apartment that we needed including what the Chinese call “fresh milk” and bread.  I think I have Internet. It seems to be working correctly.

But it comes and goes with varying speeds.  I am actually picking up a WIFI signal from Edwin Myers’s router two floors above me in this apartment building.  My air conditioning power seems to be suspect and my battery on my laptop is going down.

Then I realized, WOW, I'm in China!  I never dreamed I'd be saying that! I am a visiting professor at the University of South China (USC).  When I agreed to come to teach at Harding I never had on my radar that in less than two years I would be here teaching communications classes to hundreds of Chinese students.  

This Saturday morning, I was invited by two of the American English teachers, Linda Gearhart and Barbara Last, to walk over to the open street market.  They got me there and then they went on to other errands while I wandered around for a couple of hours on my own.  The several blocks and streets of market seemed like something out of a chase scene in an Indiana Jones movie!  Lots of fruit and vegetable stands, food being cooked, stores with open fronts, and a lot of hectic Saturday morning activities.  I stopped to watch a couple of young women cooking something that looked good, so with hand signals I had them fix me up a bowl of noodles, pork and eggs in a soup mixture. It was very good!  I took lots of colorful photos.

Saturday afternoon we had a visit from Helen (her American nickname), the woman that arranged all of our classes.  She explained what we needed to teach and where each classroom was located.  She assured us that one of the student-hosts that came along with her would meet us and escort us everywhere we needed to be and work as our translators. There were five student-hosts: three girls, Cookies, Cindy, and Mimzy, and two guys Charles and Benjamin. My teaching schedule is going to be lighter than I thought.  I will teach an Oral Speaking (public speaking) class every Monday at 5:00 p.m. to sophomore English majors, and a class to Chinese teachers only on the "Effect of Media on Culture" every Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. This is going to give me a lot of time to sit in on other classes and generally observe and, of course, people watch!  I will also sit in with my students as they teach various classes.  Their teaching is much more as a guest in the classroom to talk about various subjects of interest to the students.  It is to basically be a big Q & A between the Chinese and American students.

When we went to dinner Saturday night we went to the Muslim Noodle restaurant where we all had a large bowl of noodles with beef and vegetables, (it was like spaghetti but beef gravy and vegetables instead of tomato sauce), and it was only about .75 cents (US) per person!

On Saturday night we went to a student Ping Pong tournament on campus. You probably know that Ping Pong is huge in China.  One of our student-hosts, Cindy, was in the tournament.  They had asked us earlier to attend with them so they came back to pick us up.  It was set up as a big tournament bracket where you advance to the next round if you win.  We went to cheer Cindy on in one of her games, and she won!  She was great - hitting those shots with power and distance!  It was fun to watch.   As we were walking across campus to the event venue I asked the students where the tournament was going to be held, and they answered, "The Ping Pong Gymnasium of course!"  Yes, they have a campus gymnasium just for Ping Pong!  (Later Cindy informed us that she placed second in the women’s division of the tournament.  I didn’t see the finals but if she was second I would love to have seen the winner play!)

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