From Grits to Chopsticks

For the past 20 years, the “first day of school” were words reserved for our children.  That has all changed now, and today, complete with backpack and laptop, Mark headed out the door for his first day of classes at the university.  His schedule is packed on Monday and Tuesday with classes running from 8:15AM to 5:00PM.  While this will provide some time and space for preparation and other activities near the end of the week, it makes for two very exhausting days of teaching.  He has 100 students and plans to spend a lot of time with them in the second half of the week.

Sunday night was lantern festival, the final day of Spring Festival.  The fireworks began before 8:00PM and exploded all over the city skyline past 10:00PM.  The Chinese definitely like their fireworks!  The debris on Monday morning was also quite impressive...

We’ve spent a lot of time lately traveling around the city to visit friends and accomplish tasks.  The picture below shows the major modes of transportation for us: bus, taxi, and walking.  The bus is cheap (~$0.13) but often doesn’t go directly where you want, requiring a lot of waiting time and transfers.  While the taxis are everywhere, it is amazing how often they refuse to take you to your destination, presumedly because they either don’t know the route or they doubt that a return fare will be available from that particular place (we keep a stack of business cards to tell them where we want to go).  On Saturday, we were spurned by four different cabbies before we found one willing to take us to a particular coffee shop.  At the end of the story, we spend a lot of time waiting to travel from place to place.  Perhaps when we get settled down, we’ll get some bikes or a scooter.