Friday, April 24, 2009

Raining Buckets in Zhuhai

With the spring season has come the rainy season.

It's quite a change from home: no changing foliage, warm and humid temperatures, tons of rain. These flash floods bring a rush of water down the road up to my apartment building from the main campus road. I almost got washed away in it when I grabbed some breakfast, a sort of triangular-shaped piece of dough and an Eastern-style egg and pork sandwich, and was almost swept away by all the water.

It's almost week 10 here at Sun Yat-sen, meaning only seven more weeks of teaching classes and then its time to start packing for home. Amazing how the time has gone by. When I look back it doesn't feel like eight months, but that's how it always goes, right? Our sense of time changes so much, it's disorienting.

Classes have been fun. I had my sophomore verbal classes watch the movie My Cousin Vinny (1992) outside of class. They ate it up. If you've ever seen the movie, they particularly enjoyed the seen where the two boys just get arrested for murder and Billy calls his mother to explain the situation, shouting, "ma! ma!" The students loved how similar it was to how they say "mom" in mandarin. I truly feel that the movies are a powerful tool for teaching those certain intangible qualities that fill foreign cultures: Intonation, body gesture, emotionally-wrought phrases with a whole history.

Okay, that's enough blabbering for now. Until next time...