Vacation is over - time to go to work.

It's Saturday afternoon here and all morning folks have been coming into our apartment to hook up our internet. First our host, Mr. Chen (the Director of Foreign Affairs), escorted the local school network administrator to help hook us up but they didn't have everything they needed so they had to call the local provider, China Telecom.

It's very much like in the states, the first person comes and they can't do it so they have to call the cable guy.

In our case, a rep from China Telecom said he would be here sometime (just like the states - no appointments!) but he actually did show up (looked nothing like Jim Carrey), along with two more reps from my school, and eventually they all hooked us up not just with internet - but they ordered a router from a neighboring city, Nanjing (an hour and a half away by train), just for us so we could have wireless! Unbelievable!

So we are back to convenient online access, the bathroom doesn't leak anymore thanks to Jenn's amazing caulking abilities, we are getting used to the five flights of stairs we hit at least four times everyday (80 stairs!) and last night we made our first meal at home (Chinese of course!) and our stir-fry turned out to be delicious!

I dare say we are getting quite comfortable in our new surroundings, except last night I couldn't even find black pepper in a grocery store even with my Mandarin book in hand, so I'm not getting too cocky yet. I did learn the word for salt (yan) though, so the hike to the market wasn't a total write-off.

We both begin teaching our classes on Monday, although the kids came back from Spring Festival last week (they also go to school on Saturdays here too), so now we are busy scrambling trying to get ready to meet our first classes. Jenn is teaching at the #2 Middle School that is located about ten minutes from my school, I'm here at #1 Middle School where our apartment is located. We each have the same amount of kids though - 2,000 students, about 240 per day, four different classes per day per week...these kids go to school from 7am until 10pm at night...they even give them 5 and 10 minutes breaks during the day just so they can rub their eyes (they call them eye relaxation breaks).

And our two schools are not typical high schools like in the states either - these students pay good money to come to these schools because of their difficult curriculum and to increase their chances of being accepted into university later.

They are expecting a lot from us, and I've seen the College Entrance Exams they have to pass and they are tough (harder than I expected). We are excited about helping these kids speak better English, and also about helping them get into college too.

Cheers!