Monday, September 24, 2007

Happily Cheesey

It was a full weekend. Fasted Saturday for Yom Kippur and had a nice dinner and conversations. A few of us went out for a drink after dinner. I even found that my Spanish is a little better than I remember--I was understood quite a bit of the conversations around me. I think that after I learn enough Chinese to effectively communicate with people, I'll go back and re-learn Spanish.

Sunday, Jia, her mom, and I went to Splendid China and the Folk Culture Village. It sure was a trip. I was not disappointed by the cheesiness. I'll post a full story with photos soon.

I need to correct a small error from a previous post: The No-Car Day was Saturday. And the Shenzhen Daily headline today read, "Traffic jams plague No-Car Day." I even have a first-hand account from my boss who took a trip up to Guangzhou on Saturday. She said it took her more than three hours to get there from Shenzhen. This is really bad considering the bus from my apartment took less than two hours during the week last month. No-Car Day was highly unsuccessful around China.

According to another news report that was passed along to me by my wife, Shenzhen is the least happy city in China. Kunming and Chengdu were at the top of list for happiest cities. This gave me a great discussion topic for my students today. I was pleasantly surprised to hear them say that they would be happy with "enough money to live." I like not having greedy students. Very few of them admitted to being happy here--most wanted to go home after they finish their degrees. The best answer today to "What do you need to be happy?" was "Food," which was given by a few students.

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