Can’t believe two weeks of teach­ing are already fin­ished. For me, the ini­tial eupho­ria of arrival has died down and I’ve set­tled into a fairly reg­u­lar rou­tine. That isn’t to say that some­thing doesn’t sur­prise me every day.

One inter­est­ing dis­cov­ery from the past week:

One of our lessons this week dealt with teen cell­phone use. In our pre­cept dis­cus­sion, we talked about end­ing a rela­tion­ship via text mes­sage (any­thing regard­ing rela­tion­ships is an inter­est­ing topic for the stu­dents). It turns out that break­ing up via text mes­sage is actu­ally the pre­ferred method in China, because it avoids awkwardness/embarrassment for both sides.

This week I also become quite fond of “cold jokes.” This is a pop­u­lar kind of joke in China that is funny because it’s not funny. Here’s one I heard from a stu­dent: “why did the rab­bit hop twice on its left foot and once on its right foot?” Answer: “that’s just the way it is.”

Eliot and I have taken it upon our­selves to con­tin­u­ously make up new ones.

Just this after­noon a hand­ful of stu­dents took me and two other teach­ers to 新吉大, the newer col­lege cam­pus in Jishou. We ate lunch on cam­pus and had a great time explor­ing with the stu­dents. They never run out of energy and are always invit­ing us to go to new places. It’s awesome.