Update!

Hi Everyone!

Sorry it's taken me almost a month to put up a new blog post, but I have been CRAZY busy these last few weeks. The good news is that I have TONS to talk about, so expect plenty of new posts this week! Some things to look forwards to:

A vlog post on my trip to Chongqing for National Day Holiday. A couple weeks ago, we got a week long vacation, and I spent it going to Chengdu and Chongqing. It was incredible. We went to museums, a temple, climbed a mountain, ate delicious hotpot, and lots more—but you'll hear about that later.

News about the college anniversary...and my performance with the other foreign teachers doing a dance in front of THOUSANDS of people. Yeah. That was a little nerve-wracking. I have a video of the dance that will be posted any day now!

In addition to these, I also have a few other posts planned. So, if you're wondering why it's taken me so long to get these all of these supposed posts up on the blog, the reason is that things got a little hectic after we got back from vacation. To preface this rant, I should explain a few things. We have had a vacation before. For the Mid-autumn Day Celebration, the school was given Thursday and Friday off, but then we had to teach Friday's classes on Saturday to make up for the lost time (luckily, I didn't have Friday classes at that point in time, so I just got a really long weekend). For the National Holiday vacation, we had a similar schedule planned for us. We got Tuesday through the next Monday off of school, but we had to make up the missed Friday's classes on the Saturday before vacation, as well as the missed Monday's classes on the following Saturday. So we did all of this, with a little grumbling about having to work on a Saturday, and got back to our normal schedule...or so we thought.

Midway through last week, after coming into the office for my office hours, I was informed by the administration (and I had never heard anything about this previously) that we had to make up ALL of the other classes that we missed during vacation, and we had to do it on our own time, and schedule it all ourselves. And apparently we also have to make up Thursday's classes that we missed for the Mid-autumn Festival. Which happened over a month ago. And they only told us now. So that was a fun little tidbit of information that would have been a whole lot more helpful to know, oh I don't know, at the beginning of the year. We are quickly learning that the administration here is not very big on planning ahead.

Nevertheless, after the initial flabbergasted response, we all kicked it into high gear, and the last week has been spent frantically rescheduling classes and figuring out when to have my makeup classes. And of course, this is all in addition to my regular office hours, Chinese class, and English corner, which all happen every week. I've had five makeup classes already, and I still have six to go that have not been scheduled yet. However, I'm hoping to get them all done by the end of next week, so wish me luck! The good news is that after this, going back to my regular schedule will seem like a piece of cake.