It has been a long day.  Wednesdays are my busiest day of the week, I teach five 45 minute classes in a row.  Besides that today’s weather was pretty miserable, with torrential down pours throughout the morning and into the afternoon.  At a later date I will into more detail about my new career as a spoken English teacher, but right now I’m totally pooped.  I’ve also been making Excel spreadsheets of my class lists, all twelve of them.  This is daunting because each class has 60-80 students all with their own difficult handwritten Chinese names and bizarre sounding English names.  It took me an hour and a half to do one class.  On the plus side reading all those handwritten names is helping improve my Chinese reading ability.

Since I worked out a sweet deal with my school tomorrow, Thursday, is my last day teaching this week.  And I only have to teach one class from 10-11 am, leaving me with a solid 3.5 day weekend.  Tonight I spent 4.5 RMB ($0.65) on a train ticket to Chenxi, a town an hour away which has two other English teacher colleagues of mine.  I hear they have beautiful countryside hikes and it will be nice to have normal paced English conversations again.

Tonight I also got an under-the-table tutoring job.  It will have me tutoring 4-6 kids a week in my apartment.  The extra money (which is not much, I am a volunteer teacher after all) will help defray the costs of traveling to Hong Kong during my luxurious long weekends.