Staff bussing and other little items

Nanjing University has three campuses. We live on the downtown campus called Gulou and we teach at Pukou campus which is across the Yangtze river from here. The third campus is still in the building state. Apparently they will be tearing down and selling off some of the property on the downtown campus when the third campus is finished. Is that capitalism at work?

The buses leave at exactly 7:00 a.m. for the Pukou campus. When we have 8:00 a.m. classes (which is three days a week for me) we leave the apartment about 6:35 to get to the bus on time.
The buses never are in the same place two days in a row and never take the same route to Pukou two days in a row. However, all of the buses (sometimes there are four) take the same route. I often wonder how they decide which way to go. Sometimes they seem to be racing each other along the way.

It takes anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes or more to get to the other campus. It all depends on the traffic and in the morning we are often late for class.

On Thursday morning we went down some narrow streets on the way and I was reading the English sub-titles on the signs along the way. One store was called "Clothes and Loving". Another was "Little Hong Kong Food".

Buses and taxis honk their horn a lot here. If they are going to pass they honk. Probably even if they think about passing and there is no one to pass they honk. On Thursday as we went down the narrow street we got behind a three wheeled bicycle with a huge load on the back and the driver followed it down the street honking all the way. The bicycle driver just kept pedaling and didn't even look back.

Some cats live around here and seem to like the heating pipes we can see out our window. Unfortunately we often hear them yowling at night. It is getting cooler now. I even think that maybe I will soon need to wear a jacket.


They can't be selling off all of Goulou campus because they are still building new buildings and planting trees .

Time must be going by quickly. On Monday morning my history class students were all upset wanting to know about their mid-term exam next week. I told them not to worry because the exam wouldn't be until the end of October. They told me the end of October was next week, so I said we would put it off until November so now I am frantically preparing an exam.

Of my six classes two are more enjoyable than the others. The last one of the week is one of the fun ones. They are much more responsive, although it means I have to have more material prepared because they get through the lessons faster than some of the classes. Last Thursday I couldn't understand one of the words a boy was using and asked him to spell it. Just as he was telling me the letters and I had written m on the board someone else in the class said the word and it was mountain. Mountain is one of the Chinese symbols that I know and it is easy to write so I wrote the Chinese symbol on the board. They all said yes and smiled and clapped. That was a good feeling.

Next week in all my classes except history we are going to do Halloween - Halloween pictures, poems and ghost stories. Hopefully it will not be so boring as some of the textbook lessons.