Ni hao (hello) from Harbin! How are you? I'm doing ok. right now
it's early Saturday morning June 26, my 133rd consecutive day here,
bringing my total to 452! Those numbers look pretty good, but they fall
short of my goal of two years.
It has been fully summer here for several weeks now, and quite
hot. Once it got up to about 96 degrees, and several times it has been
about 90. At first the air was still pretty dry, but now the humidity has
increased. Soon the rainy months will be here. Our patience through the
winter has been rewarded by lots of flowers.
This month I have finished my first semester of language study.
Overall, it was a great experience, and I learned a lot. I could have
learned more, though: yesterday I took the final exam and my score was
only 78, surprisingly high because I didn't have time to study. Hopefully
I can build on this foundation in my free time.
I also taught at a small private school this month. It was a
little strange. In almost every class someone new would attend, and I
never quite knew what was going on. I enjoyed my Korean, Japanese, and
Chinese students. I also led a Culture Night at the Dongfu office last
Tuesday (about Robin Hood) and gave up on trying to do their bilingual web
page. The English-only web pages are at chinateam.org. Take a look if you
want to, and if you have any advice about why I'm unable to put up Chinese
and English in UTF-8 encoding, please let me know!
A few weeks ago something came to my attention back home with my
family, and I made a sort of emergency decision to return. So tomorrow,
Sunday June 27, I will be flying back to Michigan and staying there
indefinitely. Are you surprised? Me too! I had hoped to stay here until
about January. It is very hard to leave, and hard to get ready to leave so
quickly. Saying goodbye is so difficult, and I am not satisfied with my
performance this spring. However, I must keep pressing on and maybe
someday I will come back to Harbin.
