April Fool!

I thought April 1 might be a good time to reappear on your radar screen -- a la a bad penny. Thanks to the numerous, somewhat nasty I might add, emails I have received, it appears you all think I am dead. Here is the real problem. I keep complaining about my internet situation but I have finally decided to adjust to it instead of fighting it or waiting for it to change. The adjustment means that it is 5 AM as I write this! I only have a good reliable "bandwidth" in the early morning. With the aid of a "workaround" provided by my computer savvy son, I have returned to the original site as the new one proved to be worse. Anyway, to catch you up...

I am now here at Longyan University in Fujian, Province. It's quite a nice place, a small city 2 hours inland from the coast in a hilly part of town. The air is good, the people friendly and my apartment comfortable. This is not Harvard but a small provincial university which most of the students would not have chosen if they could have done better but it is at least a university which gives them some status. The kids are really nice, I love teaching this age group. The work load is light so it will be a "pleasant" if not financially lucrative year.

The university has built a new campus on the complete other side of town. Students, with their teachers have been moving over there for the last two years on a department-by-department basis. Left here on the old campus we only have English and Chemistry and we are due to move in August. The new campus is much more modern, spacious and attractive and apparently, so will our apartments be. The downside is that it is WAY out of town. From here we can walk to almost everything, there it will be a bus to go anywhere, even food shopping.

In the meanwhile we have this nice old campus pretty much to ourselves. Nothing is ever crowded, the walkways are beautifully shaded, flowers are starting to bloom, it's quite pretty.
It is, however, built into the side of a hill so that wherever you go, it seems you must walk both up and down a lot of stairs.

I am going to "publish" this, just to make sure I can, then I will do another quickly.