Settling In

Well another week has gone by and it was an eventful one. Our tour of the Lama Temple on Sunday with Don and Eve was rather quiet and peaceful – what better to say of a Buddhist temple? There was lots of incense being burned and quiet worship, but our guide was too low-key for me. According to him, Buddhists believe that there is no present, past, future or self. I don’t think I was cut out to be a Buddhist; I believe in all those things! The big attraction at the end of the tour was a Buddha carved out of a single sandalwood tree – it was immense – maybe 80 feet tall! Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take pictures inside any of the buildings so all my pictures are of the outside. Later, we had dinner at a Thai restaurant on Lucky Street about a 5 minute walk from the school and saw our friends from Concord College off in a cab.

That evening we met with the whole staff at the request of our V-P who asked us to fill out lists of deficiencies in our apartment and classrooms. There are some deficiencies - the plumbing is not great and most people’s washers overflowed when they tried to wash. There are some problems in classrooms too, mainly relating to IT. Strangely though we have all these new Macintosh computers and Smartboards, Internet access in the school has been limited and inconvenient and we have had almost no way to print! It is the typical woes that you might encounter in a brand new building that has been built very quickly. Anyway, due to the efforts of our V-P and Principal and the Chinese staff, things have steadily improved in our apartments and in the school. At the apartment, we have had several visits from the plumbers fixing our washer drain, also we got a new DVD player and our Internet even worked briefly on Saturday! The big day in my lab was Friday. I now have a complete projector and Smartboard setup, a brand new printer and all the computers have Internet access! So we really are starting to be high tech!

Brenda and I also tried out the school fitness centre this weekend. It is really pretty sweet! It has nice treadmills, bikes, a stepper, a rowing machine and lots of weights and weight machines. Now we have no excuse not to be in shape. We both feel like we have lost weight since we have been here which is a bit strange as we have eaten out almost every night and until now we haven’t done much exercise except walking. I can hear our trainer now, “You are losing muscle, not fat! Get back in the gym!” Also, the pool is now open - a team called “Dragon Fire” has begun practices after school. We’ll find out this week when the pool is available to us.
First Posted September 24, 2006