It's Been A While!

4/15 Sorry it's been so long since I posted. I have been very sick, so I haven't been in much of a mood to write….or do anything, really. I've kind of withdrawn from 'normal' life during the week or so that I've been sick and now it's a little difficult to get back into the social life. But now the weather has been getting warmer, the trees have been getting greener, the flowers are getting flower-ier, and I'm really happy about it! Warmer weather has been a really great psychological boost - sometimes the simple things really make the day! Today's Friday - I don't like Fridays much. I've got my really difficult Listening class and that's no fun...sometimes I feel like I've been learning too much too fast, but whatever. I always get in a little bit of a funk on Friday afternoon, but usually I manage to bump into a friend, which makes the day better. Today I bumped into Alice, who I met on a bus from the West Campus a few weeks ago. We talked about a ton of stuff for a couple of hours by the little pond on the old campus - I really enjoyed it. :) One thing she asked me was about the differences between Chinese students and American students...I really think they are very much the same - worried about tests, homework, and in some cases, boyfriends and girlfriends. There are a lot of differences, of course - class sizes are bigger here, students take their parents' wishes a lot more seriously, and a lot of them seriously have the desire to learn a new language (English, of course).  I dunno what else to say….stuff's been pretty much the same - I'm very much looking forward to the May holiday - we've got about a week off - people keep telling me different amounts. I want to go to Hong Kong, but I don't think I'll have enough money - I'm seriously jealous of Derek - he's going to Singapore and Malaysia. 4/16 Went to the West Campus today and spent a lot of time with some friends and had two wonderful meals at some restaurants on campus - fabulous! Sichuan Fish dishes, a sort of omelette dish with onions and meat, fried potatoes with spices, some soups, and other stuff that I can't remember.  On a more sober note, there was a huge sandstorm this afternoon with some really, really strong winds. There was an accident by one of the buildings in which a student was hurt very badly. The way the buildings are built here are a little shabby sometimes - they are concrete blanketed with a thin layer of bricks. During the winds, some of the bricks blew off the buildings and fell onto a student after about a 5 story drop. He was hurt very badly, we could see the blood all over the ground where he fell and where it happened - it was too much blood. As he was on the ground, the head trauma caused him to have some seizures which we could see from where we were. I hope that you can keep that student in your thoughts and prayers, it was very bad. He was carried away on a stretcher and eventually an ambulance came. I wish that my first experience with a sandstorm hadn't involved someone getting hurt, although I didn't know them.