suddenly my life flashed before my eyes

So i had my first offical brush with death here in china. while walking to the post office, where my self study class is, i came quite close to getting hit by a car. it totally wasn't my fault though!!! call me crazy but i do believe that when it comes to side walks pedestrians definitly have the right of way!! You really have to stay on the ball when walking around in china...because before you know it some crazy old man is driving on the side walk.

My camera seems to have crapped out on me. UGH. it doesn't want to read the memory card. every time i turn the camera on it says " card not initialized" This makes me a sad sad panda.

So like i said before, i had my "self study' class today. There is a huge range of ability in the class. there are 2 students who have a very good speaking ability, but the class is just a big mish mash of skill level. on one end, i have a student who has been studying english for 10 years...then i have a student who's never had any formal english class, but has been working with a tutor who is chinese. I ended up using the black board quite a bit and occasionally had to have one the chinese students, a girl named sophie, translate what i was saying. One thing that is helpful is most of them handy little electronic dictionaries. So, when they don't understand a word if i write it down they all look it up and all the sudden you will hear them all go "ooooooohhhh" it's kind of adorable and amazing.

Most of the students today didn't have english names, and having them pick names is loads of fun. i basically wrote a bunch on the board and pronounced each one. i never told them to repeat the names, but as soon as i would read one the whole class would repeat it.
when i was writing the names on the board i thought it would be fun to list names of my friends and they actually picked some of them.
i totally have a karen, jackie, and a tony. i'll probably ahve to help more kids with names next week, maybe i'll end up with some more kids named after all you crazy kids back home.

well that's all for now. i promise when i have more time, i will upload pictures from penglai.