No, I did not fall off the face of the Earth
But yes, there were some days when I wanted to jump off it! 
So, no posts and MIA. What’s the story? Well, the last week of September we had a double week of classes to make up for the ones that we wouldn’t have during the October holiday. Not cool. Anyway, so in the midst of the double week, I was also signed up to judge my department’s CCTV speech contest, get my contestants ready for it, hostess another university’s CCTV competition and go to the next level of my school’s competition to watch my students. CRAZY! It was fun for the most part. I enjoyed being able to be involved in so many aspects of the competition, but I’m pretty sick of hearing about global citizenship (the speech topic). Anyway, so I made it through the crazy week, which included teaching on the weekend…booo. (On a sidenote: I tried to let my Sunday morning class leave early, well, pretty much when we got there, and we got caught!! AND, then we got put under classroom arrest, with some woman standing outside the door until I shut it in her face. CRAZY!! There are days when I wonder why I haven’t been deported!!)
Anyway, so last week (first week of Oct.) we had vacation. We just chilled on Monday after the killer week. Due to a complicated story involving the Foreign Office and a plane ticket, I owed them a good chunk of my first pay check, so exotic travel was a little out of budget (bummer). Oh well. We still had a good time doing some touring around Kunming. On Tuesday we went to a park called Black Dragon Pool. It was in the mountains (which was quite the escapade trying to get there), so it was fun to do some hiking and actually see some trees changing color. I miss Fall! Then on Wednesday, one of our students and her friends took us to a park about an hour away called the Yunnan Nationalities/Minorities Park. Our province has at least 26 minorities, so this place was kind of like the EPCOT of China. Each minority has a little settlement with stuff from their culture. Of course, being minorities ourselves, people were quite amused by our presence. It turned out to be a good thing that we didn’t get to travel far because then I came down with a cold/virus of some sort for the rest of break. Not fun, but better than having it for teaching.
So, that means that we’ve gotten through another week of teaching. We are battling massive amounts of rain and thunderstorms this week, so that’s a bummer, too.
Those are pretty much the highlights of the last few weeks, well the condensed version
