Beijing is crawling with scads of dirty-/dorky-/creepy-looking white guys with cute Chinese girlfriends or prostitutes ( Read more... )

our electricity blew out just before we came back home from our visit to the capital. to temporarily fix this problem, the apartment's wiring has been jerry-rigged to the wiring of the lightposts bordering the lake outside. this means we only have working electricity when the sun goes down and the outdoor lights turn on. we cannot use our heaters ( Read more... )

I keep thinking about my trip to Cassadaga 2 1/2 years ago and my free psychic reading which was: you will be very much in love, yes you will be perfect for each other, he will write songs, he will play the guitar (I see him sitting at his desk, sitting, writing songs), you will travel, you will want to go and he will want to stay ( Read more... )

- like smoke ( Read more... )

the online dictionary is my only dictionary and it is unreliable. this last week's classes were on relationships. we were trying to explain what "flirt" means and used the dictionary's only translations for the first couple days, and students would giggle and say that "tiaoqing" (supposedly "to flirt") is a "negative" thing in China (which we ( Read more... )

so next week's classes are going to focus on love and relationships (vocab, idioms, blah blah blah). I stumbled onto talkenglish.com looking for material and immediately fell in love myself ( Read more... )

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Caroline (Dong Zhe): "I'm not so beautiful but I don't mind."
Jenny (Liu Junyu): "I'm not so beautiful but I am smart."
Violet (Chen Jing): "I don't think I'm a beautiful girl, but I'm very nice."
Jessica (Gong Yefen): "I'm not beautiful, not clever, not conversable, but I'm a honest, polite, warmhearted person."
Amy (Zhang Tong): "I'm not a beautiful ( Read more... )

but I don't want to talk to anybody and everybody wants to be my friend. mustering fake smiles and false enthusiasm has become especially straining. keep having to pretend I'm tired or sick. which at least isn't that hard because I feel like sleeping a lot lately ( Read more... )