Out of touch

Sorry to be so long writing, I hope there are still people reading.
It's been impossible to get direct access to my blog, and not a whole
lot of time for the internet generally. So I'm not actually going to
write very much tonight, just hope it gets through since I'm e-mailing
it. Haven't had great luck with that coming through, but I think it's
just that it takes a while. You should be able to read this. And by
not writing much, I mean that most of what I write is going to be
copied from an e-mail I sent my grandmother a week ago. Anyway...

The school I'm at, the Boland School, is pretty small, and runs
month-long courses with a week and a half long break in between. It
has two full time teachers and the owner also teaches a few times a
week. There are 6 students this session, I guess the most per class
is 8. It's nice for the small class sizes, and the people are all
pretty cool, but it's occasionally a little difficult spending all my
time with the same group of people. Nothing bad, just would like to
meet more people.

Which basically means I need to learn Chinese. I'm taking some
classes as part of my course, but it's not much and our class
schedule's pretty busy, so I don't have much time or energy to do
independent study right now. I do hope that I'll be able to take more
and more serious classes somewhere I'll have more opportunities/need
to learn once I get a job. For now it's not too difficult to get by
though. Most things we need at the store are pretty easy to pick out,
and prices are clearly marked.

It's kind of strange, Suzhou, the city I'm in, is really not at all
like most of the ideas I/we have about China. It seems to be mostly a
new city built around a much older city. Apparently the population is
about 7 million, but it doesn't feel like it. Of course, we're also
way out on the edge of town, but even heading into town it's not very
crowded. Plenty of people, but it doesn't seem like that many. Which
I guess is all kind of what China is like now, and sort what I
expected China to be like, it's just different seeing it.

Also, there's a lot of new building going on, especially out near us.
We're in the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), which seems to be a largish
chunk of the northeastern section of the city. Right across the
street from the school a new hotel is being built, on the shore of a
lake (there are a few here), and right across the street from our
apartments several high-rise apartment buildings are going up. Some
look done on the outside, some are still concrete shells. But that's
just what's going on right nearby. It looks like this whole section
of the city is getting prepared to become a getaway from the city
(Shanghai) for the wealthy. There's still some building left to do.
I'd guess that there are at the very least 50 apartment and condo
blocks that are newly built or in the process of being finished, and
at least 10 of those look like they're still being worked on. But
there aren't any people in them. It's bizarre.

I'm not going to write more now, because it's late. But we went on a
field trip today out to the other side of the city, maybe even a
different city, I'll look it up, on a field trip to this island in the
middle of a much larger lake. Will try to make time to write about it
tomorrow. At the very least hope to get pictures from the past two
months posted before Monday.