Greetings from Zhuzhou!

I am currently writting from the English department in Nanfang school. I'm actually in the middle of my first department meeting, but as it's conducted in Chinese they said my partner Michelle and I could just go online.

We arrived yesterday. Our foriegn liason Center (that her name, it's apperently a pun on her Chinese name) and a women named Gong Shang Qin picked us up in a Honda and drove us an hour south to our new home. First we went to our appartments to drop our stuff off. The place was a mess (everything in China seems to have a thin layer of grim on it. I think its the pollution.) and the bathroom was (and still is) worse than anything I've seen in the states. Let me put it this way, as I was cleaning yesterday I started writing a song containing the lines (I'm a cockroach swatter, toilet squatter, showered in freezing water...). But as I said I spent much time cleaning and the rest of the place I feel confident walking around barefoot now. The place is located in the 'foreign teachers apartment' section, which basically just us and the funny Danish guy I like to call Vegetable Lasagne (for that Seinfeld episode.  Anybody, anybody?).

Now I have to go.  There are many hoops yet to just through before they'll let us stay here.  Oh, I got my Chinese name.  It's Huang Xiang Bei (Whong Shoung Bay).  It literally means yellow Hunan North, or loosely translates to Yellow Norseman in Hunan.  Pretty cool, eh?

-TWN-