Saturday, September 16, 2006
| 12 Sep 06 Yesterday started in the usual, uneventful manner. After class I started riding back home for lunch when I ran into Collin. I returned with him to the administrative office. We had not yet been paid and he was getting pretty angry. They then told us that the reason that we had not been paid was that we needed to sign contracts with Mc¡¯Quary College, the part of the college that we are working at. This did not placate us. We had signed contracts before leaving for China. To add to that irritation, the person who had the copies of the contracts that we needed to sign was not available. I pinned our administrative assistant, Julia, down on a time. She assured me that at 16:30 we would be able to get the official copies of the contracts done, and that the people who needed to be there when we signed them would be present (the college dean and a sort of a notary public) at that time. I then rode home. When I got home I found quite a crowd. The head of the foreign exchange department, Mr. Zhen, was there along with our contact person, Mr. Lou. They had a plumber with them also. It turns out that Zeneta and Michelle had been complaining about that poor drainage of our fifth floor showers. The plumber pulled a congealed blob, about the size of a rat, out of our pipes. He seemed to think that Zeneta and Michelle were shedding in their showers, thinking that the blobs were hair. Considering that the drains, in the showers, never worked well I tend to think that the congealed blobs were something that had been there for quite some time. Colin and I discussed the pay problems with Mr. Zhen and he assured us that everything, including the signing of the formal contract was secondary to the two basic elements of the contract. The first element is that we teach; the second is that we get paid on time. We were assured that he would call them and that we would get paid. I also took this opportunity to, again, discuss the need for Zeneta and I to register with the security bureau and get our residency permit. Some action was also taken, in that regard, in order to get that done. Of course, to register with them, we had to surrender our passports to the security bureau while they process the permit. So, for a couple of weeks we cannot open a bank account On campus, this is the time of the freshmen civil defense training. So, there are a lot of people running around campus in uniform. It seems that the senior ROTC students are training the freshmen. This also means that the freshmen are not in class yet. Collin is the only one that has any freshmen on his teaching load; so, he is using this time to develop lesson plans.
Freshmen at Civil Defense training. We tried to take a shortcut to lunch and kept running into dead ends. I did see a dirt path heading up one of the hills; however, we didn¡¯t follow it. We ended up going through another, on campus, residential area and wound up back at the main building. We then walked to Diagon Alley in the same way as we have done in the past. After lunch Zeneta took the muni bus, #2, in to the main part of town and did some shopping. I suspect that this was as much about having something to do as the need for any shopping that could only be done in town. She rode the bus in with several others. However, she managed to loose them in a market. She then found one of them who had also separated from the group and rode back to the campus with him. A woman with a pushcart gave me a sample of something that, I felt, tasted like a hash brown. Knowing that Zeneta likes hash browns, I purchased a bag of them from her and gave them to Zeneta. Zeneta says that they were more like hush puppies (when I think of a hush puppies, I think of a brand of shoes) than hash browns. I went to a different vendor and got another pita sandwich. They seem to be pretty common faire in the alley. We did notice that the turtle vendor was still there selling turtles for pets. I am hesitant to get one because I cannot find on the state department website if it is something that I can bring back to the states. I do have a picture of these turtles and will post one soon. http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f382/Robert_C_bikes/DSCF0105.jpg
http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f382/Robert_C_bikes/DSCF0106.jpg
After class I went to go see Julia about the pay. I assume that something had happened during the day, as there was no mention of the contracts. She just took me to the pay office where I was paid, in cash, for the entire month. Some comments:
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