Water

6 Sep 06

Today I have only a late class and am waiting for a couple of things to be done. The first thing I am waiting for is the telephone. It has not been connected yet. Rather interesting, it is a DSL phone. I have been told that there is a relatively inexpensive way to make international calls on it.

Yesterday Zeneta purchased us cell phones. However, the cards to turn them on were not in stock. So, while we have them, and they are charged, we cannot use them yet. I also managed to, with the help of Kenney, get water delivered. We now have a fresh bottle of water on the dispenser and a spare bottle. Here was some confusion as to the purpose of the spare bottle. However, they were convinced to leave it.

You note that I said water dispenser, not water cooler. This is because the water dispenser has no cooling function. Oddly enough, it does have a heater. So, it serves hot water and warm water.

Most water here is consumed hot. I suspect that is due to the concern for water contamination, causing the water to need boiling before consumption. By drinking the water hot, it can be consumed sooner, and; in places like the restaurants, it is served in thermoses, where it is kept hot; this serves to assure that the water was boiled. Beyond this, it just seems to be a preference to serve water warm or hot.

We were also told that the monitor for our computer would arrive today. Once it arrives we should be able to get on the Internet and begin sending email, and posting theses journal entries.

Well, a change of plans has occurred. I returned the broken water dispenser and found out that there is still no monitor for the computer. An offer was made to loan us one, which we accepted, and we may have it later today.

I went this afternoon, with the South African, to work on getting our, Zeneta's and my own, cell phones activated. It turns out that the shop that we went to does not have the cards that we need. However, we should be able to get them tomorrow afternoon.

Today's class went pretty well. I had the lecture down and delivered it reasonably smoothly. I have five classes that meet twice a week. So, by the time I get to class five, I have the lecture down.

After the class I ran the first movie. Because I was running the movie I was unable to make it to English corner. This is where the students go, once a week, to speak English. I ran most of the movie 50 1'st dates. It was an okay movie. It is very much a date movie, or chick flick. I stopped it at the breakup montage.

We did get a monitor this afternoon. With it we have limited access to the Internet. By limited, I mean that it does not always work. I send to suspect, due to the nature of the errors, that it is more a case of truly bad hardware than filtering. On thing remains an issue though. I still cannot figure out how to connect with my airport. If the server is checking for MAC addresses then I will not be able to make it work. However, there are a few things I want to try first. At the moment I cannot because the Internet connection is not working at all.

It was interesting riding home. The thought went through my head, here I am, in China, riding a bicycle, in the dark. I did go down a couple of steps that I had forgotten about that are between the school and my apartment. I realized that not many people ride that way here. They ride very slowly.