Sue goes to Jiliang University

This Saturday morning, Sue climbed on the bus at 6:30 to Jiliang University for teacher orientation. It's a nice air conditioned bus that stops very near our apartment.  The ride is an hour long, each way, and makes a loop every 4 hours or so, so it's important to get on the bus when it comes so we don't miss class!

Since I am not in the College of Foreign Languages I didn't have to go today, so I stayed back with the kids.  The 4 of us took a bike ride all the way to West Lake, and across the Su Di (Su Causeway) which is a small road that crosses the lake.  Jack did NOT want to go after a hard first week at school, but once we got there he did not want to leave!  We bought fish food from the vendor (popcorn) and fed the HUGE carp that could eat several kernels in one bite!  Sorry no pics of our excursion - myself and 3 kids on bicycles in Chinese traffic was all I could handle!!

Sue hung up some laundry to dry.  Is that my sock on the road down below?

 

Sue with Alexis on the University campus.  Sue says it's very corporate and modern looking.

 

Two of the other teachers, Ashley and John with Alexis who is our neighbor.  Ashley and John just came 2 days ago and they are still very jet-lagged!  There are 7 foreign teachers at this university, and we are definitely the elderly members of the group :).

 

The map of the University.  I'm anxious to go there myself for the first time and find where I'm supposed to go!

Down at West Lake today, I fell on my bicycle with Sophie on the back!  The curb caught my wheel as I was scanning for traffic.  I put myself under the bike as we fell so Sophie didn't hit the ground, thank goodness!  Garbage from our ice cream cones spilled out of my basket and a nice policeman came over and helped us up and took all of my garbage away!  People really are so nice here!

The flip side:  On Wednesday we had someone try to scam us at the Lingyin temple - we came out and hopped into what we THOUGHT was a cab (it said TAXI and was painted as such), but the meter was broken, and there was no taxi license on the dashboard.  It was a big tourist area and they were looking for suckers!  We asked to go to a big shopping center, Carrefour, and he said it was closed down but he could take us to a different market.  We said we were game but would only pay 10 yuan.  So we went to his market where he was obviously getting a kickback to take foreigners, and we said, we wanted groceries, not silk.  So after arguing with him for awhile he took us back to a main road where we caught a real taxi.  It only cost us the 10 yuan to learn the lesson of watching for the meter and the taxi license, so I figure we got off cheap!