English department faculty meeting

Today we were escorted to the school bus stop by another faculty member and rode the 50 minutes to the Northwest Polytech University's new campus where we'll be teaching. We'll be making this bus trip every day we teach. (We live on the old campus but will teach 50 minutes away at the new campus.) The English Department had a faculty meeting there but they thought we'd be bored at their two-hour meeting, all in Chinese, so we waited in the English Department office. Afterward we were given our teaching assignments and shown our classrooms. We'll be teaching in classrooms right next to each other and will each teach five sophomore classes of oral English and one junior writing class. Classes start Monday.

I have a hard time remembering that I'm in a Communist country. The people here seem so happy and appear to enjoy so much freedom. Capitalism is defiantly on the rise. But there are controls over people's individual freedom they seem to matter-of-factly accept, probably because there's more freedom than has been had before.