Sorry

So it's been a while since I last posted, and the main reason is: I've been busy. But also, I'm trying to post pictures and it's taking F-O-R-E-V-E-R. Blogger really has a problem...it shouldn't take more than a minute to upload a picture - a minute is already way too long! Plus, often blogger won't even let me upload pictures - it just doesn't work! So it's very frustrating.

Lately I've been preparing for my mid-term exams. I had four last week - spoken spoken (dialogue with a partner), reading & writing, listening, and spoken written (a written exam for our speaking class). I did OK, not used to getting such low marks, but I was pleased in a way because considering I've only been really studying for two months my results weren't bad. I received average marks.

Learning Chinese is hard. It's hard to remember all those characters. Memorizing them comes a lot easier now (I'm more used to it) but then right after the tests I tend to forget most of them...and continuing to use them is near impossible since I'm learning around 120 new words a week (that's on average 25 new words a day - when I learned how to teach English I was told the maximum a student can realistically take in is around 7 or 8 new words a day).

I was sad to hear that my dog Cleo died. She was 13 years old (her birthday's in October). She died contentedly and without pain, thankfully. It was peaceful.

I'm excited to hear that my brother will probably come visit me end of December. Yay!

Because I wrote about those people trying to flee from Chinese mountains, I can't view my site anymore, so I'm going to cut that part out and see if I can view my site again.