May note

	Hello! Today is Monday, May 24, my 100th day in NE Asia this year. 
That brings my the total amount of time I have lived abroad to 419 days. 
I'm feeling pretty good right now, and I hope you are too.

	This spring the weather has been a little different than it was 
last year. For example, this spring it has been cloudy quite a bit and 
even rains once in a while, but last year it was unfailingly sunny. The 
temperature ranges between the high 50's and the low 70's. One thing is 
the same, though, and that is the wind. This year I experienced my first 
two dust storms, with brown clouds straight from the desert of Mongolia. A 
brown sky is more eerie than an impending thunderstorm. Still, Harbin 
weather has been more reliable than Michigan weather, and there have been 
plenty of nice days. I like cool weather anyway. It sounds like there has 
been too much rain in Michigan this month.

	I have a lot of chances to be outside when I'm walking to classes 
or going to the Dongfu office. The office is in downtown Harbin, and Hei 
Da is in the SW. I have walked from the Dongfu neighborhood all the way 
home to Hei Da two evenings in a row, and it takes more than two hours. 
The first time, I needed to walk off some stress after work and 
deliberately took roads and paths that led away from the bus route on Big 
Straight Street. It was really interesting to see the rundown one-story 
houses, the fancy new apartment buildings, outdoor markets and bus routes 
I hadn't used. I ended up as far away from Big Straight Street as the old 
zoo, but I still ended up intersecting it after it turned (no, it isn't 
completely straight!). I cut through a park at sunset and found it full of 
people enjoying the nice weather, with a big group crowding around an 
ensemble performing with traditional instruments. They were really good, 
and I stayed to listen to one song. The next night, my friend Catherine 
and I ate too much dinner at Le Jazz/Kenny Rogers Roasters, and began 
walking home, and ended up going the whole way on foot.

	During the week-long Labor Day holiday, the first week of May, I 
also spent two days doing outdoor activities. Last year, everything was 
different because of SARS, but this year people weren't afraid to leave 
home. On May 3, I went with my roommate and some members of the club in 
Daowai to a small club in an outlying region of Harbin. There, along with 
some other clubs, they performed their Easter show again, ate a quick 
lunch, and then we climbed a big hill nearby to have fun and games. I'm 
really glad I went; it was very interesting to see what a recreational 
outing is like for my like-minded friends. On May 7, the Dongfu company 
hired a small van and we went to climb a small mountain a few hours 
outside of Harbin (a few pictures are at http://www2.gvsu.edu/~dyera). 
Then we had barbeque beside a river.

	Every weekday morning I attend language class, but some of my 
classmates have different ideas about attendance. Usually only about nine 
out of seventeen students are in class! I seem to always be one step 
behind in my listening and vocabulary, so I still have a lot of 
no-clue-what-anyone-is-talking-about moments. My mid-term exam was 83, 
however, proving that I haven't lost my edge in faking my way through an 
exam. After I read through it several times, I was able to fill in a lot 
of vocabulary I didn't know by making a guess from sentence context in the 
grammar sections. I should be a professional test-taker.

	On May 14th my classmates and I went out for dinner and afterwards 
we went bowling. It was fun and interesting to be in a diverse group of 
foreigners, especially since we needed to communicate in Chinese. In my 
class there are fourteen Koreans, a Russian, an Argentinan, and an 
American. My deskmate brought her kids to the restaurant, and our teacher 
showed up as we finished eating. The low point of the evening was when the 
restaurant succeeded in ripping us off because we were foreigners. My 
deskmate and her kids went home when we left the restaurant to go bowling. 
The rest of us "older" students went home from bowling at about midnight, 
but the majority of the Koreans went out drinking.

	Last week I suddenly found out that this is the last week for my 
oral English classes. I have been having surprises like these for over a 
month (schedule changes, usually), and I'm happy to be finished if I can 
stop scrambling up my schedule. My students haven't all had a chance to 
give their presentations, so I had to schedule extra classes for them this 
week just to finish that, and there will be no time to give them an exam. 
I have been teaching these students for two terms now, longer than I've 
taught any other group, and soon they will be going to England to study. I 
hope I can offer them more help and friendship after I am finished being 
their teacher.

	It hasn't been settled where I'll be teaching next week (the first 
week of June). My language class goes until mid-July, I think. My contract 
with Dongfu is over in mid-August. Then what? I don't know yet! I don't 
have family and friends here and I love living in Michigan, but I really 
like Harbin and I'm enjoying life in this city. It's hard to decide when 
to come home considering that it would mean the end of my Harbin 
experience, and I might not ever see Harbin again.