Days 126-128: Getting Little Things Done

So I'm at a point right now in my Fulbright journey where I have some down time.This is because I'm just waiting to give my Final Exam on the 10th, and I'm also waiting for the grad students to submit their papers...so far, no one has, and it's January 4 as I write this. Therefore, I'm just getting a lot of little things done. Kerry and I went grocery shopping--to Century Mart--on New Year's Day, so it was nice to go take a walk for groceries and then walk back. Today, Wednesday, I really didn't do much of anything except sleep in and watch a movie (All About Eve--yay!).  However, I have accomplished a lot of little things over the past few days:

• Sent out requests to universities in Bangkok, Thailand to do guest lectures (it's the next place I'd like to go outside of China).
• Completed a syllabus draft for my Honors class for next semester.  The class will be called "American Literature and Culture: 1900-Present."  It feels like it will be more of an American Studies class than an American Literature one, but that's okay.  There are a lot of interesting an relevant cultural studies topics going on right now (gender, racism, Trump).
• Obtained tickets to go to Nanjing (with Carol's help). We have decided to visit Mark there this weekend. It's the last chance we will have to go to Nanjing while he's there, so we want to take advantage of that.
• Purchased all tickets and made all hotel reservations for our China trips in February.  We're going from Shanghai to Chengdu on the 19th, then Chengdu to Kunming on the 23rd, then Kunming to Dali for the Fulbright Conference on the 26th; and then Dali back to Shanghai on March 2. So many travels, even after we return from the USA.

Tuesday we also had a Chinese lesson with Deborah: we mainly added expressions to our vocabulary and talked about a conversation that we could have at a restaurant. I think we're feeling at this point that we need to review what we are learning instead of just continuing to add more words, so we're hoping the next time we meet with Deborah we can do this.

Kerry is also planning more and more of our trip to Japan on the 20th. It is becoming a reality!

Tomorrow Carol is coming over to get her money for the train tickets. Friday we have a Chinese class, and then we're having dinner with Connie and her kids.

Here are some pictures from the last few days:

The entrance to Century Mart.

Some dragonfruit at Century Mart.

Kerry's fabulous apple chicken (again!).