TV-series

1. Heroes every Monday, started last week.
2. South Park every Wednesday, starting next week.
3. Robot Chicken every Sunday, been going on for a while
4. Family Guy every Sunday, started last week.
5. American Dad every Sunday, starting today.
6. Entourage, when will season 5 start?
7. The Pickup Artist, season 1 just ended.
   
8. Lost in season 4 in February
9. Should I start watching Prison Break?
10. Should I start watching The 4400
11. Rumor has it that Futurama will start again soon.
    

It seems a lot of series has moved from Fox to Adult Swim (Cartoon Network's night shows), American Dad and Family Guy has moved, and Robot Chicken has always been there and Futurama has moved there too, I thought they would move to Comedy Central but that was apparently wrong, either way I think this is a good thing since Fox seems to have their own agenda about everything.

At least with the first four I have a lot to watch now, perhaps too much, and with the two that I'm considering it should be plentiful.

Update

Just wrote 4 posts:

Another weekend
74%
Daily life and
Mid-autumn festival

I haven't had time to write very often recently so this is pretty much what has happened since last I Thursday.

Mid-autumn festival

I will post the photos later.

I met Jane by the river on Tuesday night to watch the moon, have mooncake and put lanterns in the river, that's pretty much it actually, the moon was clouded though but I got to watch it and managed to take some weird pictures of it when I was waiting for Jane. We walked around for quite a while, just walking through the crowds and taking pictures and stuff, finally we bought two lanterns and I got to put them in the water and make a wish for each. A quite good night.

Daily life

I've been hanging out with Jane almost every day this week, I think I met her just about everyday except Wednesday. I was supposed to meet Bella one Wednesday too but she has been sick so we couldn't meet. On Thursday I had the afternoon off and spent it with Jane since she had the afternoon off too, at night I met Erin, a girl that had come up to talk to me last Saturday when I was waiting for Luna; Erin is a bit younger, 22 I think, and studying English at Sichuan university, she just wanted to meet someone to speak English to so she came up to me and talked, we had pizza at a small place close to where we had met, next door to the Indian place where I had had dinner with Luna, and I got to teach her to use knife and for, her first time ever, and just have some simple conversation in English, it almost felt like I was tutoring her and I should have charged her for it.

Last night me and Aaron went out drinking, I met up with him at Paname after my dinner with work and Jane was with us too in the beginning, we mostly drank beer and played pool and at around 3am we left for a Chinese bar instead. There we met this weird guy, spoiled kid (old kid), that we hung out with for a while and then left, I spent too much Money yesterday, in total about 300kuai despite the free dinner. I think Kelly will have a party of some sort next weekend so I will probably join that. And the taxi ride home was my first with a female driver, I guess that was surprising because it was surprising, but aren't all taxi drivers men?

As for fasters question: Daily life and chores, well work takes up a lot more time than I had expected, even though I should only have around 15-20 teaching hours per week, which is basically around 10 working hours, I'm still away from home 8-12 hours per day, all because the commuting time when we are working outside Chengdu and the 4 hour lunch brakes we have and are stuck there. Because of this I have hardly had any time to do housework, I try to have breakfast at home every day but I haven't really gotten used to anything special and it's hard to find something good to eat for breakfast, the bread pretty much sucks, there is only one kind of bread to be found in normal stores and that is a super sweet, white and super soft thing that isn't very good and probably not healthy at all. I have only cooked at home once, the pancake dinner with Lily at her birthday but I intend to do that more often now, I have enough money now to buy a rice-cooker and a stove thing now, so I will try to make my own bread and try to cook simple food at home. And between working and hanging out with friend I haven't had time to clean my place at all this week, which is what I'm supposed to do right now but I'm a bit hangover and too lazy at the moment.

I have been trying to work out a little at home too, just doing sit-ups and push-ups daily and trying to increase, doing about 140 sit-ups and 30-40 push-ups a day now, and I'm losing weight, I'm still over 95kg I think but I'm much slimmer than before.

74%

Just a brief summary of what has happened since I wrote last:

Friday last week was a full day outside Chengdu again, started of being too tired from the very beginning it became a virtually horrible day. For some reason the schools here have about 4 hours lunch break, which doesn't make much sense to me, at least not in primary school, the kindergartens I can understand since they have nap time and stuff after lunch, at least this gave me a chance to nap too. The total amount of teaching hours that week ended up at 24, out of the 15-20 that my contract states.

This week was a lot worse, started on Monday when we had another full day outside Chengdu and teaching primary school and at lunch my boss told me I had evening classes too, some kindergarten in Chengdu and only two classes but still, she could have mentioned that a little bit earlier, she promised me Wednesday afternoon off as compensation but that was changed before long. The whole week was very tiring, in total I worked 28 teaching hours, again out of the 15-20 that my contract states. My boss says she is trying to find more part time teachers though so it should be better later, and now I have 9 whole days off so time to relax.

An interesting, really interesting, thing that happened this week was on Tuesday when I had kindergarten classes outside Chengdu; a small boy came up to me and tried to talk, which is not unusual so I basically ignored it, but it turned out he was speaking in Swedish to me, apparently his dad is Swedish, I guess him mom must be Chinese since he didn't look at all Swedish, I think that was pretty cool. I think Tuesday was the most relaxed day this week, during the 4 hour lunch break we went to have our feet washed and massaged, kind of weird but it was rather enjoyable.

And yesterday I finally got my salary; my boss had managed to convince the company boss that we have worked so hard that we deserved the full month salary, since we haven't really worked all days this month, and with the evaluation 74 out of 100, which I think is rather good for the first month, but we didn't get any detalied eveluation and I don't know what Gosha got so I'm not sure, I got 5011kuai, minus the deposit of 1000kuai I got 4011kuai in my hand, I need to open a bank account now, will try to do that tomorrow or at least some day next week. At night we had a dinner together with my boss and my coworker, Jane came with me too and Gosha's boyfriend and another Polish guy that is her friend and has worked at our company before. I didn't know that our company would pay for the dinner so I'm quite embarrassed to say I ate for two or three people, which got rather expensive, around 100kuai for me alone; I had a big fajita with chicken and stuff and me and Jane shared a nine layer dip for starter and I ended the dinner with a brownie ice cream thingy, and had a beer to the food too, it was really really good though.

Another weekend

On Thursday last week I went out to have BBQ with Aaron, Amanda and Kelly, the three American Volunteers that I've met, that was really good but I was extremely tired. BBQ is something you can have pretty much anywhere here at night, they have like these small grills just about everywhere and you just chose whatever you want to put on it and after a few minutes you get it back on a tray, it's quite cheap too, I had a lot and it was still only 17kuai. I learnt a new version of the big two, neger or king and slave card game too, it's called five-ten-king (I think) and you can only play it with three people where two play against one that gets some extra cards, rather fun.

On Saturday I was supposed to go to IKEA with Luna, but with communication problems it wasn't that easy and I finally gave up, we still met for dinner anyway and I had the spiciest food I've had here so far, an Indian restaurant and we both had curry dishes, min was really spicy but not even close to Luna's, her was well SPICY. After the dinner we met up with Bella at the Hemp House and I stayed there until around 4am or something, it was actually quite dull but I didn't feel like going home.

Americans, bikes, a bug and loads of children!

Another week is almost done and this one was tougher.

Monday I did a whole day outside Chengdu for the first time and working with two guys, an older American guy that made a lot of noise and a French-Canadian guy that didn't make much noise at all. The American guy, Rick, is quite cool actually, I kind of like him despite his overly American way; he is a bit over 40 and has amazingly been to over 80 coteries, among which all European countries is included, he can also "speak" 12 languages and know phrases in a dozen others, for example he knows how to say I don't speak Swedish/Danish in Swedish and Danish "Jag talar inteSvenska", "Jag snackar icke Dansk" (or something like that). Teaching mostly 1st grade (one 2nd grade in the morning only) I managed to get a quite good pace in my class and at the end of the day Betty, my assistant, told me that the school had said I was the best among the three of us. Guess how much that boosted my confidence, I have only been teaching for 2 weeks and the others have been teaching for at least a few months and several years respectively.

Good turned to bad when I came back to the office, on the way back Betty told me that I should put my bike in the guarded place instead of outside where I have put it so far, I guess she could have told me about that sooner because when we came back my bike had already left in some mysterious way, I was sad. Had a comfort dinner with Jane instead and was rather happy after that; I think that must have been the most comfortable restaurant I've ever been to, big sofas instead of chairs and in some way they have managed to make it easy to sit by the table and eat in them.

Tuesday morning was primary school again, and 1st grade again, so I just did the exact same thing I had done Monday and I actually hardly remember any of it. In the afternoon I had kindergarten again and I had kind of forgotten my system so the lessons really sucked, new words too. After I was done Betty went with me to buy a new bike, and I bought an exact same as I had before. At night I met Jane for dinner again, it got very late which was not too good for her as she had classes in the morning, she is working at Sichuan Normal University, I've figured out that the Normal Universities ire like Lärar Högskolan (teachers collage) in Sweden. Jane made steamed dumplings for me, well not as much made as just steamed them but it was nice either way.

Wednesday was morning off so I slept in, afternoon it was a new kindergarten, I think a richer kindergarten so the kids get more to eat and are therefore both bigger and louder. Not very fun, but luckily I figured out that if I manage to convince them that it's better to have classes outdoors it will be ok. I met Bella for dinner and she tried to help me with some tickets but we finally figured out that I could have done it myself, we had the dinner at the same place that I had had with Jane last Friday and I think I really like that place; I think all places have approximately the same dishes, but they are still really bad at many places, this place is great though.

This morning, Thursday, I had primary school again and in the first class I had I lost my voice in every other sentence, I still managed though. On the way to the pickup place at the office I manged to do a full frontal with a tiny bug, straight in my eye, it took me five minutes to even open my eyes again and that got me five minutes late, it still hurts too actually. I had two 1st grade classes and one 4th grade, all went quite well I think, a little bit off in timing on the 4th grade class but I had prepared for that so it was ok. In the afternoon I had two classes at the same kindergarten as yesterday, but this time the oldest and loudest students, it was ok anyway, my voice was better than this morning and my preparation was much better, just did the same class as I had done last week, since it was the first time.

I figured out a lot of things of how to handle the students better these two weeks and I think I will manage even better in time, but right now I think I need some fisherman's friend, damn but I have to scream a lot!

Office just called and informed me that I have three kindergarten classes in the morning and three kindergarten classes in the afternoon tomorrow, and as usual they have no idea of which age, everything in the last second, damn the are disorganized.