Rain; School; Intestines

I'm delivering this post from a cybercafe, so apologies for the brevity.

We've had two days of rain and the weather has cooled pretty substantially. We're down to mid-80s which is actually a pretty nice temperature. It cleared some of the heavy haze from the air: some days it was so thick you could only just make out the buldings across the canal, a distance of less than half a mile. This is on notionally sunny days. Note that this haze consists entirely of moisture. Xiamen is a small city with light industry, so its air is very clean by China standards.

This was our first week at the school. This is overwhelming on lots of levels. The Chinese Way of Doing Things™ dictates a total lack of efficiency and coordination by American standards so the building is filthy with construction remnants and dust. None of which construction is actually finished; kids begin school on Monday. I'm having other great fun working out what my job actually is. Confusion on this point is not anyone's fault; it's just that educational institutions have a radically different attitude toward IT than businesses. More on this later I'm sure.

After two weeks of eating bizarre foodstuffs like whole prawns and fish, lotus soup, and black pickled duck eggs my intestines are staging a little revolt. No fever or other ish but I'm gonna have to lay off the bean-curd bao for a little while. Damn.