Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, no, it's...

pollution! At first I thought that maybe it was just foggy in the morning, but then I was told there is no fog in Xián. You don't really notice it much here, unless you look off to the distance. The city has mountains around much of it, but you can't see them with the pollution. There has been 2 days so far when I have been able to see the outline of the mountains far away. You'll see a few people wearing masks, but not many. They say in the winter that it is much worse (coal burning power plants for heat?) and you'll see more people wearing masks. In Wuxi the pollution was particularly bad - you could smell it in the air. It certainly is a good thing that all (or most all) scooters and motorcycles are electric...

Opened up a Chinese bank account today - it only took a 2 hour wait in line! And I can now get paid!

Let me explain a little about the school here. I was trying to think of a good way to describe it and then the words "charter school"  popped into my head. Our International School (which is really 100% Chinese) is like a school within the larger school. We are totally separate in terms of classes and teachers, but share many of the same facilities. Our staff is mostly Chinese teachers, but us foreigners are here to give the classes a Western flavor and help prepare them for their exams a little better. Most of the classes will have a Chinese and a foreign teacher, with the teaching load split about 50-50. The majority of the students take AP coursework, with some opting for the British A-level system (I haven't quite got a handle on that one yet). The students objective is to get admitted to a Western or British university - and I have been told that 100% of them do! Truly amazing! There are about 500 students in the International School (grades 10-12) and I'm going to say 1500 in the larger, general school for a total of around 2000.

I'll be meeting with a Chinese math teacher this afternoon to discuss their curriculum, and then we don't go back to school until  Saturday (yup, I said Saturday) for a few more meetings before school starts on Monday. We have Sunday off, but the Chinese teachers will be working the whole weekend. You'll find that the weekends here don't necessarily mean much to the Chinese, and the majority of them work 6 day weeks.
We still have absolutely no idea of our teaching schedule!

Our principal invited us newbies to his flat last night for dinner. His wife cooked up some pizza (the first I've had here!) and we ended with some real coffee (he had some Italian roast). A real treat! In the maze of buildings around here, it is not necessarily easy to find where someone lives! He flagged us down by yelling at us from his balcony...