Strawberry Music Fest

Located in the north part of Xián is a huge park. At one time it was apparently the play area for a long-gone emperor. Lots of trees, grass, and flowers (as my allergies would attest to). A nice setting for an outdoors music festival. It was held last weekend, on Saturday and Sunday, and they had 3 stages for performers to play on. We bought tickets for Saturday. The music covered a gamut of genres - from electronica to pop to rap to Mongolian. The performers were all Chinese for the most part (except for the Mongolian band - but they still spoke Chinese). There was a rapper called MC Hotdog who rapped in Chinese - I couldn't understand a word of it but if you watched his motions he would have been at home in the US. My favorite was the Mongolian band - they did that weird throat singing stuff and played a variety of instruments. There was also an electronica band a la Daft Punk that was very loud and entertaining. Except for the language difference, you could have been at any festival  anywhere. My one complaint was the toilet situation - they must not realize that at an all-day event people will have to go to the bathroom - the lines were huge and took forever... But the weather was nice a good time was had by all!

The AP exams are now over for school, so the classes are in a state of "limbo" until the end of the school year on July 4. We start the next year's curriculum, so that when school re-starts in September, we've already covered a healthy chunk of the material. It makes things a bit difficult in terms of planning lessons and coordinating timelines, but that's the way they like to do it so that there is a huge amount of time left at the end of the school year to review before the AP tests. So these last few weeks will not be as laid-back as I had hoped...

We finally located a bowling alley here in Xián. There's a sports building that has 8 lanes on the 4th floor of a building. I don't know how a person would ever find it. The lanes are in good shape and do not appear to get much use (when we were there only 1 or 2 other lanes got occasional use). The lanes are well-polished, as well as the area up to the foul lines. It was so slippery, that I fell several times when releasing the ball. You would have to play there often to get used to it. After a miserable first game of 121, I somehow managed a 165 on the second game. That was enough, so we quit.

I was bummed out to discover my allergies came to life in spring here in China. I was pretty miserable with my eyes and nose being very irritated. It suddenly dawned on me (maybe at the music fest), that I had brought my nose  spray with me here! I rummaged through my stuff, and sure enough, there was my savior! So after a couple days it brought me total relief and I don't think about it at all. I probably hadn't had allergies like that in quite a few years...

We are still trying to finalize our teaching schedules for the end of this school year. Things keep changing constantly - I am hoping that by the end of this week it will be settled down. Any hopes that I would know what I'll be teaching next year are pretty well dashed. Probably have to wait until our return in August.  I'm sure to be teaching BC Calculus like I did this year, but may also have some Statistics and 10th grade math (sort of Pre-Calculus). I think the math department may be a little short next year which is not a good thing...

Our next (one-day) holiday is Dragon Boat Day on June 22. I'm still not sure what goes on that day, but I know I won't be climbing any mountains!