Comments from Sichuan...

Notes on Food: One of my classmates with considerably more China experience than me loves to shock people with the following observation: "Dog doesn't taste bad, in fact I would eat it again. But donkey meat is horrible." While I have yet to knowingly encounter a dish featuring man's best friend, in my humble opinion, it's pretty easy to adapt to some foods that visitors to China consider to be less orthodox. Pig stomach? Delicious. Duck throat? Wanted to try it, but I wasn't fast enough-- it was all gone before I got my piece. Chicken feet? A bit too crunchy for my tastes, but if you like the wings I don't understand what's stopping you.   Adventures in Chinese Plumbing: I have the tendency to botch perfectly good jokes, but bear with me on this. There's this one about how bad the world would be if the Germans ran all the police, the French the hotels, the English the kitchens, etc. I think you can probably add to that the Chinese as the world's plumbers. I mean it's really a tragedy sometimes what passes for drainage here. Do not get me wrong: I am not skilled in the ways of the toilet, of wastewater, or of sink repair and maintainence. But it certainly seems as though no one else here is either.   Anti-Marketing Campaign: I'm not going to go into too much detail about the way business is done in China, because half of it is cliche and the other half is not worth explaining. Suffice it to note that at times, because of seniority, tenure, being well-connected, or maybe just pity, sometimes a person ends up in a position where they really don't belong -- this of course happens in America and Germany as well. My class happened to encounter a particularly well-entrenched "marketing professor" here. After much deliberation, we voted as a class to ask the administration to provide us with a different lecturer, one who actually knows something about marketing, lets the students ask questions and whose mobile phone doesn't interrupt class every 15 minutes or so. And to our general surprise, we were successful in our request... except for the fact that they didn't tell the about-to-be-releived professor she was getting the sack until after the whole class already knew it. In order to save her face, we were asked to keep the fact to oursevles until this particular educator could be let down softly by the dean. So the whole last session felt like a three hour long breakup with a girlfriend/boyfriend who hasn't yet caught on. Why is only half the class here today? Why did only three of you do the homework? Don't you like me?

Update and Mobile phone pictures from Chengdu

We've been pretty busy getting settled in and exploring our new neighborhood and environs, so there hasn't been much chance for blogging and the like. But here are a couple of mobile phone uploads and a brief message from me (Nate). All is well and we're having a pretty good time. The weather is often raining but sometimes suprisingly beautiful... a couple of days ago we had blue skies and sunshine.   Will blog again soon with more and better pictures.