Restless

I have been getting restless. We tried to plan some kind of weekend
getaway but it fell through. I am planning on some kind of trip soon
though. Things are getting too routine around here, which I never
like. My schedule makes it a bit more difficult to travel then the
others, since I have class on Wednesday. Still, I could go away late
Sunday night or early Monday and return by Wednesday afternoon in time
to teach. There are a few places close by- Anshun and Zunyi are a
couple of hours away by bus. Chongqing is a city that's about 6 hours
by bus. I'm also looking into flying, especially if no one else can
get it together, I might just go myself. Kunming, the capital of
Yunnan, is about a two hour flight away, and Chengdu is about one hour
away by plane.

Otherwise, things will be a bit stressful: we have to write mid-term
progress reports already for our students, then we have open classes
where the parents come to watch. This weekend, a few of my classes
were filmed. I guess they are going to put some videos on the school
website.

I will leave you with the music of Akbar Abliz:
http://www.myspace.com/akbarabliz. He is from Xinjiang and does a lot
of fusion with traditional Xinjiang music/rock/flamenco which I think
is pretty cool. I really like folk music fusion with rock, or with
other types of folk music. At one of our Xinjiang restaurants here,
they like to watch music videos on their computer which sound much
more Middle Eastern than Chinese to my ears. Xinjiang culture is
pretty inresting and the food, at least from my sampling here, is
fantastic.