In other news, I now have a camera on my cell phone.  So here are some pictures that I have been collecting over the last few weeks.  They range from the Chongqing equivalent of West Lake (not so good) to piles of umbrellas.  And a retirement home--find that one!

It is finally carved into stone. I will not be moving back to Hangzhou next year, back to my so called Chinese hometown and beautiful West Lake. Which in a way is too bad. But I will be continuing to teach at Sichuan International Studies University, which is how the dominoes, in the end, lined up. It basically became a heavy weight slug fest between my desire to live some where beautiful and my desire to become a translator and have momementum moving forward. In the end, I reasoned that Hangzhou has not moved in about 1000 years, where as my educational window is rapidly shutting. I hope that this is not my only opportunity to ever live in Hangzhou again... It is one of my deepest wishes to go back.

At SISU, I will both teach class and study to be a simultaneous interpreter. And consecutive interpreter. And written translator. And every single possible Chinese-English skill I can get my hands one. Let the man who wants to invent the perfect automatic translating device be warned, I absolutely have it in for him.