An evening at an Expat Pub.

It is slow at work or I should say the school; and with the Chinese New Year coming in less than a week, there is a holiday atmosphere about so it is hard to stay sharp for the classes I do have to teach.  I also have this sense of lack of accomplishment.  I should be doing more than I am.  But I am addicted to blogging and looking at my traffic numbers.

The snow has increased traffic on my blogs.  I have had Wuxi people from California and Florida tell me that they have discovered AKIC while looking for news about Wuxi snow.  I see that my blogs come up first when I Google "Wuxi" and "snow". 

Still, I was hoping more would look at my Wuxi Snow videos on Youtube.  My first snow video has had nearly a thousand views.  Others in the series have had four views.  I have thirteen videos in the series now.

At work, I have to find another trainer to start in March, I have scheduling headaches for after the CNY when we start teaching all the company classes.  I also have to think about the curriculum for these classes although there isn't much that can be done until I get specifics about class times and what the companies want us to each their workers.

Last night, I had Hot Pot at the Little Sheep Restaurant that is not far from the school on Zhongshan Road.  Hot Pot is a way of eating food where a pot of boiling spices is placed in the middle of a large table so that everyone can dip and cook their raw food in it.  You can choose from a wide variety of meat, vegetables and so on to dip and cook in the hot pot.  It is a communal way to eat.  It can fill you up quickly with you being seemingly unaware because you are only eating mouthfuls at a time without seeing  a plate of food and the totality of the food you will eat in front of you.

We went to the restaurant to celebrate the return from Germany of a local Wuxi woman who is married to a German expat working in Wuxi, and is a good friend of my wife and my wife's friend.

After eating we went to an Expat pub.  I was proud to show off my son but the conversation I had with the people I knew at the Pub seemed obligatory.  I really did not have much to say to these people.  I was interested to know the citizenship paper problems of a Mexican man, who had a child with a local Wuxi woman, was having.  He was in the process of becoming an American citizen and so had two consulates to go to get his daughter citizenship in America.  He agreed that the Chinese birth certificates were a pain in the ass.