Here's an understatement for you:

It is very rainy in China.

I am soaked to the bone from the rain. I have never seen rain like this before. It blows from all directions, so even if you try to protect one part of your body, the rest end up soaked.

The backs of my pants are almost pitch black.

I... did not start teaching today after all. Someday "soon" is what we're being told. Everything is soon in China -- we will have dorm Internet "soon," we will start teaching "soon," we will be reimbursed "soon." I can live with soon, though. Life is just slower here.

Whenever I travel, one of the things I notice most about myself is my sense of time. I always feel a need to be somewhere or doing something, and I need to know exactly what I need to do and when it needs to be done. I hate having huge blankets of free time, because I stress out that I should be doing something instead. I'd say a good 99% of my impulse buying, in general, stems out of me having too much time on my hands. Likewise, I attribute my better performance in school to, amongst other things, my harder schedule; the less time I have to just putt around, the more time I keep cracking.

That is not China, though. China is slow. China is slow, and relaxed, and extremely, extremely rainy. Maybe in other places it isn't so laid back, but at Wenzhou University, at least for the foreign students like myself, life moves at a slow, casual crawl.

I think I can come to like that.