Update from Yanji

We left Beijing very early this morning on a 2 hour flight to the city of Yanji located in the Jilin province in Northeast China.  The flight reminded me of what domestic flying used to be like in the US with lots more legroom and breakfast served!  Evidently is has been raining here for 20 days straight, so what a change it was to land and have it be nearly 30 degrees cooler and cloudy after baking in the sun and heat of Beijing for the last 8 days.  Our host tonight at Yanbian University confirmed in fact that we are a mere 40 km from the North Korean border!  The Korean influence is evident here in the food and all of the signs are labeled with both Chinese and Korean characters.  Gone are the Chinese and English road signs that were abundant in Beijing and here it is very difficult to find a person in the hotel who speaks any English at all.  We will be heavily relying on our escort Dick Bodman, a retired professor of Chinese from St. Olaf
College, and our Chinese escort Zhu Wanli, an English teacher from China to translate for us.  I have to say it is very difficult as a language teacher to not be able to communicate at all here in Chinese and now Korean and feels almost hypocritical for us to be trying to get people to understand us using whatever English we can find in common or a few basic Chinese words.
I have enjoyed teaching Wanli some slang as we try to teach and learn some things from each other as we go.  Today we saw a public cell phone charging station  for students on the college campus and he explained to me that the Chinese sign literally said "put gas in your cell phone", using the same word for gasoline.  So I told him about how kids might say in English that they need to "juice" it up when referring to electrical things. He seemed rather amused by that!  He is very paternal and takes such good care of us, as running around and keeping track of 16 women is no easy task!
My friends here have been gracious enough to let me use their computers since they know that I am trying to stay up to date on my blog!  We had a great day today with the faculty from the College of Foreign Language at Yanbian University.  They are so friendly and so much fun and we are looking forward to seeing most of them again tomorrow night for some karaoke singing.  That might turn out to be our most interesting cultural experience yet! They are by far the most gracious hosts that we have encountered on this trip, and they are so anxious to have any foreign teachers return to their university on an exchange program.  Anyone interested? I love my time in China but I do not anticipate returning here to teach in the near future!