Pandas have thick skin - empirical data

BEIJING - A drunken Chinese migrant worker jumped into a panda enclosure at the Beijing Zoo, was bitten by the bear and retaliated by chomping down on the animal's back, state media said Wednesday.
Zhang Xinyan, from the central province of Henan, drank four jugs of beer at a restaurant near the zoo before visiting Gu Gu the panda on Tuesday, the Beijing Morning Post said.
"He felt a sudden urge to touch the panda with his hand," and jumped into the enclosure, the newspaper said.
The panda, who was asleep, was startled and bit Zhang, 35, on the right leg, it said. Zhang got angry and kicked the panda, who then bit his other leg. A tussle ensued, the paper said.
"I bit the fellow in the back," Zhang was quoted as saying in the newspaper. "Its skin was quite thick."
Other tourists yelled for a zookeeper, who got the panda under control by spraying it with water, reports said. Zhang was hospitalized.
Newspaper photographs showed Zhang lying on a hospital bed with blood-soaked bandages and a seam of stitches running down his leg.
The Beijing Youth Daily quoted Zhang as saying that he had seen pandas on television and "they seemed to get along well with people."

"No one ever said they would bite people," Zhang said. "I just wanted to touch it. I was so dizzy from the beer. I don't remember much."
Ye Mingxia, a spokeswoman for the Beijing Zoo, confirmed the incident happened but would not give any details. She said Gu Gu was "healthy."
"We're not considering punishing him now," Ye said in a telephone interview. "He's suffered quite a bit of shock."

1492

I am teaching some glimpses of American history in my listening class, and in the search found this. I guess it is a nice edge to the historical understanding. Not that all of my students will care anyway.
But to say the least, pretty witty.

The university

My second week - almost third - at ZhongShan (aka Sun Yatsen) University. The campus is quite nice, with mountains on the one side and the (unfortunately unswimmable) sea on the other. These weeks have been marked my unusually cold weather and constant rains. But as the nature does not have its weather in vain, I also endeavor to find the beauty (which is to tell the truth is in your eye).

First year sudents (fresh-men as well as fresh-gals) ought to undergo military training. It lasts a month and lets the kids skip all academic activities. 7 days a week they march around the campus, singing songs and counting to 4. They start at 5-30 under my windows and begin counting aloud, apparantly it's the department of accounting, and they are revising the most vital professional skills. Probably at the end of the training the loudest mouth will receive a prize becuase they do not spare their vocal cords and the first morning's "1-2-3-4" literally jerked me out of bed; with the open window, the morning still and echo it was not that hard to invision that all this crowd was actually placed in my room.

Rules of chopstick etiquette

Rule No.3 (borrowed from the wide prairies of the WWW*)
* click everything that clicks

Fall semester

Here I go again.
Changed the school, leaving the Quanzhou Normal University (and here), which was (and still hopefully is) situated on the outskirts of the ancient city of Quanzhou - where the maritime Silk Way embarked on its journey to the west, and where Marco Polo reportedly stepped ashore in his discoveries of China - the picture below reveals a part of the historical monument commemorating the ground-breaking commercial act of selling a gourd to a big-nosed laowai
And moved to the south-west - Guandong Province, Zhuhai city - that's right on the border with Macao. The school is more or less ok, the name is Sun Yat Sen University. I am getting accustomed to the new rules, which are way more demanding. It's the Translation and Interpretation Department, which lured me in there in the first place.
The Muse is not going to visit me any time soon it seems, so instead of my usual florid garrulity I may offer some visual impressions of my first weeks in China after the trip to Russia.

This is the administrative building of the Sun Yat Sen University (Zhuhai campus) - especially noteworthy is the skyward staircase between the buildings which took my breath away the moment I stepped on campus.

Most of my travels around South China I made on a sleeper bus - overnight journeys shared with many a friend of mine - and I finally captured the image of a shabby one at the Zhuhai bus station. I gather a double-decker might have been more suitable for the agenda. But so far we are cramming it on a compact basis.

An amazing design of a tap without knobs the likes of which I have never seen anywhere - at a friend's kitchen. Start it up by turning it over the sink. Intriguing technologies

Another thing that kept me amazed and not bored this week is the French supermarket Carrefour with helpful posters written in French, no less. We checked at that counter, they gave us nothing.

And here I am taking a break from the demanding task of enlightening future translators and interpreters. The fat bastard that I am. Chinese food and starry nights with the device featured at the bottom of the picture make the mind wander off from the necessities of getting a grip on my-self and squeezing the same hedonistic self into the Spartan life style.