Day 3.
For the past three days we’ve been threatened with rain 明天 and have mostly had blue skies and sunshine instead. The forecast for today was quite inaccurate a couple of days ago (rain) and a little more accurate yesterday because it eventually turned cloudy this afternoon. We’re still threatened with rain tomorrow. However, in spite of a little ice forming on the ponds over the past few days, the weather has remained comparatively mild.
The next day. Well, it really did rain a little at long last. That means, yes, I have to go and do some shopping at Carrefour. It does seem to have stopped, but it’s hard to tell with drizzle because it’s impossible to see against a background of billions of microscopic particulates.
It’s a marking weekend, sad to say. I have made some progress with PAL 1 this afternoon although I find the word “social” associated with “society” (in the broad-brush sense) rather than “socialise”, which is the intended sense underlyingly. This may be a sign of the little darlings’ lack of English, but I think there’s also a cultural dimension in that in the minds of my pupils, a Social Club must be socially useful. I doubt whether most native speakers of English would think of a Social Club as a specifically charitable organisation.
I’m also being stricter with Diarrhoea Answers™1 because I don’t think I ought to be dishing out marks for answers which are obscured by irrelevant content.
I took the Impreza down to 运河公园 for a spin, but found the area outside the Olympic Museum being used as a car park. It appears that I’ll have to go later in the afternoon or in the early evening once the motoring morons have gone.
We had a boys’ night out yesterday evening to celebrate Mark’s impending nuptials. This involved sailing up the canal from 南禅寺 drinking toasts and then going to an Indian restaurant called Ganesh. I liked the lamb biryani, but it didn’t like me back. I’ve been past 南禅寺 often enough, but I’ve never ventured inside. It was the usual kind of olde [sic!] Cathay kind of thing (1300 year old site; no building more than 20 years old). I not only found a branch of Watson’s there, but also a 7-Eleven. If there are any more of the latter in the city, I don’t know where they might be.
Notes
- A Diarrhoea Answer is typically the entire sentence in which the actual answer is to be found. Normally I allow these to pass, but they’re not showing me that the student really knows what the answer is.
Green Bamboo 