Where have all the students gone?

My two morning classes today were great, the students participated in all that I assigned them and followed directions well. What I taught they seemed to understand, and what I asked them to do, they did.

My evening class was a different story. It's my last class for this week (sports meet cancels the Thursday and Friday classes) and same as last week there was an attendance shortage.
My class roster shows 35 students registered, tonight I had something on the order of 25 attendees, about 5 were auditors. My students seem to think it's acceptable to just skip the class for these singing competitions (there was another one last Monday) as long as they call me at the start of class or have their friends tell me - some don't even bother doing that.
I've made it clear that every class counts for 6% of their grade this semester, and the Midterm next week counts for 20%. I'm not going to enjoy giving any F's (I don't think of myself as being sadistic), but a number of these students are headed in that direction.

Last night I had an annoying disagreement through cell phone texting with a girl who I said 'hi' to the first week I was here (she just saw me recently and decided to start talking). I don't know her other than that she has a boyfriend who does Tai Quan Dao (Taekwondo) and she asked if she and her boyfriend can come to my apartment next weekend to learn English (knows nothing about me and practically invites herself). I told her she could come to my office during the week because I'm busy during the weekends and she went into a long spiel about how she doesn't care if I don't invite them to my apartment and how foreigners are always 'busy' when people try to be nice to them.
I told her straight up that I AM busy (+240 students, weekend lesson planning) and told her she can suggest another time (I felt like saying a lot more and much less nicely, but I guess that's one reason why cell phones have such small keypads - the necessary precision in button-mashing filters out your angry responses). She said sorry she didn't consider foreigner's "territory awareness" but MY GOD! If you haven't exchanged more than three sentences with someone in public you're not in a position to invite yourself to their apartment!


Aside from these frustrations I'm actually having a very good time here and thinking more and more about renewing my contract. Admittedly this isn't the best place to learn Mandarin because of the local dialect, but the people by and large are very friendly: the intellectuals are great fun regardless of their level of English, and I've even managed to make friends with the head cook at the Oujiang dining room. His name is 张 六 九 (surname, given name). His given name is the year he was born ('69)!


There are also some new foreigners here; a family from Georgia that as far as I know does everything except eat through the Internet. The mother Mary Ellen is teaching an Organizational Studies course in the college for the next 10 weeks while the husband Lee teaches business through the Internet, the two kids (Carter and Madison) do school through the Internet, and the nephew Alex (he's close to my age) works on completing a master's degree in education through (...would you believe it...) the Internet.
They seem pretty nice, but not particularly keen to soak up the local culture... eh, if it's not your cup a' tea...