Blogs from Dalian, Dalian, Liaoning, China, Asia - page 3

Due to my diligent practice of staying up til 5 AM back in the States, I am quickly defeating my jetlag. Last night I slept from 10 to 7 -- pretty normal. Because China has only one time zone (which is exactly 12 hours ahead of EST for those who are keeping track), the sun rises here very early; and anyone who knows me knows that the sun is my mortal enemy when it comes to sleeping in. My neighborhood is reasonably quiet, though. I spent two hours trying to cook with my hot plate, resulting first in a grease fire (no casualties, inanimate or animate), and then two eggs with Korean sausage. 220 degrees Celsius is apparently enough to ignite olive oil on impact. I boiled some water to sterilize it for ice cubes, and ... read more

Our first school year in China is finally drawing to a close. Term 4 has been very eventful. Dianne has really enjoyed her new job. Working in the same building as her replacement has allowed her to keep her finger on the pulse of a real operation while she does her head office functions. These involve the preparation of a lot of new course materials as well as many different exam papers for students planning to move on to Grade 10 as well as entering ESL from a variety of environments. Dianne has really got on well with her replacement, Wendy. Wendy has been a Canadian ESL teacher at the school a couple of years ago prior to moving to Wuhan with her husband Craig who was principal there. He has now moved back to Jinshitan ... read more

The months since the spring holiday have been filled with visits, weekend trips, and surprising changes. My delightful parents came for a three week visit and toured me around Qingdao (home of the 2008 Olympic sailing port) and Dandong (directly on North Korea's shores); I partook in a glamourous photo shoot that lasted 10 hours without food and learned a model's life isn't actually as easy as it looks (photos to be added later this week); and I accepted a position as co-department head for English 10 in September (where I will be heading the boy's campus). My parents, if anything on their visit, fed me well. We ate every possible type of food available to us (which spanned from Chinese to Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Italian, and "Western"). Qingdao was a cool city with a very ... read more

Mundanity? I feel as though it suits what the past couple of months have been since returning from holiday. I was sick with a lung infection for about 4 weeks (check out my exciting lung x-ray in the photos), and this weekend I was finally struck by a rather horrific stomach bug that has been plaguing our school. It was the first weekend I finally felt well enough to go out since my lung infection, so I was all dressed up, and headed by cab into Dalian, only to arrive at the bar where my friends were meeting to discover that there was no possible way I could keep my dinner down. So, head between my knees, I took the $20 cabride 40 minutes back home without ever exiting. Mundanity, indeed. There are a little less ... read more

The five week break from school flew by, leaving me with a whirlwind of memories from the places I visited across Southeast Asia. I'll give a very condensed version of events, and let some of the pictures do the talking. We left Dalian on January 19th, and flew to Hangzhou, just outside of Shanghai. While we were really only there a few hours (discounting sleep), we managed to squeeze in a boatride across the picturesque (and famous) lake before heading out to the airport to catch our plane to Kuala Lumpur. I'd never travelled with a group of teachers before, and found the plane ride to be rather enjoyable as we ended up writing stories and games on paper which, while incredibly nerdy, helped to pass the time! After arriving in KL, our group disbanded, and ... read more