First, my requisite apologies for being so lazy about writing. I’d like to say I’ve been excessively busy with teaching and everything but that isn’t it. I don’t know how I manage to stay so busy but I guess amongst lesson planning, tutoring an extra 6 hours a week, attempting to sporadically study Chinese, and all of the mischief my friends and I get into my time is packed pretty tightly. Anyway, I’ve told my parents a few stories about how wonderfully bizarre my life in China can be and they always tell me, ‘oh, you should write about that in [View Full Entry]

---

---

Of course, more time has passed since I've last written than I would like. Despite only working about 25 hours per week, I feel like I'm always busy. But since, pre-China I was working between 60 and 70 hours a week, I'm pretty happy. Anyway, I thought I would write a little bit about Hong Kong. Hong Kong is directly south of Shenzhen and only a couple of metro rides away. I went there on Semester at Sea and have been twice now since living in Shenzhen. For many ex-pats in China, Hong Kong becomes an oasis. Whenever we are tired [View Full Entry]

---

---

October 1st marked the 60th anniversary of the Peoples Republic of China. Mid autumn festival also landed at the same time so we got eight entire days off of school. Even though weve only been in China for about 2 months, it is already feeling pretty comfortable so I was definitely ready for a new trip. My friends and I decided early that because this is the most heavily traveled time of year in China, we would avoid the even larger than usual crowds and leave the country. We had our hearts set on going to Lombok; a tiny island near [View Full Entry]

---

---

Im just beginning my seventh week of teaching so maybe its time to tell you a little bit about what its like to be a teacher in China! School runs Monday-Friday just like in the US but they sometimes have school on Saturdays and Sundays if they need to make up for days off for holidays. I teach at a primary school so there are 6 forty minute class periods a day. The first begins at 8:35 and there are 10 minute break periods (15 minutes after the first class for snack time) between all classes. Lunch is at 11:50 but [View Full Entry]

---

---

I can’t believe I’ve already been in China for 73 days. In some ways I feel like I’ve been away from home for so long but I also can’t believe how quickly it’s going. Especially now that I’ve been teaching for a while, I think the year is going to fly past. But I guess I have a lot of back tracking to do. Let’s see… BEIJING I arrived in Beijing on August 3rd for an intensive TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) training and certification class. So when we arrived we were plopped down in a hotel in the [View Full Entry]

---

---

MOVING TO SHENZHEN Arriving in Shenzhen was exciting, if only to get off the train that we’d been on for the past 25 hours. We got there pretty late at night and poured out of the train station doors only to run into a wall of humidity. Everyone had warned us that Shenzhen was unbelievably hot. I figured that I’d been to the Amazon and stood in Ho Chi Minh City with a fever and it couldn’t be as hot as I’d experienced there. I was wrong. Not only does the temperature have yet to dip below 86 degrees F, the [View Full Entry]

---

---