Last week was national holiday, and I went to Beijing with a group of my coworkers. I left with a very good opinion of the city! It had a lot of the western comforts of Shanghai, but there were a lot more historical and cultural activities. While I was there, I went to the summer palace, the forbidden city, Behai park, and Beijing opera, and an acrobat show. I also went to the great wall, which was absolutely breathtaking. One thing which I was not expecting was the toboggan ride that had been put in place for getting down the great [View Full Entry]

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School is back in session, and I'm optimistic about the year to come. They moved my classes around a bit, so I'm not teaching grade five, as I expected to be. they've also added an extra class to my workload (and a substantial salary raise.) based on my performance last year. I'm teaching four grade two classes, and one grade three class. Two of my grade two classes consist of students that I taught last year in grade one, and two of the grade two classes are mostly new to me, though I've had a few of the kids in Sunday [View Full Entry]

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As of two days ago, I've officially been in China for an entire year. Right now it does feel as if things are coming full circle. After I finished my course, I spent a week with Will and Brian in Shenzhen, and also took a day trip to Hong Kong from their house. I went to Guanzhou for three days as well. I have to admit that Guanzhou is the first new city I visited that I straight out did not like. The hostel I stayed at there was very nice, and right on the Pearl River, and I had some [View Full Entry]

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I'm leaving Zhuhai for Shenzhen today. I'm aware that I never made a post mentioning that I'd arrived here, but trust that I did a so a month ago, and have been here since. The city is very nice. The streets are lined with palm trees, and the climate is very tropical. I did only a little sight-seeing, because of the demands of the course I was taking. At one point my friends Will and Brian from Wuhan came to visit me, and we took a trip to the beach to see the fisher girl statue, which is the local symbole. [View Full Entry]

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We all new that we had a vacation from school this week, but nobody would tell us whether it was for three, or four, or five days. The original plan was to go to Chengdu and see the Pandas, but we were afraid we woudn't have time. A quick search for the cheapest plane tickets possible brought up Nanjing, and here we (Den, Darla, and myself) are, at a dusty hostel where no one speaks English (It's supposedly an international hostel, but the staff seemed rather surprised at the event of international guests.). Nanjing itself is a very pleasant city with [View Full Entry]

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Well, I’ve been bad about updating this. My things have settled into a lovely routine. My life still revolves around my classes, and my free time is incredibly limited, but I don’t consider that to be a bad thing. I’m more or less ridiculously happy, except for when I’m sick (which is far too often. The air here does nasty things to my throat and lungs.). For a long time I was trying to make the decision to either stay in Wuhan, or seek out a healthier Chinese city. Today I finally made up my mind to stay, and talked to [View Full Entry]

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This will be quick. After a two day return to Wuhan, I got on a night train to Shanghai, and now I'm here. I feel very changed from how I was the last time I visited this city. Back in Septemper (or was it October?) I would have never been able to come here completely by myself and feel at ease. Crossing the street in China was still a terrifying at that point. I think I've adapted to the enviroment. I haven't had time to do much yet, and I don't have clear plans for how to spend the next few [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday I rented a driver for the day, in order to see the sites on the other side of Lake Erhi. This started with a chair lift up a very high mountain. At the top of the mountain their was a "stunning natural cave!", which in fact turned out to be a psychedelic light show highly reminiscent of the river tunnel in Shanghai. However, this one was much longer and involved walking up what felt like 1000 flights of steps. On the way back down the mountain I tripped and twisted my ankle. Today it's black and blue, but I wasn't [View Full Entry]

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This morning... VERY early this morning (almost last night, in fact) I watched the inauguration live on BBC news. Most of the Americans at the hostel I'm staying at were also watching, and their were a fair amount of Europeans and Australians in the world as well. The hostel owner gave us all rum to celebrate the occasion. On a somwhat less interesting note, I had a facial today. [View Full Entry]

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On Sunday I took a night train to Dali. I shared a hard class sleeper cabin with a group of three Chinese teenagers who were very friendly, and were too eager to teach me Chinese card games to allow me to sleep much. The Chinese course I took must have done me good, because we were able to talk quite a bit, albeit about simple things. One girl was particularly talkitive, and spent much of the time trying to create a travel route for me, based on the places in China that "all foriegners like". The fact that I managed to [View Full Entry]

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