sun tian hao
American and Ithaca native teaching English in Dalian for a year.suntianhao
Travel Blog Posts
April 7th 2010
is an English phrase that must have come directly from the Chinese, because it is probably the only Chinese sentence that translates directly and literally into English. Also four words, "好久不见 (hao jiu bu jian)" is a fairly common phrase in this language, and is commonly used as a greeting for old friends. In the two months since I've last written a post, I got and subsequently lost a tan, saw the Three Gorges Dam, enrolled in school (again), moved in with my girlfriend, looked for and then stopped looking for an apartment, etc. Too much to fit in this post, so most of it will probably never be recorded for posterity. A shame for those of you who follow my travails, but for me a proud and romantic reclamation of the privacy of my memories. ... read more
February 13th 2010
For those of you who are keeping track, I am not actually writing this on February 14th. I got lazy/busy during my travels and didn't bother to write any blog updates. Fortunately, this thing lets me post things at a previous date. So I will be doing some time-traveling here. Our time in Koh Samui is almost over; tomorrow we're headed to a new island, Koh Phangan, supposedly the ultimate backpacker paradise of the Gulf of Thailand. Yesterday we went on a ridiculously expensive snorkeling tour of the other main island in this ocean, Koh Tao. We left the hostel early and got on a ferry, then switched boats at a small dock near Koh Tao for the real snorkeling tour. Our guide was a Thai guy named Nelly, who spoke a funny broken but comprehensible ... read more
February 12th 2010
I made it safely to Thailand. I had three flights, from Dalian to Koh Samui. the island I am staying for the time being, and due to my experience flying Chinese airlines I expected the flights to take much more than the allotted 12 hours. I flew China Southern Airlines, which like most Chinese airlines isn't very concerned with timeliness or convenient service, from Dalian to Guangzhou, and then from Guangzhou to Bangkok, to where my bags were being checked. However, the flight to Bangkok was delayed for an extra hour, for some reason unexplained to me but what from judging the scene outside the plane window seemed to be lazy baggage workers. Anwyays, I was met at the gate in Bangkok by a visibly agitated Bangkok Airways attendant, who rushed me and four other passengers ... read more
February 2nd 2010
It has been a long time since I wrote an entry here. Much has changed. For starters, I just saw Blindness (like I just-turned-off-the-DVD-player just saw it), this movie I'm sure most of you have heard of about a city whose inhabitants all suddenly become mysteriously blind, and then devolve into a Lord of the Flies-type scenario. I have found that I am very impressionable when it comes to movies, books, and music, and after watching 90 minutes of this depressingly realistic display of human fortitude and decrepitude, I was feeling a bit of resentment towards our species. Then I got a phone call from one of my Chinese coworkers, whose new policy as a whole is to take me out to eat Ma La Tang every chance they get for the next week. The reason ... read more
December 29th 2009
Been a long time, shouldn'ta left you without a witty and insightful blog post to step to Part One: Medieval Storks One of my coworkers James, is a 50-something-year-old man who is currently starting his fourth or fifth life here in China. He works at the downtown school, so I don't see him that often, but he's definitely a trip. He's been here in Dalian for about two years, and he has a Chinese wife. A few weeks ago, she gave birth to their first child (not James' first, but his first Chinese baby), and since this was the first time I have ever had a chance to celebrate the occasion of one of my friends having a baby, I decided to go down to the hospital after work on the day she was born. My ... read more
December 6th 2009
As I'm sure most of you folks back home are aware, Thanksgiving was last week. Here in China, obviously, it's not much of a holiday, but those of us teaching English to Chinese kids did our best to make it one. For us, Thursday is a work day, but thanks to the tireless organizing efforts of our resident Holiday Coordinator (teacher by day; my own term), we had a Thanksgiving feast nonetheless. The foreign staff all were required to make a dish; I was assigned the green beans (exactly 4 pounds of them, according to the email listing our school's feasting needs). We ate lunch here at the Kaifaqu school, with all of our staff, Chinese and American, including the people from downtown, which is like a 45-minute commute away. That and the somewhat dictatorial form ... read more
November 6th 2009
Yet again, it's been a while since I've written anything. Don't worry, loved ones, I'm not dead yet. I'm sorry to keep you from tales of my exploits, but you should take my delay to mean that I am growing more and more accustomed to everyday life here, so much so that I don't find many things significant enough to write home about. Or that I'm too busy to think about writing. Or that I'm just lazy. Take your pick. I've been getting more and more enveloped in work at the school, for better or worse. The better is that I am getting closer with my coworkers, who are actually all pretty nice people, Chinese or American. The worse is that I have less and less time to spend on exploring the intricacies of Chinese life ... read more
October 21st 2009
I've been busy lately, but as opposed to the first month of utter chaos, I have managed to develop a daily schedule. I wake up and run in the morning, which due to the increasingly chilly weather has caused me to catch a cold. I have tutoring three days a week with a soft-spoken and very studious Chinese college student majoring in English. In my spare time I hang out at the local university basketball courts. I met a kid down there who, from what I can gather, spends more time playing basketball than going to class. I've been hanging out with him more and more, and he told me once (either in confession or, more likely, in the hope that I could offer him some assistance) that his dream is to go to America and ... read more
October 11th 2009
I've been back in Kaifaqu for a week, but still haven't fulfilled my promise of writing about my time in Beijing. This blog is slowly falling a week behind whatever is actually happening to me at the moment. I'd say I'm sorry to any of my readers for leaving them hanging, but it's more important to me that I live my moments, and record them afterward, even if that might result in me forgetting most of them before I get them down in type. Anyways, about Beijing. I stayed there with a friend of mine from Ithaca, Jake. We went to elementary school together, and then kind of grew apart, but like all Ithacans we remained on good terms and are still able to have a normal, unforced conversation with each other. He ended up studying ... read more
September 30th 2009
It's been a while since I've written because work has been hellish. We have an 8-day vacation for National Day (国庆节) and the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节). Vacation started Sept. 27th, and we have classes immediately after we get back. Because of that we had to write twice the lesson plans in one week, on top of our regular workload. But thankfully that's over with and now I am wrapping up the first leg of my vacation, which I spent in Shanghai. I'm staying with Seneca, a fellow Ithacan and a friend from high school. She's teaching at Shanghai University in a much cushier position than mine. She works something like 12 hours a week and only makes 1300 kuai a month less than I do. On the other side of the coin, she doesn't have anything ... read more
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