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 [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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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 Universit [View Full Entry]

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Part One: West This week was a big one for celebration here in Dalian. In addition to Freddy's birthday this Sunday, my roommate Tim had a birthday on Wednesday, which he happens to share with the G.M. of the Goodyear plant over here. So we went down to an expat bar in the city called Brooklyn, owned by a Chinese-American who can actually speak Chinese (my boss knows enough to get around, probably more than he lets on; like a lot of expats here, not speaking Chinese unless it's absolutely necessary is sort of a point of pride) and who takes [View Full Entry]

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Chinese food, appallingly familiar to most Americans, is a very different beast in its home country. Learning how to order food was always the slowest of my grudgingly accelerating language skills when I was in Beijing, mainly because all the restaurants we went to had pictures on the menu. Since I've been back, I've been trying to learn the names of some of my favorite common foods. Eggplant here is amazingly delicious, perhaps because anything would be delicious if it were soaked in gratuitous amount of oil before serving. I always thought bacon made everything a better dish, so lucky for [View Full Entry]

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Life here continues to be action-packed. My boss Freddy has the energy of a pre-schooler, which might explain why he works in a school; he is constantly bouncing around, talking at 300 miles an hour, calling every 15 minutes to see if I need anything, do I want to get breakfast, how is my A.C working, will I be in school tomorrow, am I still alive and able to teach for him. Consequently, my work environment is rather fast-paced. Although I don't start working officially until Thursday (or getting paid officially, for that matter), I did full days both Saturday and [View Full Entry]

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These last few days have been action-packed. They have me jumping right in at the school. This week I have been shadowing teachers in classes, taking notes on how to manage a room full of 4-year-olds and helping out when necessary/possible. These little Chinese kids are as cute as I remember them. Classes are 90 minutes long, with a 10 minute break. The kids seem to be amazingly proficient with their English, but they might be just very good at memorization and repetition. We play lots of games and make lots of crafts, and that keeps them occupied and entertained long [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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The flights were long and sleepless. My flight to Shanghai was delayed an hour, and after little sleep and much fidgeting I arrived in Shanghai needing to go through customs, recollect my baggage, and then re-enter the security checkpoint to get my connecting flight to Dalian (the airline couldn't pass my luggage through to Dalian, either because they are lazy or because Dalian has no customs officers). I rushed through all of this to find I had two hours to spare, and then my flight to Dalian got delayed another two hours, one and a half of them while we were [View Full Entry]

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