As most of you know, my brother Eric has been in China since the beginning of January. He’s been teaching English at a university camp called Storm as well as doing a ton of traveling. He is really enjoying himself and has been sending frequent emails updating us on his adventures. I decided to post a few excerpts on here along with some pictures. He’s posted a ton of pictures on Facebook. I know many of you…uh…older folks don’t do Facebook so I have chosen a few good ones for your enjoyment.
1/24/09
So I am alive. There was no internet at the school and it took about an hours walk to get away from the school and into town, so we weren’t having that. Class was good though. I taught the level A kids which was harder and easier at the same time. Harder because they speak little English, but easier because the things I had to teach them were much more basic. Also, they are, on average, much younger than the C level that I usually teach, so we played a lot of games. Yesterday I went into town to meet up with a student, Amber, who is staying with her Aunt in Beijing for the spring festival. We ate some Pizza Hut (her idea) and toured the Birds Nest and chilled at a ShinBaKe (Starbucks) and did some shopping. It was insane cold, almost -20 Celsius and super windy. So the tour of the Birds Nest was quite unpleasant.
2/11/09
I was teaching at my camp and then went directly to a new school for a few more days so I have been internet-less for almost 2 weeks. Everything is going very well. My storm camp was awesome; the kids were cool as ever and classes went well. I taught 1 level A and 2 level B. Met a lot of friends and had a few kids come back from past camps. All in all, very good. The morning after the camp I was taken to a new school where I taught 3 more classes. These were slightly different classes but I still did a lot of conversation exercises. The kids levels of English varied a little more in each class but I made it work. I taught there for about 4 days, 3 classes per day, about 11 hours teaching per day.
Class C1 and Class C2
2/21/09
I am in Qingdao right now. It is in Shandong Province on the eastern coast. I was here last summer and I came back to visit some of my friends again. I am staying with Alan, the same person I stayed with last time. I'll be here for 2 more days then leave for Weifeng, which is very close to Qufu, which is where Confucius was born. After that I will go to Tai'an and climb TaiShan (Mount Tai) with a friend. Then I will head south to Nanjing (South Capital) and then to Shanghai and then to Hangzhou, all very big cities. I just recently left a small city in Shandong called Jimo where I lived at a restaurant owned by the parents of a student. It was very interesting to live in a restaurant. They put a bed in one of the small dining rooms and I hung out in the lobby a lot. OH and they let me cook! I made them chili one night and then omelets and taquitos the next morning, they were very impressed. I ended up staying there for about 5 days.
The restaurant he lived in for a week, the family he stayed with, and the food he cooked.
2/27/09
Well, I am in Tai'An right now. After I left Lancun (the restaurant) I went to Qingdao to see Alan. Then I went to WeiFang to see Daisy and we went to a few museums and to the town she was born in. You know the city of WeiFang invented kites thousands of years ago. Yep. The birthplace of kites. Every year in April there is a huge kite competition and all that. ShouGuang, the city she was born in is the largest producer of vegetables in China. They have a huge exhibition hall and a large show every spring. I just arrived in Tai'An last night. Tomorrow I think we will go climb Mount Tai. We may not be able to because it takes so long, but we'll see. After that, I was going to go to a few more cities, but I have to go back to Beijing first. I lost my ATM card and I can only replace it at the bank that issued it. I can’t even withdraw money from the same bank in a different city without that card. Stupid right? So I have to go back, get a new card, and then come back this direction. Terrible.
Weifang, the city that invented the kite. The 2nd pictures Eric notes, "This room was called, loosely translated, "18 angry women making kites all day long wondering what their lives have become".
This is when he climbed Mount Tai; he says it was 7,000 steps to the top and took him about 5 hours to climb. The first picture is the hotel at the top where he stayed.
3/25/2009
I think I mentioned that I lost my Chinese ATM card so I had to go back to Beijing to get it replaced after I left Tai'An. I stayed there for a few days then left again for Bengbu which is a small town in Anhui province. Probably the noisiest city I have ever been in. After that I went to NanJing which is the old capital of china. It has a super long history and lots of neat stuff to see. I stayed there for about 6 days and met quite a few people. It’s a nice city, though not as cosmopolitan as Beijing. Very old mixed with very new. Kind of weird. Then I went farther south to Hangzhou in ZheJiang province and stayed at a hotel near my friend’s university. We visited West Lake and some marshland and some other water related things. Very wet here near the coast. Anyway, I spent most of my time hanging out with her friends, visiting sites and things. Then 2 days ago I arrived in TaiZhou which is very near to NanJing. I thought I was going to a different TaiZhou which is farther south, but I was wrong. So back to Nanjing then a bus to this TaiZhou which is probably the most depopulated city I have seen in China. I gave a lecture the other night to about 250 students about why they should speak English and not just study English. It is very common for Chinese students to know a lot of grammar rules and vocabulary, but most of them cannot speak very well at all. This is something I try to combat. So tonight I will go to Nanjing and tomorrow I will take a train to HongKOng to renew my visa. It will be a... 30 hour train ride, more or less. Tons of fun as you may well imagine. From HOngKOng i'll visit Macau which is right on the southern coast of China. Lots of gambling there. A very fun city from what I hear. Then I will travel up the central china, stopping maybe 4 or 5 times, then back to Beijing.
View of Nanjing, dragons at XuanWu, and the Goddess of the Lake at XuanWu.
He'll be back May 4th!
