Well, Iv'e been a pretty terrible blogger. I haven't posted anything since arriving in China. I'd like to say I've been busy having adventures, or so swamped learning Chinese that I haven't had the time. Unfortunately the truth is when we first got here we didn't know how to get around the Great Firewall, but after we got that taken care of Iv'e just been to lazy to start blogging again.
To get started again, I think ill give you a brief recap of the last 6 months.
1. We got to China, eventually. We left Salt Lake City, had a quick layover in Denver, then made it to San Francisco. We were supposed to go straight to Beijing from San Francisco. However! when we got there our plane was broken. yep broken. We were able to get everything re-routed for the next day but stayed the night in California before flying to Seattle, and then Tokyo, and THEN Beijing. So our total trip spanned two days and 6 airports. Salt Lake City-Denver-San Francisco-Seattle-Tokyo-Beijing. Yikes what a horrible flight. Anyway, we landed in Beijing at about 1am and instead of taking the 30minute train we had to take a 2 hour bus due to it being past the train's bed time. We arrived in Tianjin and drove another 30 minutes in a taxi to finally get to our apartment. Yay we made it!
2. Teaching. The next day we started teaching. We sat in on a few classes while the American teacher before us taught, and I taught a class my self. Teaching is rewarding and frustrating, great and terrible but mostly the best job I've ever had. took us a couple weeks to get the hang of it but now its not a big deal. we teach around 20 hours per week, usually a little less than that.
3. Chinese Class. Taylor and I are both doing fairly well in our goal of studying Chinese. We have class 4 days a week in the morning for 2 hours. Mostly being in China is great because it forces us to practice. I might not be fluent by the time we leave but I can defiantly get around and make my self understood.
4. Living here. So far so good! We live in Tianjin City, Hexi District. its the outskirts of the city but that suits us fairly well, we can take the subway into the city center in about 25-30 minutes. We have a grocery store, street food and everything else we need within a 15 minute walk. If anyone wants to send us some stuff our address is, Tianjin City, Hexi District Si Shuai Street Long Bo Hua Yuan 20-5-101, 天津市河西区泗水道龙博花园20-5门－101.
5. Travel, we haven't been doing as much traveling as I want to. Mainly because summer in Northern China is brutal and the thought of even leaving our apartment before it gets dark is exhausting. But we have had a chance to go two places and are getting ready for a third next week.
-Beijing, the first place we traveled to was Beijing. We had a long weekend so we took the train, which takes about 30minutes we stayed in a youth hostel that was about a 10 minute walk to the forbidden city. we spent the day there and it was AWESOME! also saw Tiananmen square, aside from all the history its pretty boring, just a big slab of concrete with a bunch of communist statues, and a giant picture of Chairmen Mao. They wouldn't even let us into the mausoleum to see Zombie Mao because apparently its disrespectful to one of the biggest murderers in history if you have a backpack with you.
-Xiamen/Kinmen, The second place we went was Xiamen in Fujian Provence. Xiamen is an island on the Taiwanese Straight. It is governed by the PRC (mainland China) about a 20minute ferry across the channel from Xiamen is Kinmen which is controlled by the ROC (taiwan). We had to do a Visa run so we flew down to Xiamen, took a boat over to Kinmen and technically left China. Then we came back and spent the weekend eating seafood and exploring an old fishing village full of nicknack shops and smoothie stands. It was an awesome weekend.
To wrap up this wrap up Taylor and I are having a ton of fun. Living in China really is an adventure everyday. I will keep posting blogs about some things iv'e learned that may help other expats in our situation, also any fun stuff I see or do and maybe some general rambling about travel or China.
Questions? comments? ryker.minks@gmail.com
