Jinci and Shanxi Museum

Shanxi Museum


Journey to the West paper cut outs.


Linfen on a nice smoggy morning.

Last weekend my school sponsored a trip to Taiyuan for all the foreign teachers. Only half of us went but it included the cute 71-year-old Japanese man that lives above me. We actually bunked together Saturday night; he's a pretty interesting guy. His Chinese is quite good and his English isn't too bad either. One of the other teacher's husband could speak some Japanese and it wasn't unusual to hear any mixture of Chinese, English and Japanese circulated through our conversations. They took us to Jinci (晋祠) and Shanxi Museum (山西博物馆), both were pretty impressive.

First a teacher now a coach

These are from three weeks ago, I've just been lazy about posting. I went to China North University (中北大学）for the provincial English competition. It's a school just outside of the capital city of Taiyuan. I was one of two teachers sent by our school to act as coaches for our two students. Our students didn't place too high, one got 9th place out of 39, but the trip was still pretty fun. I thought the judging was a little skewed anyways and there seemed to very little basis for the awarded scores. Our students were good sports though and we were able to just enjoy ourselves. We climbed up one of the mountains neighboring the school, which was really cool to see. The other teacher was Chinese, fairly young and spoke really good English. She was really nice and helped to teach me some more Chinese too.

Chinese Halloween Party

The English Association put on a Halloween celebration Sunday night. It wasn't really a party nor did it really have much resemblance Halloween. The thing opened with a video of a Halloween themed rave, followed by a series of random student performances such as singing and dancing. The decorations were purple and pink balloons and the 'O' in Halloween banner was a heart. All the foreign teachers attended but, aside from a couple children, were the only ones in costume. And it was no surprise when they sat us on display in the front row facing the crowd. Even though the party was sort of a bust it had its entertaining moments, the worst part is now there are at least 50 pictures floating around of me dressed as a fisherman.