Foreigners

Jess and his wife Yvain Ali and Andrew

Some of the other teachers at Shanxi Normal University chowing down at Big Pizza (比格披萨)

Shida Campus 2 (师大二校区)

Building B where I taught 4 classes a week Spring semester.




Studying …


The classroom where all my Campus 2 classes were taught.



This is Shanxi Normal Universities 2nd Campus, its about a 20 minute bus ride (or 20 minute bike ride as well, which was my preferred mode of transportation) away from the main campus.. The facilities over there are not as nice and the students scored lower on their entrance exams so they have to pay higher tuition. I taught there twice a week during the spring semester, two back back classes each day.

PS I wasn't able to post for a while because I was doing a lot of traveling around. I'm now back in the US indefinitely and will be floating around for a few weeks, but I'll try to keep posting when I can. Thanks for looking.

Synchronized Competition

The other week I got a phone call saying one of my afternoon classes was canceled because of some competition. So with no class to teach I thought I'd walk over to the sports field and check it out. Turns out all the freshman were required to compete in this synchronized movement competition. Group after group marched to the center of the field and performed the same movements to the same music counting from 1 to 8. I didn't quite understand the point but I watched a while, said hello to some of my students and went on my way.

Update on Life at Shida.

I've been in Linfen for almost 3 weeks now. I'm teaching regularly now, 7 two hour classes a week, supposed to be 8 but I'm not complaining. All but one of my classes are Freshman non-English majors, the other being post grad non-English. Most classes are about 50 students and mostly girls, as this college is mainly for students who want to become teachers. Life here has been good so far, I have made a few Chinese friends, explored the city some and tried quite a few new dishes.

I apologize for the lack of pictures on here lately, I haven't been carrying my camera around too much, mostly because I'm still getting comfortable here. I already draw a lot of attention being a white foreigner and a giant camera just adds to it, but also I don't want to get into any trouble with the law so I want to feel out the political climate a little more too. Lately I've been devoting a lot of my free time to studying Chinese, I'm trying to regain a lot of what I have forgotten and get my conversational up to speed.

For now I've included a night-scape of Shanxi Shida, short for Shīfàn Dàxué (or Normal University). Also here's a picture of an asian style burger i concocted up from meat I bought at the butcher, and lastly a pumpkin I carved because, well, things like this make me happy.