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)

Shanxi Normal University (山西师范大学)

Buildings 10, 11 and 12


Buildings 10 and 11


Buildings 11 and 12


Building 4


Building 4


Building 4 and 8




Departmental basketball tournament.


English Singing competition. I'm a judge.

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.

Graduate Students (研究生)

This was my last class with my graduate students, only four showed up plus this random undergrad boy who stated sitting in on our class. This class was always pretty low on attendance because it was a last minute elective that was added to their last semester of classes, but this week 10 or so of my students had to be in Taiyuan to grade tests. For those that did show up we just got to hang out and mess around, and after class took a few pictures.

Rest In Peace Jeffrey Martin Keefe

"沉痛悼念杰夫凯夫先生" - Deepest condolences for Mr. jeffrey Keefe (roughly)



















I am sad to say a colleague of mine here at Shanxi Normal University, and fellow American, passed away unexpectedly May 19th (It would have still been the 18th in America) at the age of 52. A local funeral service was held this morning in the wake of this unfortunate event. Jeff and I were not particularly close; I came here with the intention of spending more time with the locals rather than other foreigners, but it was clear he was a very kind man and he loved his work. When I first arrived in Linfen, Jeff greeted me warmly. I distinctly remember one time early on sitting in his apartment and drinking a beer with him as he rambled on about all the foods he had managed to find here, the computer-TV combo thing he had going on, his crazy red couch and other various things.

What I know of Jeff's past isn't much. He was a veteran of the US Army; married but divorced. His last four years were spent teaching English, one here and three in Korea. This summer he was planning to visit America for the first time since he left four years ago. I'm not sure what he did before that, or what else he may have left behind, but I know that those who knew him here will miss him dearly. This is evident by the busloads of students who attended the service this morning and those still that had to be turned away due to a lack of space. In a city of over 700,000 people, I can't help but feel the streets are a little empty without Jeff ridding by on his electric scooter; may he rest in peace.

Another Foreigner!

Professional mountain biker Alan Eger passed through Linfen recently. He's working as research and design director at Triace Bikes, the brand sold by the bike shop I always hang around, and is visiting a bunch of the 90 stores they have across China. These are just a few images from a talk he gave at Shanxi Normal University. Some better ones to come from our biking excursion.

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.

Linfen Apartment

This is the outside of my apartment building from the back.


My kitchen with awkwardly low counters and high cabinets.


My little fridge and washer.








Check out the sweet lamp.


The spare room, equipped with a mattress and everything. This apartment was intended for a couple.




My little porch with clotheslines and a sweet plant.


My view of the giant Garfield mural.

I'm all settled in Linfen. After lugging my bags through Beijing and crashing three days at my friend Han's place it was nice to finally move into a place of my own. My apartment here is real nice and now I have the internet up and running. I had to do a little hacking to get to a few sites including this one though. Apparently my blog must be to racy for Chinese eyes. So I created a secure shell (SSH) tunnel to the server where my website is hosted and then configured foxy proxy to access blocked sites via that server. Its been working for sites like blogger, but facebook and twitter don't normally load all the way, so I might have to let those go for a while.

Anyways the university I ended up at is pretty nice. The apartments are good, the five other English teachers are all friendly and they say the university always pays on time and is pretty attentive to your needs. I don't have any classes yet but I was a guest teacher for one of my co-workers classes, just so I could get my feat wet.

I haven't taken many pictures yet. I've mostly just been walking around observing and getting comfortable here. Hopefully some images will come soon.