Lao Shi

At New Student and Parent Orientation Night, a fellow Heathen colleague and I were talking to the mother and father of one of our future students. The student himself was not present. 
It came out in the conversation that the student’s mother worked near the Carrefour, a place my colleague and I know all too […]

Tomorrow is the first day of school, and I am ready! I have my outfit all planned out: I’m wearing my jiggy, pinstriped pants. 
The past two and half weeks have crawled by in a mind-numbing muck of meetings and assemblies. This is a corporate school, and the orientation has certainly favored the corporate side. The […]

This is great: in order to test the fire alarms in the building today, a man went around from room to room with a very long pipe and a cigarette. He propped the pipe up on his arm and pointed it directly at the fire alarm, and then blew smoke through it. After about three […]

The CEO of the corporation that funds our school visited today for the faculty picture and convocation address. He shall henceforth be referred to as the Godfather. Not because he in any way resembles a Mafioso (he actually resembled an overgrown Chinese Hobbit), but because of his interest in leading my soul to the safe […]

The sky hung heavy and grey today, and the air seemed charged, as if a thunderstorm might burst at any moment.  Though the community here was still bustling, the heat slowed people down and the thick air dampened the noise.
Though at first glance this area appeared to be solely composed of upper class gated developments […]

The school is located next to a beautiful swimming facility. The pool is Olympic sized, and is only a short five minute walk from my apartment.Yesterday I was doing laps with a colleague who is the High School swim coach. She was giving me tips on my freestyle, a stroke which, despite years of childhood […]

The school is run and financed by a company that shall remain nameless, and the LQ is a gated community that houses the foreign teachers, company employees and also has several dorms full of young women from the Western provinces who work in the factory.  The exact nature of their work or the conditions under […]

I am now able to access my website here behind the Great Wall!  I wasn’t able to see it, and I feared that my site had been banned, but it was just a technical issue that my hosting company cleared up.
What a pain in the ass the first week of settling in was. 
Though my plane […]

My visa should be waiting for me at the Chinese Consulate at 2pm, and from there it is a mad dash off to JFK to make my flight at 4:30. Till then, check out this picture of me from college.

Today ended up being an unplanned dry run of what will, hopefully, be my departure tomorrow.  Check it:Everything went as planned right up to my arrival at the airport.  I have never carried this much luggage onto a flight before, and after some macho attempts to lug it myself, I decided to use a luggage […]