Tongzi

The main fresh food market in Tongzi. Its not too far from my place, I can walk there in about 15 mins. Shopping in the market is super cheap, a 1/2 kilo of potatoes cost 1 Yuan (14 cents), 4 large onions = 2 Yuan (28 cents),

The women carry just about everything in these baskets on their backs, from fruits and veggies, to their children. You see them every where :)









Take a rest at the market in this area.

If you want to eat chicken this is how you buy it.









Selling chunks of fat from who knows what animal...

A poorer part of Tongzi.




A typical shop selling everything you could ever need having to do with rice.


This has got to be the creepiest children's toy. But the Chinese kids seem to like it.

About Chinese schools

Sorry for not explaining about the schools in China...

The mandatory schooling for Chinese students is only through what we call middle school, or 8th grade, until they are about 15. What we call middle school they call junior middle school. Then the students who have good grades, in the top 10%, from junior middle school have the opportunity to go to senior middle school, what we call high school. But of course like in all places if a student's parents have money or power they can bribe the schools to accept a student with bad grades into the senior middle school. This sometimes sucks because you will have some spoiled students who don't want to be in the school and who've taken the place of a poorer student with good grades that worked really hard and that could really benefit from the extra schooling.

Then in senior middle school they have 3 grades; grade 1, grade 2, and grade 3. Grade 3 is the highest grade and these students are preparing for the Chinese college entrance exams... but i don't really know how these exams work. The students are placed in grades based on their test scores. So in theory a smart 15 year-old student from junior middle school could be placed in grade 3, do really well and go off to college the next year. But I think more normal is that the young students start in Grade 1 and work their way up.

I teach Grade 2 in Senior Middle school. And in my school they put 1000 students in each grade, I just found this out yesterday that there are only 1000 seats per grade. So they're divided in 16 classes, and half of these classes are studying the sciences and the other half are studying literature and arts. So, I finally found out why some of my classes hate English and refuse to work, because they are the science group, and the other half love English and even want me to stay after class to talk with them, they are the literature group :)

Then in every class there is a class monitor. I think the job of the class monitor is funny because its their job to quiet down the class if they are loud, or erase the board for the teacher, or even listen to the students if there is something wrong and talk with the teacher about it after class.

Out side of class the students have a 2 1/2 hour break for lunch to go home eat and take a nap. Most students eat at one of the many small one room restaurants(?) or food stalls on the same street as the school. The students have 7 periods a day just like American schools. They finish the regular school day at 5 pm. They have classes during the day Monday through Saturday, and night classes Sunday through Thursday. Every student get tasks, like chores, assigned to them and to my surprise they are very diligent about completing them. They're tasks like cleaning the white tiles around the gardens with a mop and water or sweeping the leaves off the basketball court, lol (an Asian favorite of sweeping leaves!), or wiping down all the desks with a wet towel.

Some students come from rural areas from as far as 2 hours outside of town. These students live in the dorms on campus. There are three 4-story building for Grade 1, 2, and 3, then there are 2 lab buildings, a 5-story office building, the dorms, a cafeteria building that I think the students only use it to get hot water for their thermoses, a football stadium, basketball courts, badminton courts and ping pong tables. This is what I've seen of the campus so far.

Teaching in China

So, my real reason for coming to China was to find a teaching job. I found the Buckland group in Yangshuo that has a program for training new teachers to China, finding schools for them, and making sure they have everything they need as far as living goes. WOW!! I thought, "This is more than perfect for me!"

I trained for a week in Yangshuo and got all kinds of helpful tips on teaching Chinese students, teaching in big classrooms, and living in China.

One night during the training we (all the new Buckland teachers) got invited to the opening dinner of a 5 star hotel and restaurant, mostly for promotional purposes they wanted to show foreigners enjoying the new hotel. But the food was still really good!

Cheers for being new English teachers!

English corner with the Chinese students learning English in the Buckland Academy. They were sooooo enthusiastic and interested in speaking with us!

A little sketch of how small Yangshuo is.

I really needed a hair cut, so Chinese style, I sat down and with out a word the guy picked up the scissors and wanted to start cutting about 8 inches off my hair!! I was like, "ahhh... anyone in here speak English!"









The No. 1 Middle School of Tongzi!

My teaching post, and where I'm living now, is in Tongzi, Guizhou province. Its about 18hr north-west of Yangshuo and in the mountains. The town has about 100,000 people and I can walk from one side of the town to the other in probably an hour.




My own apartment! They converted the hallway into a kitchen :)

My living room!







Here are some of my students playing basketball after school. They are literally obsessed with basketball and the NBA. But then when I watch them play basketball they all just stand under the basket and wait to fight over the rebound, they when someone gets the ball they just let him go off and shoot on his own.



The school stadium and the mountains in the background.

My building, Grade 2. So I teach in all 16 classes in this building, 1 lesson per class.

Arriving in China

I had to leave Thailand on February 16. First because my Visa ran out and the new law in Thailand is that if you enter by land you only have 15 days before you must leave and I can't keep leaving Thailand every 15 days. Second, I had no more money!

So, I heard that it is easy to find teaching jobs in China and most places don't require you to have a teaching certificate, like TESOL or something. My advice was to go to Yangshuo in Guangxi Provence, a super touristy area and find a teaching job there. So, 2 friends ans I bought plane tickets to Shenzen, China and we were off on Feb 16th!!

My friends and I arrive in Shenzen (the closest Chinese city to Hong Kong) at 11:30 at night and immediately go to the train station to get on the first train to Guilin, Guangxi Provence. But the next train was to leave at 6pm the next night... Ok, so its now 12:45am and so we decided the 3 of us are ok to sleep in the train station, and there are hundreds of people sleeping everywhere (and they're not homeless people), just people waiting for early morning trains. The next morning at 6am we were awoken by a train station security guy and told to get off the floor... ok so we did... by it was freezing!!! we just came from Thailand and had only warm weather clothes, and the temp was about 2 degrees centigrade!!! Burrr..... so we shivered our way upstairs to try to find coffee, which was the first time we found out Chinese people don't drink coffee and its incredibly expensive if you can find it!

After finding, and paying for the coffee, I wandered off with one friend to explore Shenzen for the day. And we found lots of cool stuff!
From the Shenzen train station looking at all the taxis lined up on the street and the skyline of Shenzen.
Duck is actually a Beijing specialty but there were plenty of stalls there selling duck cooked in different ways.
Anybody for fresh octopus?!


An alleyway of a random neighbourhood in the middle of Shenzen.

Sev, my friend from Thailand found a man selling granola... by the KILO!!

We found a really nice, small, restaurant in Shenzen where the man did hand made noodles!

After wondering all over Shenzen by foot for the whole day we couldn't remember out way back to the train station... ahhhh.... so frustrating because we finally got back 3 mins before our train was supposed to leave and they wouldn't let us board!!!! We had to wait another day... and sleep in the train station again!! And we lost the 3rd person who had come with us from Thailand :(

Finally all aboard to Guilin.

Ready for our 11 hr train ride to Guilin. There were 2 beds above me and 3 across from me making 6 beds in the small cabin. Good thing the train was relatively empty!


We arrived in Guilin at 5am and took the first bus to Yangshuo!!! Finally only 2 hrs to our destination after nearly 72 hrs since leaving our guesthouse in Bangkok!

Yanshuo!

It was really cold but still beautiful when we arrived in Yangshuo!

The street of our guesthouse :)

A man making the Yanghuo speciality, some kind of spicy sugar candy that he works on this rod thing. After hes finished stretching it for, I dunno, an hour it turns from brown to a white, shiny, hard candy that he cuts into pieces to sell.
The Chinese people like to eat on these small chairs, lol, everyone laughed at Sev the giant English guy that couldn't fit his legs under the table, lol.

They really do use these old pick-up trucks to haul around almost anything you can imagine!

The rock climbing in Yangshuo. Can you see the man in red on the wall? Thats my friend Craig from Thailand that we lost in Shenzen... Yay and we found him again in Yangshuo!

Ton Sai

So I don't have too many more photos to post cause I've been in Ton Sai for the better part of the last 2 1/2 months!! I love the climbing and the relaxing atmosphere of the small community of climbers here! But I must leave next week my 2 month visa runs out... :(

It's so sad to be leaving the place that has changed my outlook on life! Its hard to explain how relaxed and happy I've become about life. I feel I can stop worrying about all the selfish things I should be doing to improve my life and to think how i can get a good job and blah blah blah. I just want to relax and teach English or find a volunteer job in SE Asia. I just hope everyone can understand me that at this point in my life I have the ability to live simple and help others more effectively than maybe later in my life!

So I found a teaching job in China that doesn't require the TEFL (teach English as a foreign language) course and it pays slightly more than is needed to live. Unfortunately I cannot extend my flight until the teaching job is over. So I feel comfortable to forfeit my ticket home and take the chances on teaching. I don't worry too much about it because once I have the experience of teaching its as good as taking the course and I can teach anywhere in SE Asia. I've thought a lot about it and it is my decision. Plus I'm not even sure that if I come home at this point that I could find a temp job good enough to save up the money needed to get back here to Asia... So this is my thinking and I hope everyone can understand me :)

lots of love, Shana

Stanton and Dad made it to Thailand!!

Finally!! Stanton arrived a week earlier than Dad and so that he could get his scuba diving certification. First he flew into Krabi and we rented motorbikes to go to some nearby waterfalls. In Krabi Stanton finds his first take away drink in Thailand, in plastic bags. I guess that has become a norm for me.








Then in Ton Sai we did a little rock climbing and a lot of showing him around the area.











He took his 3 day certification course and really enjoyed his dive instructors. Then the last day in Ton Sai before we went to Phuket to pick up Dad we rented a Kayak to go around the limestone cliffs of the peninsula.










Then in Phuket we picked up Dad no problem at the airport and stayed in Phuket for the night before heading north to find some diving in Khao Lak. in Khao Lak my Thai friend, Poo, met us and basically took care of us for the entire time we were there, taking us to dinner, driving us to a from our resort, trying to get Dad happy.
The first resort we stayed, Banana Bungalows, was really nice with a pool and nice bungalows. And someone had a pet monkey Stanton was playing with!! (Pic)



One of the huge dinners that Poo arranged for us on the beach in Koh Kho Khao, included too much crab to eat, whole fish, rice, and too much beer for Dad, lol :)




Pic left: Poo means crab in Thai!





Dec. 26 was the 4 year anniversary of the Tsunami, so there was a memorial going on in town where (I think) thousands of people came to remember the terrible devastation on the town of Khao Lak and all the people that died. Everyone lit these paper lanterns that flew into the air, so there was a continuous stream of these lanterns in the sky that you could see from miles away. The money from the lanterns went to the families of the victims and to help still rebuild Khao Lak

Pic left: Dad lights a lantern.



Sunset from another small dinner on Ban Sak Beach. Before we were off to another seafood fest at one of Poo's friends resorts on Koh Kho Khao. We also stayed there one night. The next day Nun, his resort, took us out on the water in his longtail boat, where we saw a dolphin!

After leaving Khao Lak we went to Krabi where Stanton wanted to show dad some of the things there. We went to the Tiger temple where you walk up 1237 steps to the top of the mountain fro a great view over Krabi!

Pic: All three of us on the motorbikes in Krabi.

At the top of Wat Tham Suea.