Greetings from China

3 min read

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OccasionallyLysander's avatar
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I think the title is pretty self-explanatory but hello and greetings from China. It has been one month since I hopped on a train to take me to London, from whence I flew to Chengdu for my orientation. I have been living at my placement school, whose name I shall not repeat for contract purposes, for 2-weeks. I am here as a teaching intern with the Teach & Discover in China internship program, helping Chinese college students practice their Speaking and Listening ability.

So far it has been pretty chill. My workload isn't too heavy right now and my room is nice here. It is a college in Guanghan, a county-city that makes up part of Deyang, in Sichuan province. I was originally bound for Chongqing in the municipality of the same name but visa issues killed that move. But yeah, I have a kitchen more or less all to myself and the Internet in my room is great by China standards. I do, of course, use a VPN to watch Youtube and update the family on Facebook but that is about it. I'm no radical here to ferment chaos against the government, far from it.

My experience of China so far has been negligible. My college campus is about a mile outside of the city and my passport is still with immigration as they process the Residency permit needed for me to stay more than two months, so there has not been much in the way of city exploration and travel to tourist spots and the like. But this has only been a month and I am here in Sichuan until the 10th of July at the latest.

That's when I am moving to Beijing, to take up a full-time actual teaching job with a salary and travel expenses and all kinds of benefits. That is when the real work begins. I'll be teaching at a public middle school, and school time at one of those places runs from 7:30 in the morning to 9 in the evening. Chinese kids are under an insane amount of pressure.

This Beijing job will see me in China until September 2017, at which point I am considering either moving to a different city or maybe taking my more-experienced self to Taiwan or somewhere new.

So art on this page is going to be even thinner on the ground than it was before. My focus is to hoard my money and send as much of my earnings back to the UK. I still have student loan payments to make, and I intend to pay that off quickly.

Update over. See you all.
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BrianThomasX's avatar
That sounds like a life of adventure! Good luck with this direction you're taking!

BTX