David's Big Adventure in China

China has been in the news recently for its economy having recovered quickly from the recession. They are expecting 8% growth in the economy this year but there is some skepticism about that number because there is other information that suggests otherwise. Power usage has been reported as being down vs. the previous year. Apparently government spending is what is driving the economic growth these days although car sales are a bright spot. Car sales are up 25 to 30% vs. last year and now china is #1 in the world for new car sales. The government provided some incentives to purchase new cars with engines smaller than 1.6 liters and many people took advantage of the opportunity. Most cars of this size are made in China so the incentives were targeted at cars made here.

After looking at my pictures, some of you may wonder if I only have one or two shirts since you see my orange shirt in many of the pictures. Actually, I have 2 of those oranges shirts and they are special travel shirts made to protect me from the sun and they dry very quickly after being washed. So when traveling I can hand wash one of those shirts in the evening and it will probably be dry the next morning if I want to wear it again; perfect for traveling light.

Classes started a week ago and I have an interesting schedule. I teach Tuesday morning and afternoon, Wednesday morning and afternoon, Thursday morning, and Sunday morning and afternoon. So my weekend begins at 10:15 a.m. on Thursday and ends on Sunday morning. I am teaching 3 sections of International Business, 3 sections of Finance and Accounting, and a class called English Interest Corner. The reason I have classes on Sunday is that is the only time that juniors and seniors are free to take that class. The juniors and seniors are former full time students of SCIC (Sino-Canadian International College, which is the school I work for) but are now studying something other than English at another college within the university. They want to have English as a second major so they come back to SCIC for that. SCIC is only full time for freshmen and sophomores. I guess you could think of it as a junior college with all of the students having English as their major. There are a total of about 1100 full time students and 29 foreign teachers at SCIC which is a money making enterprise. Except for my Sunday classes, all of my students are sophomores. There are two other colleges at this university that employ foreign teachers so in total there are over 50 foreign teachers here with all but a handful of them teaching English. The other languages taught as a major are Japanese, Thai and Vietnamese.

We will have a holiday from October 1 to 9 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of modern day China and also Mid Autumn festival. It’s amazing to me to think that China has only been a country in its modern form for 60 years considering its long history and culture. The government is really making a big deal of the celebration. Anyplace worth traveling to in China will be packed with people during the holiday so I’ve decided to get out of the country. I’ll be going to the Philippines. Until next time….

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 8:28 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.