David's Big Adventure in China

It’s been about 4 weeks since I’ve written mostly because the last two weeks I’ve been incredibly busy. I have been working on finding a different job, dealing with some issues at my property in Reno and grading mid term exams.

I have accepted a position starting in August in Nanning which is the capital of Guangxi province which is southeast of here and is the province just to the north of Viet Nam closest to Hanoi. I will be teaching at the Sino Canadian International College (SCIC) at Guangxi University. SCIC is a program that is a cooperation agreement between a Canadian institution and Guangxi University (GU). It is a fairly small program in which the students primarily study English for 2 years then go on to GU or a school in Canada to study their subject of choice for 3 years. I learned about this program from a couple of the current foreign teachers there that I met when I went to Nanning about 3 weeks ago. I went to Nanning to visit a couple other schools and learned about the SCIC program by accident. The school where I am now asked me to stay for next year but I decided to look for a different school. I think the SCIC job will be better in almost every aspect than the job here…better students, better school facilities, better living quarters and better pay. The only thing that will not be better is the weather as the weather there is similar to Florida weather with very hot and humid summers. GU is the biggest university in the province and has 48,000 students.

Now for some odds and ends. I recently learned that the power in the students’ dormitories gets turned off at 11:30 each night and turned back on between 6:00 and 6:30 in the morning. I have watched the dorm across from my apartment a couple times when the power goes off. I heard a few screams and then saw many of the rooms with flashlights or perhaps cell phones being used to provide enough light to finish whatever they were doing. Apparently, this is the case at all universities in China. There is a restaurant here in downtown that sells Dreyer’s (Edy’s) Ice Cream and I went there recently and had lunch and bowl of Cookies N Cream. The ice cream cost more than the rest of the lunch at 35 yuan (about $5 which is about 1% of my monthy pay). They sell a container which is 1.875 pints (a little less than a quart) for $11 U.S. That’s it for this time!

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