National Holidays

We don't get Christmas and New Year's off, but we do get a week off to celebrate National Day (October 1st). That day in 1949, in front of 300,000 people during a ceremony in Tian'anmen Square, Chairman Mao declared the founding of the People's Republic and waved the first five-star PRC flag. Grace and I are celebrating by going to Shanghai to see my sister Betsy and her family... travel books generally have this to say about the idea:

"Traveling during National Holidays" With a week off, many Chinese travel domestically and internationally. Travel fares double and triple and advance bookings must be made weeks, even months ahead for international travel. Hoards of tour groups flock to the major tourist destinations of China, so you can forget having a quiet moment to ponder how the Great Wall was built. If you can avoid it, it's advisable not to travel domestically during the week around October 1st. The latest statistics released publicly are from 2000 but according to these, 59.82 million people traveled during National Day holidays that year.

We're new here and still willing to see for ourselves... and we won't need a hotel room!

English Majors

Grace and I are teaching six classes of English majors between us. BIT's student body is about 80% male; English is the only subject area with a female majority, and those six classes are about 90% women! The young lady pictured, "Emma", chose it because she likes the language and wants to study abroad after graduation. She is from Lanzhou, the capital city of the province of Gansu, which is in the north-central part of the country, bordering on the north with Mongolia. Unlike most of her classmates, she has traveled outside China, spending a month in Canada at a summer camp during her high school years. She lists as her hobbies: "reading, watching movies, traveling and playing a Chinese musical instrument"

Our First Classes

Grace and I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching our introductory units, each of which have had 33-45 students. The young man pictured is representative of my Freshman Oral classes; he is from Liaoning, a province in northeast China bordering on North Korea; he has studied English since middle school and is majoring in Computer Science and Technology. He has 14 classes this semester and although Oral English is not at the top of his priority list, he is hoping to become more conversant and to go to graduate school in either the US or Hong Kong. He says he loves sports, especially basketball, soccer, tennis and ping-pong... "Ted" is his English name, which he chose at some point in one of his previous English classes, in part because it sounds a little like the first syllable of his Chinese given name: "Tianhong"

Figuring Things Out

With the nearest English language service two hours north of us, we've decided our best option for Sunday mornings is the 3-self church in LX. Fangshan Christian is very traditional... choir, hymns, an hour-long sermon... We've been able to join in when the hymns are familiar and by identifying the Scripture passages with the help of the index in our Chinese-English Bible. The one in the picture is Romans 3:23... Providentially for us, the speakers use lots of Scripture... Today we went from 2 Samuel-Genesis-Job-Acts-John-Romans-Luke-Romans-Job ending with Psalm 90:12

Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom

We're most likely getting a completely different sermon than everyone else, but it's where we're supposed to be for now!

Our classroom

Classes begin Monday... strangely enough, we both teach our first class (at a different hour) in this classroom 1-309... it seats 100, but English classes are capped at 45. Grace has 3 AV (at two different levels), 3 Sophomore Conversational English; I have 3 Reading classes (at two different levels) and 5 Freshman Oral classes... Three preps apiece... should be enough of a challenge for us as veteran Math and Spanish teachers!

First Haircut

It had been almost two months since my last one, so it was time to do my best to try to communicate what I want in a haircut to someone local...

I played the "cup bearer" on this one and Grace must've liked what she saw because she's pledging to get hers cut there next week...

...at 30 Yuan (roughly $4.90) for a shampoo and cut it's hard to complain.

Spanish Class in China!

Beth allowed me to field questions from her second-year Spanish students in this afternoon's class...






Terrific group of 32 Spanish majors! There are like-sized groups of students majoring in Russian, Arabic, French, German, Japanese and Korean

BeiDaiHe

Made it! the 180-mile trip to the coast took roughly 8 hours and involved a bike ride, 4 subways, two buses and 110 miles on the D-train (fast). The coastal resort town of BeiDaiHe is beautiful... a little like being back in Jax!

Primary among the purposes of this trip is the opportunity to observe a few classes... the group pictured is the girls'-side of one of Beth Bergstrom's Oral English classes at Hebei Vocational School of Foreign Languages...

Beth is the only ELIC team member currently teaching Spanish in China... tomorrow we get to observe one of those classes!

Flexible Plans

One of the things on our to-do list is a trip out to Qinhuangdao to see the only Spanish program currently up-and-running...

When told last night that fixing our "plumbing issues" would require shutting down our restroom for four days, we began looking into the possibility of making the train trip out east an immediate reality... things are falling into place; we hope to pull off the multiple train and bus transfers to arrive at our destination around 5:00 this afternoon... Should be fun!

Beijing Institute of Technology

It has been entirely too long since my last entry... much has happened, and we are still trying to get settled into our new home base, thankful for the fact that we don't actually begin teaching until the 24th... Freshmen and Sophomores at BIT are required to do three weeks of military training at the beginning of each school year... they are shown here drilling Sunday evening of week one!