A new blog...

Well, an additional blog. I'm just posting this short entry to let everyone know that I'll be posting for the weekend to a different blog. No, I'm not stopping this blog. This is still the place to go to keep up with my experiences living in China, but I wanted to start a separate blog to cover my travels.

I first thought of maintaining a separate blog last year when I got the opportunity to travel in southeast Asia. I wasn't really keeping up with posting to this blog at the time, but it did occur to me how different my experience was traveling than learning the in​s and outs of living in China. Further, the audience might be quite different, so I thought a separate blog might be the right answer.

The idea has been rattling around in my head since then. Some friends of mine will be playing in a rugby tournament in Guangzhou this weekend and I'm going down to watch. It will be my fortieth birthday weekend as well, and I hope to get some sightseeing in, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to start the new blog.

The new blog will be less about daily life and personal issues and more about traveling and the places I'm going. I hope to be taking more pictures and videos as well, in keeping with the theme. I will consider making it a vlog in the future. As soon as I find out what that is.

Needless to say, I expect to have a flurry of entries for this new thing, then nothing at all for at least a couple of months. That's usually how travel goes. I'll insert a link here and post a notice on G+ when I get the new one set up.

Working 9 to 5... What a way to make a living!

I've finally gotten started on classes, though out of all of the classes I've got, only one class is really going well. I have a group of students from around age six to twelve. That class has been going for about a month and a half now and the students seem to be learning a lot, though it is a beginner's class. I plan the lessons for that class ahead of time and execute the classes fairly well, though my school doesn't really have anything that's necessary for the class to run properly. The school has no toys to help teach, lacks the basics for elementary age students (like scissors, construction paper, crayons, etc...) so the classes are basically just me saying the words and the students repeating, along with the occasional game of Simon Says and red light, green light. I also don't have a computer, so my lessons are planned on scrap paper. And there's no screen or projector to use in the classroom. Despite this, it's probably the best planned and executed class I've encountered so far in China, so that's something, I guess.