Year One

It's been exactly a year since I arrived in Beijing and time has certainly flown by. As part of my resolution for the first year I said I'd try to find some sort of routine and I'm happy to report I found a few things.

Scott and I enrolled in an evening Chinese language class since it became evident that we'll need to learn to speak the language if we're going to be here longer. I'm restarting from the very beginning to build up my basic language skills. I haven't been meeting with my language partners as regularly as we had liked because their schedules had gotten busy and as a result any language skill I had at one point has disappeared. You could say I'm in the UN of Chinese classes - every one of the six students enrolled comes from a different country and similar to the real world the American (me) speaks the fewest number of languages. We have an older gentleman from Portugal, a girl from India, a girl from Russia, a guy from Germany, a guy from Iraq, and of course our teacher from China. English for the most part is the unifying language. Also, I'm continuing my online accounting classes through San Diego community college.

The other new development is I got a part-time job helping a lady in my apartment complex create teaching material for her English language school. Her material of choice are Goosebumps books and Disney movies. I'm not sure how Goosebump books are appropriate for 6-7 year old kids but what do I know. For part of the job I had to listen to a recording of a real class and I have to say that maybe it was a good thing that I haven't been able to find a teaching job with elementary school kids. I'm not sure I could handle them.

My plan is to post pictures from the past year but the process is taking longer than I want it to. I think most people consider me a patient person but I just can't get myself to babysit uploading pictures. Maybe for this year, I won't post an entire year's worth of pictures at one time.