Yo-ho, yo-ho. An expatriate's life for me.

I know what you’re thinking, and yes, it’s been a long time (over a month? Sheesh!). In my defence, I’ve been busy.

December is for Creationism

I wrote this on the first day of December. I wanted to publish it as is, rather than editing it due to the delay in posting. Sorry about that, by the way; my VPN has been on the fritz lately. Enjoy!

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Don’t let this title alarm you. I’m not looking to have an evolution discussion, especially not here on my Chinablog (and besides, Bill Nye the Science Guy said it best). Instead, I want to talk about my own version of creationism…

A writing exercise?

Some of my friends who completed this BlogThings post had disclaimers at the beginning of their stories. I am fairly nervous about what I have composed, so I feel motivated to do the same.

As I mentioned last week, this week's prompt is to choose a song and write a short piece of fiction inspired by it. My added challenge is to focus everything within the context of this blog—my chinadventures.

Chinese literature has been in the news lately, so I thought I would attempt some of my own. Then I realised I'm not a great writer; instead I started developing ideas about China-themed writing. At the same time, my iTunes library blessed me with some inspiration.

I wanted to use this song, as well as conversations I had with my students, to inspire my writing. The goal is capture some of the emotions and feelings my students have toward life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hope you enjoy it.

BlogThings 2012

I have some exciting news from the blog front! In an effort to improve the quality and content of my blog—as well as keep myself super busy as I keep writing my summer series—I have begun an endeavour with some of my friends they’re calling BlogThings 2012.

Residential Malady

In my previous post, I mentioned an odd, but glad, feeling of homecoming upon returning to Lanzhou. I took that as a sign that I should upload a blog that I've been working on for some time. Full disclosure: I've written and rewritten this blog many times. I hope you enjoy it.

A Creative-writing Christmas

So, as I promised on facebook yesterday, I do have a second Christmas-related post to share with the world.


On Christmas Eve, a group of us got together for a Secret Santa gift-exchange at KTV--that's  what they call karaoke lounges here in China. In honour for the evening's festivities and yuletide cheer, I decided to rewrite "A Visit from St. Nicholas" for Lanzhou.


Enjoy.

Writing is hard.

I’ve not written a lot lately. That’s untrue: I’ve written nothing lately. Other than those quick posts giving people some brief information about Lanzhou, I just haven’t found the time to sit and write. All of my time has been consumed with my job and my apartment.

It has honestly felt like I’ve been creating lesson plans since the moment the semester started. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I’m teaching sixteen hours this semester—four preps—and all of them are content courses. They told us volunteers always teach oral English, with the occasional content course. Apparently my situation is a bit different. However, I like it this way. Even though prepping for content courses is considerably more work, that’s what I’m used to; that’s what I’m comfortable with.

Unfortunately, I am still planning lessons only a couple days in advance. I’d like to get ahead at least a week or a week and a half. And midterms are coming within the next couple weeks. It’s hard to believe midterms are so close. After midterms, I’m going to get ahead in my planning. First, I should probably focus my energy preparing those.

I’ve got a few really good anecdotes from teaching so far, plus I have been brainstorming some ideas for blogs to write, so I’m hoping that when I get a VPN and full access to my blog (as well as some more free time to write), I can publish some things people really want to read.

A public notice: I will henceforth never refer to my living space as an apartment. Most people know I have a penchant for British vocabulary. Well, they do not use the word “apartment”—only “flat”—which, it should come as no surprise, I prefer tenfold. It’s easier to say; it’s faster to type; most of my students are used to European foreign teachers, who use British English; a couple of the foreign teachers on campus I’ve befriended are Europeans who lived in Britain for some time (so they’re heavily influencing my diction).

My flat is coming along nicely. The volunteer living here before me never cooked, so I have been spending a lot of time cleaning it. I wanted to make it clean enough that I was comfortable to say that I live in it. Also, if I am living in a place, I want to claim the messes there as my own. I am nearly comfortable owning the space and claiming it for my own. My other goal for the future is to publish a lot of pictures of my flat, so everyone can get an idea of what kind of space I’m living in. (If I was more technically inclined and/or had a better camera, I would make my own PCV Cribs episode. That would be a lot of fun, but I don’t have a camera that could film something like that.)