Why a new blog about China?

I have always felt bad that we did not keep a blog for the two years that we were in China.  We tried a couple of times to blog, but with the fact that blogger and facebook were blocked by the Chinese government made it really difficult to get anything really published on social media.  So I have decided that I will try and reconstruct some of the experiences we had while living in China.  I'm pretty sure that I can't recreate a timeline of how things happened but I think that with the pictures and videos that we have I can at least share some of the places we went and the experiences we had.  We decided we would like to do a few missions but because of our financial situation we thought we would if got accepted to go to China and teach English we would do that first because it would not cost us anything.  You are paid by the university where you teach and it is enough to live on and travel a bit when you are not teaching. So in January of 2009, just before we went to Ecuador and Peru, we submitted an application to be English teachers with the China Teachers Program at the Kennedy Institute at Brigham Young University. Early spring we found out that we had been accepted to teach at Nankai University in Tianjin, China.  So with our house up for sale we prayed that it would sale so we could leave in the fall to spend the year living in Tianjin and teaching English at Nankai University.  Nankai University consistently ranks in the top 10 universities in China.  It is considered by many to be the Yale or Harvard of China.  We felt lucky to have been accepted by this university.  Our adventure began with 2 weeks of TOEFL training at Brigham Young University.  Our house did sale in May and we had moved to our home in Mount Pleasant.  Kate and her family decided to live in our house while we were away.  We stayed at Tad and Tove's home in Alpine and commuted to Provo for the training each day.  We remember that 10 hours a day of training is like drinking from a fire house when you are already full.  You can not cram any more into your brain.  But we left with a big binder of ideas for how to teach.  There were about 75 of us that trained together.  We were going to be with the Galbraiths at Nankai and the Larsons and David Hennesey were going to be close at Tianjin University.

 

Our BYU Training.

This is our group being trained at BYU.

This was our Chinese Language teacher.  He had been a mission president in Taiwan.