Our first few days getting to know the campus.

We arrived in Tianjin Sept 5th 2009 and started exploring the campus and surrounding area the very next day. Below is the entrance into Nan Kai University.

This is the building we taught in.

The Administration Building

We need baskets on the front and back to carry stuff from the market.

This is our apartment building we live in the end apartment on the right on the top floor.

There aren't many cars on campus but they still have traffic police directing what few cars there are.

There is a canal that runs through campus.

The flags are to welcome the new students. I am a little wobbly on my bike, but I haven't caused any accidents yet. Cars and bicycles seem to have equal rights to the road with pedestrians mixed in. You just move forward and try not to stop unexpectedly. We love to ride to the open air market to buy vegetables and fruit.

We inherited bikes from passed BYU teachers. 

There are beautiful lotus ponds on the campus. They aren't in bloom yet, but still pretty. It's fun to see the students arrive on campus with their parents, suitcases, and sometimes bedding. It's just like campuses everywhere. There are very nice dining rooms close to our apartment for the foreign teachers and students. We haven't found the student dining halls.

In the distance you can see the building we will be teaching in. It is very new and we have access to media in the classroom. We don't start teaching until Sept.21st, so we still feel like we are on vacation.

We go out every day to explore the city and to buy something we think we need. Mostly it is just fun to wander around. Tianjin is not a tourist destination, so we are often the only foreigners when we go places. There are a lot of Koreans in the city though. There is a lot of building going on, but the city is clean and has a great energy. I can see why Ginny likes living in New York.

Our memories of the first few weeks in China are that everything seemed so interesting and strange and that we had a hard time figuring out how things worked.  Going to the South-West market for the first time to buy vegetables, we would just point at what we wanted and then hold out our money and let them take what they wanted. 

This is the South West Market but still on campus.

The street right next to the South West Market.

Riding a bike anyplace but on campus was scary and we felt so unsure of what to do and how to do it.  So we would just wait for someone who wanted to cross the street the way we wanted to go and we would follow them.  But after a few weeks, we got the hang of things and were riding our bikes all over the city.  The freedom was exhilarating to be able to go anywhere we wanted to go.

You can't drive a car on campus without a permit but they don't stop bikes.

Nothing about China was what we expected.  We anticipated a rather closed or suspicious society.  What we experienced was exactly the opposite.  People were friendly, gracious and eager to form friendships.  We thought things might be a little backward.  Instead there was energy in the air and a rush to modernize and create.  There was construction everywhere and a cheerful optimism in many people.  Our students were so studious and determined—to some degree even driven.  We were at one of the top 10 universities in China and the competition to be admitted was intense.  Some of our students came from small villages, the first in their family to attend a university.  Many expressed the belief, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” and they exemplified that motto in their discipline and studies.

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.