I’ve not written a blog post in over a year! Well not for this site anyway, but I’m in China and I want to document it. So as of Monday I hope to be posting a weekly blog about my experience.
I arrived in China on the 20th of February and it has been a whirlwind of adventure and friendships and experiences since then! All of which I will update you on properly in the blog posts that follow this one.
After I graduated University in July I realized that as much as I loved my course and everything it involved, a desk job just wasn’t for me, not right now anyway. I had the travel bug, I needed to GO somewhere, anywhere, and where better than China?! A completely different culture, new people, new places and a chance to try my hand at a possible new career. Also… Pandas! The decision was obvious, the choice easy. So to China I went…
To give you a basic run down of my current situation, I recently passed my TEFL qualification certificate which allowed me to apply for a teaching internship in China. The lovely people at STA travel, I-to-I TEFL and ImmerQi all helped in setting up my trip and I will also be writing posts for I-to-I TEFL so keep an eye out for those, I’ll let you know when they are posted. I have been placed in the South of China in a Province called Guangdong, my school is in a “small” (I use inverted commas because it is bigger by far than Aberdeen but by China standards it is classed as small) town near the city of Zhongshan. I’ll go into more detail in a future post, but it is BEAUTIFUL! I could not be happier with where I’ve been placed and the people I’ve been placed with!
My plan as it stands just now is; complete my internship here in China, spend a month travelling around South East Asia and then go on to do another 5 months’ internship in Vietnam. Who knows where from there but I feel like trying to plan further than a year ahead is just not how I work.
I left home almost a month ago, after a wonderful send off from my friends and family, I spent a week in London and then hopped on my flight to Beijing for a week of orientation, cultural classes and exploring. It was a ten-hour journey by bullet train down from Beijing to Guangzhou and then a further hour to our town. As I write this I am sitting in Sanxaing, Guangdong Province, China, in my new home, with my new flat mates, easting pancakes because it’s International Woman’s Day so what else are we meant to do?! (I should be creating a lesson plan for my first graders… but I thought I’d post this little update first).
Well Travelled Lass 