An American Teacher in Guiyang

Guiyang is full of great natural beauty. The city has excellent parks everywhere you go and has made a real effort to conserve open space even as it has developed significantly over the past decade. Some of the parks are new, but some of them are quite old. Last month, I visited one of the older ones: Qianling park, named after Qianling mountain. It's one of the most well-known mountains in Southern Guizhou, and the park itself is known all over China for its population of Macaque monkeys. The mountain is almost completely covered in forest, making it a prime habitat for them. I'm not sure exactly how many live in the park. I would guess it's in the hundreds. They are everywhere along the paths, and they aren't shy around humans at all. This shouldn't be a surprise, since you can feed them nuts and fruit that you can buy from vendors outside the park. They'll take food from your hand, but I wouldn't recommend it. They can be very aggressive, and I saw mo

I know that this blog sometimes seems dead, but I promise you I'm very much alive! I have a number of posts in my drafts folder that I'm working on, and sorting through a truly ridiculous number of pictures to share with you all. What have I done in the six weeks since my last post? I've been busy with work, exploring Guiyang, and going to a couple of English-language events on a regular basis. I've been meeting new Chinese friends and learning more about the country I've settled in from them. What's up with work? Last semester I taught year 5's and year 7's. This semester I've added a class of year 9's. This means I've had to learn another curriculum. Luckily, it's just the next level in a curriculum I'm already familiar with, so I mainly have to familiarize myself with the lessons and craft slideshows. It's still a fair amount of work, but not nearly as much as a completely new curriculum would be. The middle and high

I've said in previous posts that I don't like to visit places like a typical tourist. I'm not that interested in going to the typical tourist destinations and seeing what everyone else has seen. I'm more interested in seeing the neighborhoods people live in, the shops they go to, and the rhythms of their day to day lives. That's what I love most about traveling. All that said, I'm not going to miss some spectacular sights just because everyone who has come before me has seen them. I'm not that much of a travel snob. Singapore has plenty of places I think everyone should see. The first place is the Marina Bay Sands hotel. I saw it from across the city and knew immediately that I had to go there. Yes, that's a faux boat stretched across three hotel buildings. It's the most over the top thing I think I've seen in architecture. The MBS, as most of the local call it, is one of the most famous buildings in Singapore. It's not hard to se

This will probably be my last post about Hong Kong for a while. You might be able to tell that I liked the city quite a bit. I know that I only stayed for a week and that is barely enough time to form an opinion on a place, but I would rank it among the top three cities I have been to. I could see myself happily living and working there. It has everything I want in a home: interesting architecture, beautiful coastal hiking, and decent Mexican food. It also has some excellent parks. I spent some time in two of them that were specifically recommend to me by the owner of Hoppy Junction. Hong Kong park is famous for having a tram that you can ride to the top of the mountain it's built into, from which you have some breathtaking views of the island. I looked forward to doing this, but every time I went the wait to buy a ticket was somewhere between 1 and 2 hours. I decided that my time would be better spent exploring the park. I have some regrets about that. I've been told that