First time, definitely not the last

Hi! I'm a US citizen currently teaching English in Guiyang, Guizhou, China. I'm starting this blog primarily to keep my friends and family updated on my travels. I'll be posting pictures, stories, and random thoughts about living here. Updates will be as regular as I can make them.

Feel free to leave a comment about what you'd like to hear about. I'll do my best to make it happen.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Summer Plans

The end of the school year is almost here, and it's been a very slow couple of weeks for me. The foreign staff gave their final exams about two weeks ago, and the Chinese staff have taken over all of the classes to get the students ready for their exams. We had a week to grade our tests, and haven't had much to do for the last ten days or so. We still have to show up for work, but there isn't really anything for us to do except clean up, organize, and spend some time on the internet. It's not the worst way to draw a paycheck, but it's not that much fun, either. So let's talk about what I'm going to do with my summer. I'm leaving Guiyang on the 13th of July at 0730 local time, arriving in San Francisco on the 13th of July at 1220 local time, after a combined flight time of 16 hours and a 5-hour layover in Beijing. I will most likely sleep little to none on the flight, and collapse into my hotel bed for 10-15 hours. I'll stay at the Crowne P...
Read more

It was out of character, but I did touristy things in Singapore

Image
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...
Read more

Qianling, Guiyang's famous monkey park

Image
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...
Read more