The life of a career English teacher

I feel like I might be becoming just such a beast.

No chance actually, but oh, how I teach and teach.

Got to JinJu (check it out on the google map here) last Thursday night after 24 hours on the high seas. I was the only westerner on the boat, and I got upgraded from "first class" - which is the lowest class actually - to "suite class". Turned out that the only difference between "suite" and "first" class is that there are only two beds instead of four... but the status! I met a couple of Korean students who have been studying in Beijing for a couple of years now and spent most of the trip with them. Not the isolation at sea I was half expecting.

Now I find myself right back in the thick of teaching english again. Not the old "sleep in till 9:00 or 10:00 o'clock, spend two hours drinking tea and reading, go for a bicycle through the rice paddies, and roll into work at 330 in the afternoon to prepare for a 5:00 class" kind of teaching though. Not this time. This time it's a summer camp, and so tomorrow morning I'll be up at 6:45 to lead exercises for about 250 elementary students, and I should finish up the teaching day around 9:00 in the evening. It's a pretty good set up though. I've got twelve 11 and 12 year students with whom I can pretty much converse with. They are diligent and quiet and cute and I have them all day. The cirriculum is set up fairly well. I've most of this stuff before, so most of my prep is quick. There's not too much to tell really.

I've included some pictures from BeiJing, The Great Wall and the Forbidden City below. My camera is kind of broken right now, so I don't know if you can expect any original photos of this fine country any time soon. I'll try to get it fixed though.

I was forbidden to enter the city because it closed at 5:00 in the evening.

HuTong alley way in the dead centre of BeiJing.

The SiMaTai section of the Great Wall is very steep and mostly unrestored.

It was a pretty cloudy/foggy day.
This is my friend Patrick whom I mentioned in a previous post.