And so, another chapter of my life comes to a close.

As Ella and I wrap up for our move to Shanghai, a lack of responsibilities (yay!) has given me a lot of time for reflection. These past 2 years have been quite momentous, and there's a lot to unwrap. Just like I did with Taipei, Bangkok, and Bangkok again (I missed Hangzhou?), I thought I should reflect on my time here. Previously I tended to focus on the people and culture, but that's kind of hard to do this time. At this point, Chinese culture is in some ways more familiar than America's, at least on a day-to-day basis. It's hard for me to pick out things that are unusual. Like, mothers holding their baby over a sewer drain to pee? Getting into a no-holds-barred fist fight over who gets to grab the check? That's everyday stuff. Not to mention, we're just moving to another part of China, making it a bit moot. Instead, this time I'd like to break things down into 3 parts: Guangzhou, my professional development, and my personal development.

To start, Guangzhou's location is awesome. Macau, Zhuhai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong are all spitting distance away, and Macau and Hong Kong might as well be different countries. They each do their own thing, and I really enjoy the contrast. They're both doable on a weekend (and a day trip if you're really ambitious), so I really appreciate them. Especially Macau. I've become a big fan, especially because it's often overlooked. It reminds me of Laos. There's not a lot to do there, but what is there is just amazing. And, this is key - all these places each have their own international airports. This makes it pretty easy to be a hub for... anywhere.

Guangzhou itself I describe as "fine". Not great, but comfortable enough. Something that always sort of bothered me about Guangzhou, is that there is no big reason to come here. What I mean is, Bangkok has the Grand Palace. Paris has the Eiffel Tower. Guangzhou has nothing distinctive. You have Canton Tower, an overpriced view of clouds. Or some would say Changlong, which is basically King's Island with a zoo. There's no "must see" here. If you ask Chinese folks, they'll say Cantonese food. Which, can definitely be good. Great in fact. But I'm not as much of a foodie to really appreciate it. The actual cultural attractions in Guangzhou, that would be befitting of its role as China's international gateway for hundreds of years, is pretty small. Huangpu Port is such a tiny footnote now, it's not really worth seeing unless you live in the area. But the significance of it is so large, I think they could easily develop it to be a big thing worth seeing.

Instead, it's a large city not unlike many others. There are good restaurants and bad restaurants. Good malls and bad malls. Perfectly comfortable, but nothing that makes you stand back and go "Wow, this place is awesome!" For me, Taipei had that in the parks and night markets. Bangkok had that in the absurdly happy, party atmosphere. Guangzhou is just there. It is. It's a good, comfortable "is", but ultimately a forgettable one.

Switching gears to me professionally, I fell a little short of my expectations, but it's otherwise been quite good. I've had the pleasure of working at some great schools in the past, as well as a mediocre one (up to you to guess which). But one thing about all of these, is that the students were controllable. They were either old enough to not go insane, or had very involved parents that were waiting out in the lobby for them to finish class - and they knew they'd be in big trouble if they acted up. At this school, the kids only see their folks on the weekend. Combined with the larger classes, and diversity that comes with different upbringings, economic level, parental involvement, etc., I've run into my fair share of troubled kids. The first year, it bothered me a bit - when you have this asshole kid who is trying his or her (but almost always, his) best to derail your class. It's like a mosquito that you swat, but then when you look at your hand you find you've missed. And it's flying in your face minutes later. On a few occasions, my patience wore thin, and I harshly scolded them. I've noticed over time, that's changed. I don't take things (as) personally anymore. For better or worse, I'm starting to see it as just a job. I've set rules, both with the students and with myself, and take it as a "Way to go, dummy. You've gone and done this. Now I have to enforce the rule." It's not something I would think about after class anymore, which is probably a good thing for my sanity. And that is probably the best takeaway I could ever have from my time here.

Otherwise, I've accomplished a lot. I have gotten my Google Educator Certificate, a Cambridge IELTS Certification, my American Teaching License, and wrote a book. Seeing that spelled out, it looks pretty amazing - especially the Teaching License, because I don't think I'd have my new gig without it. To be honest, I thought DELTA would be partially on that list by now. Ella and I both failed the first exam, which I would be disappointed but not upset about if I felt it was my fault. But I feel it is assessed in a very unfair way. I won't go into specifics, but wow, what a frustrating ordeal that cert is. I'm curious myself what the status on that will be in a year - Did we press on, or jump ship to the DipTESOL? It's a moot point, because neither of those will be relevant until (if) we do teacher training, and that's a few years away. But we'll see.

Personally has definitely been the largest development, on account that I went and got married. Now that it's been a year, it somehow feels like it was so long ago and yet still new. I do know it feels darn weird to say "I'm married", or words like "Husband" and "Wife". I think if you told 'pre-Ella' me that I would be married by now, I wouldn't be shocked, but I would be a little surprised. I've always been a sort of independent, reserved person. It turns out that you just need to find someone also like that, then you can be independent together. Honestly my life has changed very little, personally, since I've met Ella. I still do the same things and have the same hobbies. Admittedly, I do probably eat more meat than I would otherwise, on account of Ella being part carnivore. But I don't find that I've really "changed" myself, which bodes well for my (our) future sanity. Knock on wood. Professionally she's changed me quite a lot. I feel more pressure in some ways to do well, because before if I screw up, it's just me that it affects. But now if I screw up, it affects both of us. And I don't like to inconvenience people. So that's probably a good bit of positive pressure to succeed. I think I would have accomplished very little if it wasn't for her ambition.

The friendship personal front is a little more complicated. We've made friends here, for sure. But I don't feel as many or as deep as I would have preferred. I've been thinking about why lately, and there are three factors that I think explain things. The first is time, which I'm okay with - I was in Bangkok nearly 4 years, Ella 5. We've been here for 2. The second is our professional development took a lot of the time we did have. The first year was a fair amount of work to make all our lessons and get settled, the second was dominated by the DELTA. The third is that our school is a bit isolated. The little village across the street is fine, but nothing special - it's a place to get groceries and food. But to go somewhere with a more social atmosphere is a bit of a trek, so it's something we didn't do as often.

Now, so much for making excuses - how can we do better for next time? Something I've started to keep in mind is a silly trick from an old book, Dale Carnegie's How to Make Friends and Influence People. While it is cringy at times, and very outdated, something that did stick with me is to say peoples' names. I've tried to do that with my students (although with nearly 500 of them, it's mostly a lost cause), and it does seem to help. I'm going to (try) and resolve to do that more. Another, which I learned from a friend of ours here, is to volunteer some personal details. Not like your bathroom habits or whatever, but information you normally only get from knowing someone a while. I don't know... things like dating history, social views, your secret hobby you don't usually tell people about. In the case of this person, it's helped me feel much closer to them very quickly, which is a good takeaway. The others as well, bunch of nice folks. Some of them unfortunately already left back to America, and probably will be there for the foreseeable future. The others... well, I wouldn't be surprised if we see them in Shanghai one day.

You may have (not) noticed, I've been throwing in my favorite pictures of Guangzhou throughout this blog. I'll end with a few more.

Seeya, Guangzhou.

After the whirlwind of travel we had recently, I guess it's not entirely unexpected that Ella and I have been a bit of homebodies lately. We did travel to Hong Kong (more on that later), but for future me, there's two big piece of life news to get out of the way.

The first is... we wrote a book! I had been working on my other, professional blog, http://123esl.wordpress.com for the last couple of years. If you haven't been over there, basically I am of the opinion that teacher training is honestly, pretty terrible. It's really big on theory, and very little of "When you get into class, do this." I think that's a damn shame, especially for new teachers. Explicit practical advice is what they need. And sure, if you have time back it up with "why this works", and "why research says it's good", yadda yadda. So I set out to be as practical as possible, along with explaining what ESL is, how to get started, and bam - there it was. As it got closer to actually being a thing, Ella contributed a bit, and our good friend Steve popped out a cover in no time. So it's on Amazon, right now, at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P2KQ1JK/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1550966511. I'm not looking to make any money on it, it was mostly a passion project I could put on a CV. If you don't want to bother buying it, I don't mind to send you the PDF. I plan to update it maybe 2 or 3 more times, maybe in 6 months or so - I've already got a few ideas.

So in the last blog, I said that we may one day call Shanghai home. Accordingly, the other big piece of news... Ella and I are moving to Shanghai! This is still half a year away, but I got a job at a school pretty close to downtown. I struggled between a few offers before settling on this one, mostly because of its proximity to the city and the metro. I think one of the reasons why I loved Taipei so much was that I could walk to the metro, and how big an impact that was on my life - I was downtown pretty frequently, and it really made me feel much better, like I was part of a large community. But it seems in all my other positions, they've been a bit suburban. And that makes me feel... well, trapped, I guess. Sort of like how I was living in the US, I just find myself going through the same motions every day. I really think I'm a kind of person that needs to be in the middle of the hustle and bustle to thrive, and it's hard to get more hustly and bustly than one of the largest cities in the world.

The job itself sounds challenging, but potentially rewarding - it is definitely more work than here (although, this school set the bar pretty low), but it is an international school with an IB program. If you're not in education, you may not have heard of IB (International Baccalaureate), but it's a big deal in schools right now. Being employed by an IB school when I did not graduate with a certification in IB is also sort of a big deal. And actually, I want to go back to school to get that. Maybe it's something Ella and I can do together next year, as it's about 12-15 credit hours online. Should be able to handle it if I spread it out over a year. This means DELTA will probably take a bit of a backseat for a while, which is fine. I've been pretty frustrated with it lately, and even mulling the idea of dropping it entirely - instead, going with the DipTESOL, an equivalent certification. We'll see.

Whew! If you read through all that, well, you must be really bored or my family. I think we could all use a break, so here's a panda resting on some ice.

Now, in more recent news, we popped over to Hong Kong! We're no stranger to Hong Kong - I've been there twice before. But this time, per Ella's insistence, she wanted to go to the beach. It's not a bad idea, actually - considering we're moving to a colder climate, this would be a good opportunity to see tropical weather one last time before heading to a land with seasons. We decided to go all out, and travel to a beach in a rural area of the territory - the first time there for both of us. We also decided to save some money and camp, a first for Ella. Oddly enough we have camping gear from a teacher that left, so might as well put it to get use.

We started out by going to Guangzhou East to take the train. This is actually the old route to go to Hong Kong, since the South station now has a high speed train there. It's about 40 minutes, as opposed to the old way's 2 hours. But the South station is huge, and quite far away from us. So honestly, I don't think we'd be saving much, if any, time by going there. Fortunately that also means that the train wasn't really that crowded.

Anyway, once in Hong Kong we took the metro, then bus to Sai Kung. This is a sort of rural-ish area of Hong Kong, and is a nice looking port town about 30 minutes north of the metro line. It actually seems like a nice area to live if you're retired or like boats. There was a boardwalk with a ton of seafood restaurants selling whatever they pulled in that day, plus a surprising number of international restaurants for a town about as big as a mall.

Anyway, we were running pretty late, so we just stopped at a bakery to pick up some food for the trip. We were planning to hike, but already being late afternoon, we decided to take a speedboat. It's actually really easy, albeit a little expensive (for us) at $150HK a person. That's like, $20. But considering a bowl of noodles on the street is $4 (compared to $2 in the mainland), it's pretty cheap for HK.

The boat was a bit of a rush, actually. It was a 30 minute ride, and it more or less skipped over the top of the waves. But we eventually got to Ham Tim Beach, only to find... nothing! Well, not nothing. It's kind of the idea for a beach to have nothing. There were a few people there, along with two small shops/restaurants. They were pretty expensive, with a plate of fried rice being $70HK ($10 US). But considering everything here needs to be delivered by boat or on foot, it was expected. A beer however, is still $2 for a massive, 1-liter bottle. Hong Kong and Macau - your beer industry is hilarious. It really is cheaper than water.

 

 

 

Of course we didn't do much there. Just walk along the beach, enjoy the weather. Hong Kong is about as far from the equator as Hawaii, so the weather was amazing. The water too, was almost crystal clear. I dare to say I put it up there with some of the beaches in Thailand, although those have a much more social, party kind of atmosphere. This was a "family camping trip" kind of beach. In particular at night, the once empty beach just became a sea of tents as hikers started to arrive.

The next morning, we decided to start our hike out. It was probably about a two hour hike to the nearest bus station. There were a few hiccups, as Google Maps and Gaode (A Chinese app) both were a bit inaccurate, showing trails that just did not exist - so I'm glad we didn't try going this way the day before when the sun was setting. But we stuck to the "main" trail, and along the way we passed another beach, a canyon, bamboo forests, and who knows what before arriving at Sai Kung Pagoda - basically just a small covered bench that serves as a bus stop. We took the bus back to Sai Kung, got some lunch, and then took another bus back to Mong Kok.

 

Mong Kok is an interesting part of the city. I have briefly passed through it, but this time Ella and I explored it. It is the most densely populated area in the world - I know it sounds like I've made that claim before. But as I understand it, Macau is the most densely populated administrative division (state/province). Manila is the most densely populated city. And here in Hong Kong, Mong Kok is the most densely populated neighborhood. Got it? Good. I think. Moving on.

I think when people picture typical downtown Hong Kong, they're thinking of Mong Kok. It's a sea of neon, narrow alleys, and just full of people. Like, really full. I can see how this may give some anxiety. For me, I love it. It's like an endless discovery of what's around the corner, all the while feeling like you're part of a big community. We didn't do anything special in Mong Kok. Mostly just walk around, snacking on all the street food options available. After checking into our hotel, we got a long overdue shower, and Ella had a nap. That evening, we went out for some Thai food. While not 100% authentic, it was pretty close, and scratched an itch I've been feeling for a while. My green curry was spot on, but Ella's Kha Phrao Moo had a bit of a Chinese tilt to it. Still good.

That night, we went up to The Peak. I've been there many times before, and I've said in the past how it's my favorite spot in the world. That's still the case. Maybe it's just the contrast between the very suburban, green feel in comparison with the bustling city you were just in. But the view is just second to none, and is definitely my favorite thing to do in the territory.

And that's about it. We had a wonderful breakfast at a jam packed American diner. I had bacon, eggs, and hash browns, and whew - it's been a long time since I've had that. Ella got a Zhu Pai Bao, a sort of pork cutlet sandwich famous in Macau, and it was also really amazing. Back to the train station, there were probably only a couple dozen people on the way back to the mainland. We had almost the entire car to ourselves, which was a nice change from the shoebox sized hotel we were in the night before. And so begins another week back at school. We're about halfway through the semester, and I'm anxious to start to the next stage of my (our) life.

By the way, future Weg - on April 4th, Ella asked you to do the dishes when it was her turn, and she would "owe you one". I'm sure you've forgotten about it, so I hope in 10, 20 years when you read this, you get it back.