First post - purely informative!

Hello all! Welcome to the blog I intend to keep up as I experience China next year! That's right, on August 14th I will moving to China for a year to teach English through Maryknoll China Service Project. I will be there until mid-July of 2011 (besides hopefully coming home for my brother's wedding, of course).

To give you a vague idea of what I know now: first I'll be staying in Hong Kong for a couple of weeks to do some training-type stuff at the Maryknoll house. Then I will be teaching at Wuyi University in the port city of Jiangmen, Guangdong Province. Jiangmen is very close to Hong Kong (about an hour away) with a population of around 4 million and sub-tropic weather. So pretty far South, and close to the coast, and really hot and humid. Fairly urban and westernized, with some pretty crazy food. Look it up on Wikipedia if you want more info about the city or to see it on a map.

Once I'm in Jiangmen, I will be teaching conversational English for around 20 hours a week, plus the hours spent creating my own curriculum. I'll probably do some tutoring on the side too, and hopefully I will get to take some Mandarin classes to supplement my lately neglected knowledge of the language. The university supplies me with a single person apartment near campus, so that's where I will be living. I hear the apartments have all new appliances, and that the second floor is cursed but no one will talk about why.

In the rest of my spare time I hope to go hiking in a mountainous region that has old temples that apparently is nearby. I would also like to join random groups of people that exercise or meditate in parks in the morning, doing Tai Chi or whatever. Maybe I will even take up the Erhu, if I can get one cheap.