中国梦
Breaking livejournal silence (which has really the silence of laziness, nothing more drastic) to say that it looks like I actually will be going to China in a few weeks. Perhaps I'll start using this a bit more again when I have Exciting Life in Foreign Countries (okay, one country) to chronicle. We shall see. Right now I am waiting to get the invitation from the school that will allow me to get a Z visa. I would say 'sshh, nobody tell them that I have pretty much no teaching experience!' but I don't think they care; it's August, they needed to hire somebody before the school year starts, and they strike me as one of the Chinese schools that would be content so long as they managed to hire somebody breathing, conscious, and a native English speaker (I get the impression this isn't too uncommon). Then again, perhaps I'm underselling myself as usual.
If all goes well, I'll be in Qingdao, a medium-sized coastal city in Shandong with a lot of European architecture left over from the treaty-port era. That's the short version of everything I know about the place. Well, that and Qingdao=Tsingtao in the old postal romanization system--the Germans left their beer recipe as well as their buildings behind when they cleared out, evidently.
According to the current, somewhat vague plan, T. will be staying in Portland and Seattle for a month or two more, extricating himself from his current job and then getting trained for the new one that the Powers of Nepotism can get him in Qingdao. Then I'll be dragging him after me to a country where he doesn't speak a word of the language (at least at present). I feel sort of bad about this--not his coming, but the part where he admits it's not something he would even have considered doing if I wasn't so determined to go. But he also claims that that doesn't mean he won't enjoy it, and that at any rate it's highly preferable to ten months of a long-distance relationship plus more of his crappy data-entry job (which he only took to keep himself fed and housed until I graduated and we figured out where we wanted to go from there). I'm choosing to focus more on the first part of this thought; 'better than the alternative,' by itself, seems like a poor motive for expatriation, however temporary. But I also sort of want to see if our relationship can handle a big change of scene/circumstances--are we really up to being long-term in the real world sense, and not just as a college relationship? Since love makes me a raging optimist, I'm thinking (and hoping) yes, but as part of the exercise in being brave that this whole thing seems to be for me, I do want to find out for real.
Anyway, that's the plan: get visa, go to northern China, teach English to (more or less) community college students, hang out on beach, drag boyfriend along, and see what happens. Tourism and self-discovery ensue (maybe). If nothing else, I expect I'll really improve my Chinese, which was Motive Number One in the first place.
If all goes well, I'll be in Qingdao, a medium-sized coastal city in Shandong with a lot of European architecture left over from the treaty-port era. That's the short version of everything I know about the place. Well, that and Qingdao=Tsingtao in the old postal romanization system--the Germans left their beer recipe as well as their buildings behind when they cleared out, evidently.
According to the current, somewhat vague plan, T. will be staying in Portland and Seattle for a month or two more, extricating himself from his current job and then getting trained for the new one that the Powers of Nepotism can get him in Qingdao. Then I'll be dragging him after me to a country where he doesn't speak a word of the language (at least at present). I feel sort of bad about this--not his coming, but the part where he admits it's not something he would even have considered doing if I wasn't so determined to go. But he also claims that that doesn't mean he won't enjoy it, and that at any rate it's highly preferable to ten months of a long-distance relationship plus more of his crappy data-entry job (which he only took to keep himself fed and housed until I graduated and we figured out where we wanted to go from there). I'm choosing to focus more on the first part of this thought; 'better than the alternative,' by itself, seems like a poor motive for expatriation, however temporary. But I also sort of want to see if our relationship can handle a big change of scene/circumstances--are we really up to being long-term in the real world sense, and not just as a college relationship? Since love makes me a raging optimist, I'm thinking (and hoping) yes, but as part of the exercise in being brave that this whole thing seems to be for me, I do want to find out for real.
Anyway, that's the plan: get visa, go to northern China, teach English to (more or less) community college students, hang out on beach, drag boyfriend along, and see what happens. Tourism and self-discovery ensue (maybe). If nothing else, I expect I'll really improve my Chinese, which was Motive Number One in the first place.