Hello! Welcome to Annie's personal experience during her two-year adventure in Xiuning as a Yale-China Teaching Fellow. Posts to include insights into Chinese life, teaching discoveries and lessons learned,
FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD, frequent heartaches from missing friends and families, and other updates on life.
Here are my insights now:
1. Good lord! I am nervous! Not only am I moving to an entirely different culture, but I'm also moving to a rural setting. Though, Xiuning County is almost exactly the same population size as SLO County!
2. What do I bring? Too much always. The current fellows and the Yale-China staff have forewarned that the winter is as cold as East Coast winters, and there is not heating inside the schools! So warm clothes and thicker socks, methinks.
There are so many decorations I want to bring... I'll have to be economic about it. Certainly, I will bring my Disneyland 50th Anniversary map, my YPMB Scav Hunt team flag (Y), a few stuffed animals (including Bear, Tigger, and probably Mickey Mouse because I wanted to use it as inspiration in my classroom, per my interview suggestion), my YPMB handkerchief, and I'm sure more things will come up as I continue to think about this.
3. Logistics. I need to get many forms and shots before I can fly to China.
4. I need to also think about this summer and Norfolk! I want to see all of my friends and spend time with the family (and go to Disneyland?), so I hope two weeks will be enough. I'm flying home a week later after graduation, because Yale-China has an orientation/retreat in Madison, CT. I am missing the Beijing CET Chinese language acquisition course, but hopefully I can get up to speed on my own while at Norfolk.
Norfolk Chamber Music Festival is so exciting! My position as Production Manager is a mix of stage managing and event producing, which I've done at my internships with the PAC and SLO Symphony. This will give me a nice bit of pocket money before going to China in late-August, and will help to refine my non-profits arts administration skills. Also, the staff at Norfolk--Jim, Deanne, and Ashley--are all unbelievably friendly. It's also nice because several band friends are staying in New Haven over the summer. Hopefully I'll be able to visit a few times on my days off. Speaking of which, I get Sundays and Mondays off at Norfolk. The schedule is very reasonable considering I'm on salary!
Well, folks, that's the update now. I've got one more major paper, a presentation, and serious fun to do before graduating. (Oh! And booking reservations for graduation!) So I'll get to that, and be back soon!
See ya real soon!
--Annie
