As our placement comes to an end we've had to make decisions about the next stage of our journey and I thought it was easiest to let everyone know what I'm doing by putting it all down here. So here it goes.
When I came to China I never imagined that I'd enjoy teaching so much, I knew probably wouldn't want to go home to get a monotonous office job but I thought wanderlust would take over and I'd play nomad until I ran out of cash and be home for Christmas. But the longer I spend here the more I love my students and my job. It's a cliché but it really is so unbelievably rewarding to now be able to have semi-conversations with students who could barely say "hello!" when I started at the school. It's fun to watch them learn and its still exciting when a lesson goes really well. Even though I only realized, 13 weeks in, that a huge chunk of my students were calling me 'Daniel' (because that was the name of the last foreign teacher at the school) and didn't actually know my name, teaching has largely been a success.
This is why being home for Christmas doesn't look like that is what's going to happen at all. Pretty early on I thought that maybe I'd like to do another term in China and then see where life took me next, but as we've been looking into our options more it seemed like taking another half year contract was limiting. We would have to trust an element of random luck with where we were placed again, we'd still be on a restrictive X-visa, which essentially stops us playing traveller outside of China, and money wouldn't be that much better.
On the flip side, doing a years contract means that we can be on a multi-entry work visa, get to choose where we'd be placed and pay could increase four fold. All in all a years contract seems like a better deal for us. It's kind of scary to commit yourself to a whole year teaching, and there are so many elements that could go wrong, but sometimes I think it's worth taking the risk. I can't say how I'm going to feel about China and teaching in 6 months time, let alone a years time, but I may as well make the most of the opportunities presented to me right now.
On the flip side, doing a years contract means that we can be on a multi-entry work visa, get to choose where we'd be placed and pay could increase four fold. All in all a years contract seems like a better deal for us. It's kind of scary to commit yourself to a whole year teaching, and there are so many elements that could go wrong, but sometimes I think it's worth taking the risk. I can't say how I'm going to feel about China and teaching in 6 months time, let alone a years time, but I may as well make the most of the opportunities presented to me right now.
Making the decision to work here for another year means that my expected date back to London shifts majorly from the estimated Christmas 2014 to summer 2015, and the only real reason I have to go back then is a wedding (which I wouldn't miss for anything!)! This means Christmas, New Year, my birthday and many other 'important' dates are going to be spent in China, and I don't think that that's a bad thing.
My mum always says that you can never say you really lived somewhere until you've been there a year, any less and you're just passing through, and I think that makes sense. It takes time to fully see a culture and to come to terms with it, it takes time to feel like you know what's going on and can feel completely comfortable in a place, and it definitely takes time to reach a point in learning a new language where you could be considered to speak it, if only conversationally. Everything takes time and I think a year is an appropriate amount of time to attempt to achieve all these things. I'm not saying I'm going to come back to England a Chinese expert, linguistically or culturally, but I do think that after spending 18 months in the country I could go home and say I knew China.
My mum always says that you can never say you really lived somewhere until you've been there a year, any less and you're just passing through, and I think that makes sense. It takes time to fully see a culture and to come to terms with it, it takes time to feel like you know what's going on and can feel completely comfortable in a place, and it definitely takes time to reach a point in learning a new language where you could be considered to speak it, if only conversationally. Everything takes time and I think a year is an appropriate amount of time to attempt to achieve all these things. I'm not saying I'm going to come back to England a Chinese expert, linguistically or culturally, but I do think that after spending 18 months in the country I could go home and say I knew China.
At the moment we're looking to find a contract teaching in the city of Chengdu, in West China. It may seem strange to want to start over in a completely new city just when we're finally finding our feet in Suzhou, but coming to China was never about feeling comfortable. I want to experience and see as many sides to China as possible and now we've seen and experienced Suzhou it's time to move on. Quite a few people on the same programme as us have been placed in Chengdu for the past 3 months, and they all seem to love the city. Chengdu is best known for its panda research centre, and anyone who knows me well will know about my childhood obsession with all things panda! Its also pretty well located as a springboard to some of China's other big sights, Leshan and the giant Buddha are a couple hours away and Xi'an is also a reasonable (in China terms) distance. Overall, Chengdu seems a pretty good option for us and I hope it lives up to the hype!
So that's that, China will be my life for the next year. London, you'll have to wait until 2015 to get me back!
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