Introduction

What, yet another blog? Yes, another blog. This one, as you can see, is to be a record of my trip to China. While there's no particular reason not to write such a record on my Linguistic Life blog, it appealed to my aesthetic sense of organization to keep the experience recorded in its own place, with its own look, rather like a written scrapbook. So here 'tis.

Surely you have noticed the lovely design. I came up with the picture, found by Googling for pictures of Hangzhou, as well as the title. Mark came up with the waterfall for the sidebar, and basically wrestled the rest of the template into submission, and thence into working order, with some help from Will.

The new URL follows in the steps of my Japan blog, which used my name. In this case, though, "Wang Jinna" is my Chinese name, given to me by Scott Cook, who tried valiantly to teach me Chinese for the one semester I took it at Grinnell.

The purpose of my trip to China is, once again, to teach English. I found out about the opportunity by pure chance. Pat P., who works in the writing center at the ELC, is friends with Eva, the woman trying to get this English program started in China. Pat came by the TA office while I wasn't there to ask if any of the TAs would be interested in going to China, and Alison told me about it when I got back to the office. I tracked down Pat, got a flyer, gave her my email address, and I was signed up to go at the first meeting. Yay!

Originally, this program was intended to be a 3-week intensive English summer camp for elementary and middle school students in Hangzhou. The focus was to prepare the students for the upcoming 2008 summer Olympics by exposing them to other cultures and improving their English ability. Though we, the teachers, would not be paid for these three weeks of teaching, we would get a tour of China during the fourth week of our stay. We would be renting out one of the city schools for the camp, and living in a nearby hotel. A fifth week got added to the beginning of the China trip when Zhejiang Media College, where Eva is a guest professor for two months, decided they wanted to have an international English education conference. This now meant that the trip would be from June 23-July 30. Our schedule was set, so we arranged for plane tickets with a travel agent.

You may have noted from the tone of the preceding paragraph that this is not what is actually happening...