My apartment in Tianjin

The lounge

Looking out the kitchen window

I have been really busy lately teaching at my new school so my posts haven't been as frequent as normal. The summer period is not a holiday for some of the kids as they sign up to extra classes to prevent any 'backslide' in their English. 

I thought I would post some pictures of the apartment that I share with another EF teacher Ellie from Wales. We are on the top floor (level 28) and look out over the city (and a sea of other apartments in various stages of construction). We are in a very convenient location as we are sandwiched between a large mall called Joy City on one side and a subway station on the other. Joy City is about 6 stories high and has a ice rink at the bottom where shoppers can look down and watch either kids skating around or ice hockey players practicing their shots at goal. The mall is always busy, similar to Christmas shopping at St Lukes lol!

This school apartment is much nicer than the one I received with my first school in Yongjia. It has a kitchen and all the mod-cons you can ask for and everything is much cleaner and in better condition.  It definitely feels more like a home than the other place. When I arrived, the school gave me a little goodie pack with sweets, coffee, toiletries, towels, slippers, a map and laminated copies of my home and work addresses in both Pinyin and Chinese characters (very vital information). My bedroom had been cleaned beautifully and the bed also had new sheets, duvet and duvet cover.

Our apartment - terracotta one in the foreground

View outside my bedroom window

I was given a set a keys to get into the apartment, one was a tag to get past the security gates, one key was to get into the building and another into our actual apartment. We also have security guards that sit out by the gates 24/7 letting cars in and out and just watching everyone going about their day.

Joy City

The kitchen

Summer school at EF

 Above is my teaching schedule for the next 3 weeks for the first half of the summer camp.

My first class starts on Monday with Reading Science - yep you read that correctly I have to teach science to a group of teenagers. We only received the content yesterday so I went in early to get familiar with the topic and the experiments we would be doing. Although, I haven't done science for many years I think this is going to be an interesting class to present. For the first hour I am teaching about the different layers of the earth and the second hour will be based on earth's resources. I have found a couple of cool experiments on Pinterest and I hope I will be able to find the ingredients here, so after I post this I will be heading down to Walmart (10 minute walk away) to check out their supplies. The other classes I have are Meet the World with kids around 11 years and then phonics (Sound and Word Adventure) for the smallest kids with the youngest being 4 years old.

Training has been intense but really thorough at English First and I am really enjoying my time here. We have a number of EF schools in Tianjin and I am based in TJ4. Our foreign teachers come from Canada, USA, England, Ireland and South Africa (and now NZ!) and everyone gets on really well. Some have been living here for as long as six years and have made their home in China while the most recent (excluding me) has been here for six months. We also have a number of local Chinese teachers who we co-teach with, administrators who are busy dealing with the parents and keeping the school running smoothly and the sales staff who have targets to meet. All in all, it's a small but tight knit and hard working group.

My school TJ4

My desk

Flying to Tianjin

To get to my summer school job in Tianjin, I took a 4 hour flight from Wenzhou. You can also take a train to Tianjin but I wasn't too keen on a 20+ hour trip even if I did pay for a sleeper cabin. Also, some of these arrived in the middle of the night and I didn't think my new employer would be too impressed if I asked them to pick me up at some ungodly hour. Thanks to my friend May, she was able to book me a cheap flight on Tianjin Airlines for just under $150. Because I was leaving the day after the Dragon Boat Festival when people would already be back at work (or for kids, sitting their end of year exams) I was able to get these at a much better price.

So, on Tuesday 23 June I was up early doing a final clean of my apartment and packing the rest of my things ready to meet May at the bus stop at 8am. Because I hadn't caught many buses in Wenzhou and didn't know which one to take to get to the airport she decided to come with me to make sure I didn't get lost. So, off we went. Firstly, we had to get to Wenzhou so on the bus we hopped to catch the ferry in Obei. After we made it across the murky river we were lucky enough to see bus number 42 a few minutes later that would take us directly to the airport. That trip probably took about 45 minutes. We arrived at the airport at 11am, well before my flight at 12.35pm.  The airport was small but very busy, so as we waited we looked in the gift shops to pass the time.

I arrived in Tianjin at 4.35pm after a brief stopover in Qingdao and was picked up by one of the Chinese workers from English First. After a 30 minute drive we arrived at the apartment I would be staying at in the middle of town. There I met the HR assistant Rita, who let me in and showed me how everything worked - everything is written in Chinese of course, even trying to work the washing machine and the remote on the aircon can be like a puzzle sometimes. However, it is so nice being in a big city and I am surprised by how beautiful it is with it's old buildings, statues, parks and the river that is perfect to run along. I am definitely going to like it here.