We found a place for you!

Friday night (March 5) we returned to our Beijing hotel and a note which scrolled “we found a place for you! You leave tomorrow!” The next day we learned that we were going to go the city of Nanning in Guangxi province in the south of China to teach 14 year olds. This turned out to be false information but we will get to that later.

The train took 30 hours – by far the longest time I have spent on any type of transportation. This time we had the top bunk and it was a pretty pleasant journey except for the fact that the music/communist propaganda and overhead light was on all night. We thought that this was the way these old trains worked but right before we got off the train we noticed the one of the bottom bunk passengers reach under the bedside table and turn up the music. Turns out you could turn off the lights and the speakers too! Why they didn’t I have no idea.

We got off the train having no idea what to expect. We were greeted by Ms. Dang, a fellow teacher who informed us that we were actually going to a city called Chongzuo about an hour and a half to the west of Nanning and only about an hour away from Vietnam. We also learned the name of our school, Guangxi Normal University for Nationalities; we were actually going to be teaching college freshman who were only a couple years younger than us!

When we arrived at the school we met Mr. Deng who showed us our apartment. The apartment was above and beyond anything we expected. It is brand new; we are the first tenants. Massive living room:

two bedrooms, two balconies, an office:
and a kitchen:
It is also fully furnished and someone bought us everything we need from spices, to stationary, to toothbrushes, to umbrellas! The picture below is taken from our back balcony and shows farmers burning their fields to plant their crops:

In the morning we found a campus which is a total construction zone. Only about a third of the buildings are complete and everything else is a mess. This is the partially constructed library:
and this is the building we teach in:

The campus is also very remote. It is located in the middle of farmland and it takes about a 20 minute rickshaw ride to get into the Chongzuo city center – which by China standards is only a small town. I don’t think many people have seen foreigners around here. Everyone we pass stammers “hello” and then giggles furiously with their friends. We will give a longer description of the school, students, and our classes next blog.