Happy New Year!

Happy new year, everybody! The internet is still a little broken here from the earthquake. Most pages from North America take two to three times longer to load and some of them can’t resolve at all. Google and gmail seemed to run a little slower but never experienced any outage — amazing. You got to love Google.

Today is our third and last day of vacation before finishing up this semester. I went to a different language school this morning to try out the classes. I was there yesterday and sat in on a class that was reviewing their exam. They just completed the same book as I did, so it was a good fit. However, I was really disappointed that hardly any Chinese was spoken during class. All of the students asked questions in English and the teacher responded in English, sometimes repeating what she just said in Chinese.

My classes at 云南师范大学 (Yunnan Normal University) end on Friday, January 12. And then what?

The most pressing issue is that my student visa expires March 15, so I have to either enroll in a school to renew my student status, or I can look for a job that will give me a work visa. Unfortunately, although jobs are plentiful they are mostly (a) teaching English and (b) require at least 1 year contract. At worse, this could chain me to a terrible school that jerks me around because they control my ability to continue to live in China. At best, this could be a great experience that allows me to earn the respect of the people around me and motivates me to study Chinese even harder.

Anyway, it would be helpful for learning Chinese to be in a new environment, maybe I would even have something I want to communicate and have people I want to communicate with. Heh. Yes, any job would give me an opportunity to communicate something new in Chinese.

Of course, what I’m most qualified to do is work in communications and information technology for a non-profit organization. But it seems kind of pie-in-the-sky to find a job like that here in Kunming. From what I can gather, there are more than a handful of NGO’s here in Kunming and they are all either related to HIV/AIDS education or environmental causes. I wish I had more direct experience with these kinds of organizations. My work with labor unions and economic justice groups doesn’t really open any doors for me here. And my language skills are still too minimal to be ready for a job interview in Chinese.

In any case, the resume has been resurrected and I’m looking for work.