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“He punched me in the groin. Yeah.. let’s get some lunch.”

This was our first weekend teaching for the semester. With classes throughout the entire day, it’s no family picnic, though it involves many many many families. Class ages vary between 5 and 45. Needless to say we’re not stacking the 45 year olds into the 5 year old classes.

Dan and I have made a reasonable attempt at coping and rationalizing any negative emotion, buffering each with a fantastic stories of dragons, warriors, and non-substantive positive experience fallacies as well as anticipation of upcoming courses of enthusiasm and novelty. More so, I’ve found one of my classes is asking for true english experiences in debate, reading, listening, culture, etc. I’ve invited Dan to sit in on this class and help share in the fun of planning what part of the English world we’ll expose these new speakers to. – we’re thinking The Economist, Wikipedia, Fitzgearld, and Notorious B.I.G.

In the mean time, while the office is used by many for prep work and serious planning, Dan and I have found much joy in the simple task of classroom detox, pranking the English, sharing cookies, and loading up with squeaky toys to put into our pockets for classroom fun.

Starting Friday Dan and I have been sacked with tasks, planning, and a break here and there for a beer or some Oreos. After today’s last class we’ll seek out a local German bar to throw back some imported wine (we’ve quickly become friends with the owner) and then it’s off to Jinan to take care of governmental visa work and a bit of touring on the Company.

So happy together – we’ll take a photo at the end to see who’s still smiling. After the photo it was down to business working out the details of training and teaching. I don’t think it’s going to be too bad. After all I know the material, right?

We’ll see, first class is tomorrow at 6:00 PM. My first test.

-oh, and Dan feels tropical.

A Letter:

In the last month I have been working to secure a six-month job with Aston Schools teaching English. In the last week I was told my Chinese visa was just about secured, I bought my plane ticket, and I found out that my traveling partner was a 100% “go.” So I concluded there was little more that would change my new direction.

I have taken a job in Hohhot (alternately spelled Huhehaote). The city is the capitol of China’s Inner Mongolia with a population of about 2.5 million and densities ranging between 400-26,000/sq mi. The weather and rain fall is fairly mild and many of the images I’ve seen make it look like the American Southwest. While ‘briskly’ cold (current temp is some -20′ C) during the early winter months, it would seem that it warms up quite quickly as it’s only at 3,500 feet. My friend, Dan Tuttle, whom I’ll be traveling and working with, is a close friend from school and has spent a good deal of time in China studying already and knows a great deal of the language. He assures me I’ll learn something of the language, which is nice to think about. However, while in China I hope to enhance my teaching skills and my language skills, understanding more of the language is a large priority with perhaps learning more about the cultural expectations in business as an unlikely second. Who knows what will really come across my plate. In any case it should be a neat way to explore another corner of the world while being paid (meagerly) to do it.

While I’m in CA now, I’ll head back to Arizona after the new year in order to make sure the house is ready to be without me for six-months and to move out. Then I will return to CA where I leave. The job will start March 1st, so I will be departing LAX February 18th, and will be returning (barring any changes) September 8th about ten days after my contract is over.

I think that’s my plan for now, though after I apply for The Great Race things may change. :) Very Good.
John Mizell

I’ve attached a couple of websites for more information about the program and the area.

Weather Averages for the city:

http://www.fwcc.org/neimong.htm#hohhot

Wikipedia Article for the city:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohhot

Aston Schools Website:

http://www.astonschool.com/