I’ve decided to make Coldplay’s latest song “Viva la Vida” the theme song of my PST (pre-service training), if not my whole PC experience. If you haven’t heard it yet, I highly recommend going to iTunes and downloading it immediately.
Chongqing – a new home for the next two years. A metropolis. The city is huge and there are people everywhere! If you can manage to find your way to the downtown part of the city, surrounded by giant skyscrapers and major department stores, you could easily imagine yourself in any major Western city – Chicago, New York, whatever!
Chongqing is sometimes called the mountain city, as it is surrounded by hills and mountains. The city streets are also very hilly, which makes for some pretty intense taxi rides (really any experience in a car in China is one where I have murmured many a prayer). The university I will be teaching at (Chongqing Technology and Business University) is about a 15 minute taxi ride from the city center and is nestled in the hills below one of the mountains. The campus is beautiful and definitely takes advantage of their great location. There are hiking trails up the mountain that lead to teahouses and scenic overlooks that help you really envision the vastness of the city.
I was met at the train station by one of the members of the Foreign Language Department and was taken back to the campus. I was shown my apartment that I’ll be living in for the next two years (pictures still to come). The apartment is very spacious and welcoming (and there is a Western toilet!). There is a kitchen, bathroom, a balcony area to do laundry, a living area (and the university was kind enough to provide a TV and DVD player), and two bedrooms. That means plenty of space for all the visitors I expect to see (just let me know when you want to come, so I can make sure to be ready for you!)
I met with several members of the faculty I will be working with including the dean of the Foreign Language department, my teaching counterpart (a host country national who will be teaching courses similar to mine), and some deputies of the Foreign Lang. Dept. Everyone was incredibly welcoming and helpful. I am extremely excited to start the school year! There are actually about 10 foreign teachers at CTBU (only 2 of us are PCVs and the rest are all paid and from all over the world) and we all teach a couple sections of Oral English to English majors (I get to teach the freshman!) and then we all take classes of upperclassmen students who are non-English majors. Apparently every university requires that every student (regardless of their major) must pass a certain English exam in order to graduate. I think they might be able to graduate without the test, but it sounds like every employer in China asks for the results of the test, so if they don’t take it, they will have a difficult time finding a job. I have 2 sections of Oral English from the School of Economics/Business and 2 from the school of Mechanical Engineering. So 7 classes total, and each of them only meets once a week. There rest of the week I will office hours, English corner (an informal setting where essentially anyone who is interested can come converse with a native speaker), and whatever I decide to do for my secondary project.
Because everyone was away for their summer vacation, the university was pretty empty. I am looking forward to returning at the beginning of September and meeting my students and all the other teachers. It was all very exciting, and although I am excited to be back in Chengdu with my host family and the other trainees, I am anxious to get started teaching and I think it is going to be difficult to focus during these last two weeks of PST. We have our language proficiency interview coming up this week and I am terrified. We must manage 30 minutes of conversation with a native Chinese speaker and I am really concerned about my abilities. If we don’t pass this week, we have to get a tutor at our site and then try again in January during IST (in-service training). Wish me luck!
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