Name: MBE (jason)
After living in China for over 6 years, my life back stateside...
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(since 5.14.04)
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I month or so ago I outlined the trip that my wife and I are planning for this summer holiday. Since this time there have been a few changes to the plan. WE ARE STILL GOING, but with a few modifications. We are going to cut out Xian and Yinchuan. This will free up over a week of travel time. The main reason for this is that we will be able to do those cities another time as they are close to Suzhou. We have also requested a change in our current apartment. Our school is moving campuses and we will no longer be on the same block (as we are now). Furthermore, we are wanting to get closer to where most of the other teachers live. As it stands currently, we are about a 15 minute walk from the complex where the majority of the other teachers live. In order to make more time for moving we decided to postpone the cities mentioned above.
The past few weeks have been so busy and crazy that MBE has been the thing to suffer. For this I am very sorry. I will not go into the details, but will say that I am going to try harder to organize my time better to enable me to blog more often. We are currently looking at next school year and student placements. As my students will be making the move from primary school to secondary school, my decision is a bit more difficult than some of the other ESL teachers in my school. Not only am I looking at their language ability, but also social skills that will ensure success at the next level of schooling. This, along with all the everyday stress of school, has been taking a good bit of time.
There has recently been a change in the visa requirements for 'outsiders' working in China. In the past every year I had to renew my Chinese visa. I always had three choices. 1) Single entry - meaning that once I was in China with that visa it was then finished and if I wanted to leave anytime in that year I would have to buy another visa to get back into the country. 2) Double entry - what it says, two entries in one year. 3) Multi entry - come and go as much as you want for one year. The fees for these different visa were different depending on where your passport if from. Americans had to pay the most. For the single entry it was about $50 USD; double entry about $100 USD and then the multi entry was about $200 USD. In addition to the visa we have a 'green card' (well, it is a little book) and what is called a foreign experts card. Now the 'green card' is no more and the visas only come in one style, multi. The good news for me is in the cost. Now there is a standard fee for EVERYONE. It is about $100USD. It is still only valid for one year, but I think that it is only a matter of time before that also changes. 
Only 34 days left of classes before our big summer holiday! As far as our trip along the silk routes, we have made a few adjustments that I will update here a little later once things are more finalized...It totally slipped my mind that this blog is one year old today! Through the ups and downs of the past year, MBE has been my outlet. Starting as an 'experiment' it is now gone beyond the 'beta' stage and is a part of my daily life. For all those who have been reading since the beginning or just a few times, thanks for coming back! I could never have imagined that in one year this site would have been visited 21379 times!?! As a celebration, I have some gmail invites to give away. Anyone interested? Leave a comment with you given and family name and your current e-mail address. (you can type 'dotcom' if you want). Gmail now has over 2.1 GB of storage and keeps growing! 
This past week was our first week back after a week-long holiday. I must say it was one of the longest weeks of my entire life! About the only thing that kept me going was picking up the last Ray Charles CD "Genius Loves Company." I must say it is one of the best CDs that I have heard in a really long time. It started raining last night really hard. It put a hold on our plans to go shopping this weekend. We had planned to go to the local 'BIRD and FLOWER' market. We are not looking for flowers or birds, we are on the hunt for old Chinese screens. They the four-six panel stand up screens that a lot of Chinese restaurants have in their entry-way. I will put a photo up when we find them...
I have recently found a couple of really cool travel sites. They are done in sort of a WIKI/Blog style. One is called "World 66" and the other is "Virtual Trouist." They both allow you to input the places you have visited or wish to visit and create a map. Much like mine below: (From World 66)
After a long break from blogging (for various reasons that I will not expand on now) the students in my homeroom ESL class have been back at it! Check out what they said about their recent holiday off from school. Motime was updating their servers at the exact time that some of my students were trying to post their comments so it is short by 4 comments. 
I know that is have been a week since I last blogged here, but my wife and I have been away on holiday without an internet connection. I must say that it was nice to relax a little bit. We traveled to Xiamen, China (Fujian Province). Most of the trip was very nice. Although I must admit that I had very high expectations of the place. I was a little disappointed. Mainly, there were not the 'western' aminities that I was expecting. Dispite this it was a nice trip. The attractions were nice. We visited several tourist spots and it was not as crowded as I had though. It was really nice and hot (about 30-34°C) and rained almost every afternoon. I have uploaded some photos of the trip (about 50 of them) here. I also added 18 new photos from our visit to my wife's hometown last October. They can be found at the same page. Our favorite spot that we visited while in Xiamen was the Nan Pu Tou Si (Temple).
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