One-by-one each of my obligations in June slowly wrapped up. As the spring semester at the college where I teach English drew to a close, all of my students had various final exams and dwindling levels of motivation. I felt sad to say good-bye to my students knowing I won’t see them in class again.
I also taught a few classes this month to a group of business people who wanted to expand their products to include vegan handbags. So I learned all the relevant terminology, issues, and anatomy of a handbag to help them communicate with their English-speaking customers. Even though these classes required a good deal of preparation on my part, they were super interesting and fun to teach.
Besides wrapping up all my classes, I also spent a lot of time in June working on my final essays for Block 1 of my graduate degree. They are due at the end of August, and I’m thankful I have two more months to research and write them. I have a lot more work to do.
June did not bring much traveling mostly because both Martin and I had to renew our work visas. This means for about 2 weeks we don’t have our passports. Of course our employers do the paperwork at slightly different times, so we never had our passports at the same time!
Despite not leaving China in June, we did have some adventures during Dragon Boat Festival, which was the first weekend of June. Last year, we learned how to paddle a dragon boat. This year we finally watched a competition.
That same weekend we also went to Ma Luan Shan (马峦山), a mountain just east of Shenzhen. It took us about 2 hours to get there, most of it just taking the metro to Yonghu (永湖) the other side of Shenzhen. From the metro we caught a Didi to the park’s northern trail head. The trail started out on a road with fairly heavy car traffic.
We later found a narrow forest path, which was much more fun to hike along.
The best part of the hike was that the trail ended at XiaoMeiSha (小梅沙) beach! None of us had brought anything for swimming, but that didn’t stop us! We bought some towels and swam in our underwear. We found some Chinese barbecue on the beach for dinner and snagged a comfy coach bus for an easy journey back to the Shenzhen metro.
At the end of June, I went to a pop art exhibit by an American artist. It was really fun because I recognized all of the characters in his sculptures and his paintings from the breakfast cereals I ate as a kid.
The exhibit was also in this architecturally interesting new shopping mall, which had a movie theater that was showing free movies before the theater officially opened. That’s why my friend and I found ourselves comfortably watching Kung Fu Panda 3 on a Wednesday afternoon. I love my flexible schedule!
We also had a little work done in our apartment this month. Due to new fire regulations, my school was required to remove all of the burglar bars from the windows. I was elated since I always felt like I was living in a jail with them on there. I think the apartment looks much better now even though I have no idea how I would fit out of some of these windows in the event of a fire. If you want to see what it looked like before, check out my previous virtual apartment tour.
I left for my 8-week summer trip to the United States on the 28th. As I’m typing this, I’m enjoying the beautiful sunny weather of San Diego and catching up with my cousin. Now, time for the beach!