School’s Back! September 2019 Reflections

School started again in September, and I began my third year teaching at Shenzhen Polytechnic. For all three years, I’ve taught English as a Foreign Language to students in a marketing major preparing to potentially study at a college in Australia. As a result, these students take a lot of English classes. I usually teach writing and speaking, but this semester I’m also teaching listening. There are only 24 students in this year’s program, so they spend about 18 hours with me every week. They haven’t gotten sick of me yet…but I’m sure my novelty will wear off soon.

Over the summer, my school built a new gym that has a beautiful indoor swimming pool that I’ve been making use of about 2-3 times a week.

Recently, the school added geese and ducks to the ponds on both West Campus and East Campus. Geese are so mean!! If they see you looking at them, they will honk loudly and even start to chase you! I even saw two geese fighting with each other one day. The fight ended with one goose swimming off alone. It was so sad. Students like to take pictures with the geese and feed them, which always amazes me because the geese are clearly demonstrating angry and territorial behavior.

Mid-autumn festival gave us a 3-day weekend!

Martin and I along with our friend Jacky wanted to get out of Shenzhen but …where? Jacky and I have a co-worker who has an apartment at Silver Beach, a place none of us had heard of or been to before. He gave us directions, and we left early Friday morning to avoid the traffic. Two hours later, we were in a small town bursting with new construction just waiting for the day the high-speed train line was built bringing all the tourists.

For now, Silver Beach is nearly empty.

Another co-worker joined us and the five of us hung out on the beach all Friday afternoon. The water was not very clean and was so warm it brought little relief from the summer heat. Thus, we didn’t do much swimming.

But we did rent a sailboat for an hour! John had never been on a sailboat before, but Ted knew how to sail and Martin had some experience too. Soon, we were in a boat attempting to sail into the waves and away from shore. It was very difficult to sail away from shore. The waves kept pounding us back in and there were a ton of people, including kids, swimming in the area. I don’t know how many people we hit with our boat. One woman was wearing an inflatable tube, couldn’t swim, and was in water over her head. She could not get out of the way of our boat and we couldn’t avoid hitting her. The worker who was helping us get started had to push her away from the boat. It was crazy! We asked him why people swam here even though it was so dangerous with all the sailboats and jet skis. He didn’t have an answer. Regardless, once we got going, we had a blast. We were soaked by the end, but we were all happy. Definitely a highlight of the trip!

That evening we ate at a local restaurant owned by a Czech expat. His coleslaw tasted just like my grandma’s. It was delicious.

Our second and final day at Silver Beach, we rented e-trikes: two wheels in the front and one in the back. They were surprisingly hard to drive, but it was still fun to explore the city that way. We went to a farther section of the beach, which was not as well developed. The people watching there was glorious.

We rented some umbrellas, but the guy we paid had overstepped his boundary and made another guy really mad. It was like we had gotten into the middle of a turf war. We ended up having to move to different umbrellas to help the man appease the angry boundary guy.

Then we saw a foreigner arguing with a local guy who was renting jet skis. Later, we talked with the local guy and found out that he didn’t have a clue as to what the foreigner was saying. He thought that the foreigner was upset because a boat had capsized! But in reality, the foreigner was upset because the local guy had driven his jet ski too close to his wife. Once the locals realized their mistake in translation, they thought the whole situation was hilarious. They were not at all concerned that they had nearly hit the woman with their jet ski.

Golden Week is October 1-7.

The 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China is the first week of October, and we’ve been seeing preparations for it all month long. VPNs have been shut down. Twice as many guards are on duty at the gates to campus. They are wearing helmets and bullet proof vests (but have no weapons). Red Chinese flags line every street, path, and park. With the protests in HK, Chinese nationalism is alive and strong in Shenzhen.

Both Martin and I have been working a lot this month, so we haven’t had much time to go traveling too far. However, we have explored Shenzhen quite a lot. We went to LianHuaShan park, one of our favorite places in Shenzhen. Afterwards we had a drink at the local brewery Rich Kat and at pizza (cheese-less for me).

The 22nd marked the 17th anniversary of my brother’s fatal car accident.

I wish I could have made some Ben Bars but alas. I like to live my life very deliberately on this day. If possible, I like to do something new. Sometimes that’s as simple as eating at a new restaurant, other times it’s more elaborate.

This year, Martin and I decided to hike the most famous hiking trail in Hong Kong: Dragon’s Back. In the three years we’ve been hiking in Hong Kong, I had never been on this trail. Martin went with our friend in 2016, but the weather was so gloomy that they couldn’t enjoy any of the vistas.

The weather on the 22nd was perfect: mid 80s, small breeze, low humidity, clean air. We headed out early, which was good because it took us about four hours to get to the trail head. We took two trains to the border. After crossing into Hong Kong, we took four more trains and finally a bus. Whew!

Along the way we found a wet market, which was bustling and had beautiful looking veggies and fruits. It made me want to live close to this market.

The Dragon’s Back trail is only 8 km long and takes just 2-3 hours to hike. It only had a few stairs and is filled with beautiful vistas and some shady forest paths. It was a little crowded but was still one of the best hiking trails I’ve been on in Hong Kong.

As an added bonus, the trail ends on a beach! We grabbed a late lunch and then went for a quick dip in the water before making the long trek back home. I hadn’t done this trail before mainly because it is a bit farther than most of the other trails we hike. Also, the bus ride to the trail head was super scary! We went straight up and then along the edge of a mountain in a double-decker bus! The road had no shoulders and lots of traffic! I kept saying to myself: if it’s not scary it’s not worth doing. This is my mantra that helps me step outside of my comfort zone.

Now, we are busy preparing for a week-long trip to India. Our Indian friend is getting married and invited us and a group of friends to attend! I’m so excited. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post some pictures of the festivities on Instagram and Facebook during the trip.