Campus Life

After moving to North campus, I have been given more time to settle in and will now begin teaching next week. Tomorrow I will visit one of the classes I will be teaching to see how it is organized and to meet the current teacher. There will be a student monitor assigned in each class to help in the class. Each class will have nearly 50 students.

In the mornings around 645am and 930am morning exercises are led outside my building for the Middle School students next door to our university. In the afternoons, students gather to play soccer, basketball, and badminton. There is a cafeteria on campus and during meal times, students are seen in droves with their thermoses and dishes on their way to eat.

I met with Hu Juan (Cindy) and Zhou Hui (Annie) today. Cindy is with the Foreign Affairs Office of Hefei and Annie is with the Hefei Foreign & Overseas Chinese Affairs Office. They have a sister city relationship with Columbus, Ohio, where I used to live. They work closely with Hefei University and we visited one of their campuses close to where I live. I also met Jia Feng (Trevor) who is with their Department of Foreign Affairs and Wu Ke who is a Professor and the Vice-director of the Department of Foreign Affairs. I may be able to teach some English classes at that university as well.

There are lots of little shops nearby like at the previous campus I was on and a large supermarket/mall. There are many of these around Hefei. At this one, the RT Mart, the first floor is a mall with clothing stores, appliance stores, a pharmacy, etc. The second floor is a large grocery store with lots of fresh produce and fish, a bakery, and freshly prepared food. Then the third floor reminds me of a Walmart—a store with anything you could need. On the way out of the mall there is a vendor selling soft serve ice cream. The woman working there already knows me!