Guangzhou - First two weeks

We can hardly believe that we have been here in Guangzhou for two weeks already. We even have one week of teaching under our belts!

This is a picture of our teaching building on campus at SCUT.  The building is only about a 5 minute walk from our apartment but many of our classes are on the 6th or 7th floor with stairs only. By the time we get to class we are ready for another shower!  The weather has been in the 90's so far with 100% humidity. 

The Andersons, Rick and I are all teaching International Conferences and Academic Paper Writing to Ph.D. students. We are teaching almost 300 students with all of our classes. There are about 103,000 student here at SCUT with numerous Bachelor, Master, and Ph.D. Programs. The number of Ph.D. Students here at SCUT was one of my biggest surprises. I don't know how many PH.D. Students we have at ISU but I'm sure that the numbers are very few compared to the programs that are here in China. But then there are 1.3 billion people living in China. 

This tree is in the Beijing Lu area where there are some really good restaurants with plenty of shopping. We have been to about four very large shopping centers so far in addition to areas such as Old Town, New Town and Shamian Island. 

The New Town area was rebuilt for the Asian Games in 2010. This is the Canton tower that was constructed during that time. Other buildings constructed for the Asian Games include a stadium, opera house, museum and other buildings. The total cost was 15 billion dollars. China likes to do things in a big way!

We have tickets to see Phantom of the Opera in October. The opera is the Broadway production and will be in English with Chinese subtitles. 

This is another picture of the very modern looking opera house. It is made of stone and glass. 

We were checking out the Pearl River on one of our excursions. The Andersons were here two years ago so they have been great tour guides. 

This is a group of seniors that were doing some type of performance under one of the bridges. A Much different group of people than we saw under the bridges in Portland. 

Today was our 2nd time attending church here.  We are members of the Guangzhou English Speaking Branch.  We meet at the Ramada Inn by the Pearl River. To get there we walk about 10 minutes through "dumpling alley", take a 45 minute bus ride and then walk about another 10 minutes to the hotel.  We love it!

Tomorrow we are headed to the health care center to get physicals for our visas.  Even though we had complete physicals before we left Idaho, we need to have thorough exams before they will give us our residence permits. We are not looking forward to the exams but they must be done if we are to stay here for a year.  We will be going with the Cookes because they also need their residence permits. Different rules apply for the Andersons because they are only staying for one semester and are traveling on an F Visa. 

Next week we are flying to Urumqi for our Silk Road tour. School is closed for a week so that everyone can celebrate the organization of the communist party. The holiday is for 7 days which is a perfect time for our first tour.