In the summer of 2001 I went to China and taught english as a second language. I went through a volunteer organization, I paid $400 and got a plane ticket, room and board, tours of various tourist sites, and amazing people that helped make the experiece what it was. If you are interested in participating in the program it is located at uschinaedu.org
I believe that the application is not yet posted on the uschinaedu.org webpage, but it should be soon. If you are going to apply, please put my name, "Brian Vaughan" under the part of the application that asks who refered you. I am helping them to recruit people from my university for next summer.

The city I taught in was called daxian, or dazhou.. there were 7 foriegn teachers there including me, there were 2 chinese teaching assistants for each of us (none of us spoke any chinese). there were 2 chines laisons (vicky and zaiing), and a professor from coneticut, john, that helped us out.

first we flew into shanghai, that was a fun city... then to chongching, and took a train to daxian. We taught in daxian for about 6 weeks. Then we took a train to Xian, where we saw the terrocotta warriors, and to beijing, which is where we flew home from.

We gave the kids english names so we could remember them.. which is why i refer to them with english names.

here are some pictures from my trip,if you click on them you get the full sized image:

This is a picture of my class:

this is me and the other foriegn teachers, the TA's, john, vicky, zaiing, etc.

bill and steve

one day we went out on a boat..

and then jumped out of the boat

this is the campus of the school we taught at

this is the city that our school was in

this is some of us in a fast food restaurant called "dicos" (pronounced dex by the chinese) it resembled a mcdonalds or something besides that they did not have cheese or beef.. it was mostly chicken sandwhiches, it was a good break though sometimes, after a while the chinese food could be hard on our stomachs.

these are some of elanas kids

this is the forbiden city in beijing


the great wall

another picture of my class

a couple of pictures of kids from my class

tienamen square

a picture of us after playing in the mud one night...

heh.. take a look at this... at least they admit it

the terracotta warriors at Xian, the story is that there was a general that wanted his army burried with him when he died, but they didn't like that idea, so they made statues of them selves instead, each is unique, there are like 3000 of them. A head was found once when some guy was digging a well, and so they began excavating.

this picture was taken inside one of the towers on the great wall..

eating turtle for dinner...

drinking bai jiu and breaking tricia's bed..

me and mike (one of my students)