TravelBio

  The school year is nearly over; I feel like a kid again—yeah, summer break! The students will be in school until July 4 th , but I’m finished on the 29 th of June. So, what’s on the agenda? Earlier this year I had a bunch of different ideas in my head as to what I could do when my contract was finished. Maybe I’d travel in Eastern Europe. Maybe I’d have another job lined up. Maybe I’d visit home and then go traveling in the fall. I hadn’t given much thought to coming back for another school year, and when Sisley, my boss, asked me I initially said I wasn’t interested. Sisley even said I had the option of coming back for a semester, but by that point Mike had invited me to travel with him to India for a rickshaw race in January (more on that later), so I told Sisley I had plans at the beginning of 2017. She surprised me with an offer to stay through December, basically for the fall application season. This spring Joanna and I have also grown close, and I hoped that ...

  On our way to the holiday apartment we stopped for snacks and drinks at a local convenient store. As soon as I stepped out of the shuttle van and got smacked by a cloud of hot, humid air I was reminded just how far south we’d come; it was after midnight and the temperature was still close to 30 (over 80 Fahrenheit). After getting past the momentary heat shock, I looked around and noticed streetside food stalls, bright buildings, shirtless guys playing cards, and tanned skin—it seemed more like Vietnam than China to me. Streets of Sanya After the three day weekend for Labor Day in early May we had one more holiday before summer vacation: the Dragon Boat Festival. I’m still not sure what the holiday is for, but I ain’t complaining about an extra day off. Originally the vacation was scheduled from Thursday, June 9 th to Saturday the 11 th (then we’d be back for work on Sunday; those weird schedules again!). But as it turned out the main campus was hosting the Ch...

Damn Hangzhou traffic. Well really I should say damn Didi drivers! Didi is the Chinese version of Uber. Katherine, one of the Chinese counselors, ordered a ride with Didi to take Joanna and me to the train station Friday afternoon at 1:30. Our train wasn’t scheduled to depart until 3:30, so I assumed we had plenty of time. The key word in that last sentence is assumed. By the time the driver made it to the school and we were on our way it was after 1:45. Then he took the one road we should have avoided, the road that’s plagued by construction and always a parking lot. I kept thinking he’d realize the mistake and take an alternate route ASAP. There I go with my assumptions again. He was following the GPS directions, and my guess is he was a part-time or new driver who didn’t know the local area. Many Didi divers don't actually know the city well and just use their smartphones to get around Progress was painfully slow, and as 3:00 came and went we were still miles...