About

Great Wall of China at Badaling

I graduated with a BA in Management from small university in the mid-West, then hopped on a plane to begin my adventure as a Foreign Teacher in Beijing, China.  When I arrived in August 2007 I planned to sample a new culture, new cuisine, do some traveling, and get by on as little Chinese as possible.  Then after a year, I’d return to the States to get a “real job.”

That was three years ago, and since then I’ve had more than a tourist’s introduction to the culture and food, and collected stamps in my passport from seven Asian countries.  One year turned into another and another and now I’ve come to call Beijing home.  Somewhere along the way I decided that Chinese wasn’t that hard after all and I figured out that my pronunciation was halfway decent.  I’ve been teaching junior and senior high students at Ren Da Fu Zhong, a position for which I’m both under-qualified and overpaid.  I wonder almost every day how I got such a sweet job teaching at the Harvard of Chinese high schools, and there’s no question that I’ve been blessed.

Likes: skiing, other cultures, reading, new recipes, walks, my students, Wikipedia, organizing, accomplishing goals, bartering, games, hosting friends, personal finance, travel

Dislikes: John Eldredge, The Shack, mushrooms, pretentiousness