Traveling the World

Here’s the quick breakdown of the latest. If you hadn’t heard, I was insanely close to being fired last week. I pulled a rabbit out of a top hat I swiped off a hobo and I am still employed. I know I almost got fired because I was paid my salary in cash (which they NEVER do unless you ask for an advance or they are firing you).

Anyways, we didn’t find a new apartment so Mark and I will be living in my 700 sq. ft. apartment for another month. It’s not too bad. It’s small but we manage it quite well. When I need privacy he goes out and vice versa.

The school had a Grand Opening for the new center that was built. It’s the building directly to the right of the building I live in. They spent about 1 million RMB for the whole school and for marketing (about $150,000). For the event this evening I (and every other foreign teacher) wore a suit. I had 1 picture of it but the angle and lighting were terrible and it just makes me look terribly flaming. Deleted that one.

So in the morning (before I went to the Grand Opening party) Mark and I took a 10 kuai ($1.80) cab ride over to the si men kou (a really poor area of town with amazing clothes shopping) and bought some things. I bought 2 pairs of pants for $15 each, a jacket for $17, another jacket for $14, and a pair of dress shoes for $10.

I really need to make a trip to Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou this month to buy good winter clothes, because in the next week or so it’s going to start getting insanely cold. Apparently, according to my co-workers who are foreigners, it stays insanely cold until the beginning of May. And then we have the blistering heat for 5 months. Goody goody gumdrops.

I started teaching my chinese friend Vicki how to dance salsa. Some friends suggested that I can get the school back on my good side if I can make a good outline of how I could teach a salsa class to the students as part of a Culture Salon (and follow through). At the same time I can use their amazing wooden floor in the classroom to teach the classes, and get my name out there as a good instructor. All the while I get a chance to perfect my instructing style so that when I start my studio up (yeah, I’m trying to start a salsa studio if you didn’t know) here I’ll have a good pattern of how to teach moves and styling.

Things are a bit hectic right now but I’m going to try to post more…

Mark is still living in my apartment, and we’re trying to find one. I don’t know if i mentioned the 3 bedroom apartment in Alex’s building, but it’s about 1800sq.ft and worth about 2000rmb a month. Figure that’s about $320 a month. Very expensive for our city, even though the location is the reason for such a high price.

I decided that the best way to get back into salsa dancing (and earning extra money on the side without causing New Oriental to fire me for doing “part-time work”) is to open my own studio. The only reason this is possible is because several friends and students have shown a desire to learn. I’ve calculated that, to be really fair, within a few months from now I could be earning 12,000rmb a month on top of my salary from New Oriental. Once I earn enough money through this to afford a really nice studio, I could start earning closer to 50,000rmb a month or so from salsa

My plan is to first find and teach some people for free as to get myself back into the swing of dancing, as well as use them to find my teaching style. Then I’ll teach people to become instructors so I can run different levels of salsa in one class so not everyone is stuck doing the same thing. I can attract more students by doing free social dancing on university campuses (also like my old studio).

Well that’s what I’ve been doing these past two weeks.. I hope to post a bit more, but there is also not much new going on.