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Hello and greetings from Zhengzhou Henan China. Here I work as an English conversation teacher trying to get the young ones speaking English. It really is a great position and love it. Just a short background about me but then maybe no one does care. Home of course is Boston, Ma and seldom get my backside home mainly because it is a long flight.

I often sit back in my apartment and try to remember things form the past ad wonder why things did happen as they did or what did I get out of it. Sure ithas been a great life and yes indeed it takes a lot out of you if you are living in a foreign land like I have been doing. Of course rememebr when I took my first position in a distant land teaching English.

My first post was in Japan. Oh wow! A nice place but in many ways lonely, but where i wa sit was just a lovely isolated island out in the middle of the ocean with several smaller islands nearby. There were few foreigners and not many tourists as the island had nothing really to offer those who would want to be there. The only exception were the beautiful beaches and diving if you like this sort of enjoyment. I liked living here for 9 months and the netizens were super. I did se 2 missionaroes frpm the mormon church. The island had a catholic priest frm the states which was great and 2 other teachers which comprised that of foreigners. Ok this was my time to do my best, hope the people will learn and then go on with my life. The only drawback was trying to find things in the supermarket but then my students did help me. I could purchase fresh fish but declined as the smell was worse than my own feet.

I did spend 11 years after that in taiwan where i did the same thing and enjoyed it tremendously. Worked at 2 schools as this land was expensive and the school gave me nothing except a flat hourly rate. The other schoolgave me a nice salary but nothing else. There were many foreigners in taipei but many were of great woderment and some were just not suitable to do the job. Others were drunks, womanizers or thse seeking cheap one night stands and some were just plain questionable. I do remember gettinto into a tussle with one guy as he came to class drunk and did not fully know what the heck was going on let alone knowing how to really hold a class. the school being late saturday afternoon did not seem to fully care and kind of let him do his own thing. he was a real jerk really but well that wa shis own problem not mine. Anyway life here was good but hard. You had to work very hard in order to survive but then many people did not fully care.

I remember getting sick and ended up in the local hospital. i had no other options and needed mediacal attention fast. The docs and nurses did speak somewhat English and gave me loads of TLC since i was a foreigner in a strange land. One thing thatI did like was a large room of to the left of the emergency room where I was put while receiving iv drugs and givena few shots. they puta heart moniter on me and was watched to make sure I remained alive and not dying on them. The cost was borne by the school which had insurance for me but think it was very minimal as compared to the states. I had to stay for more than one day here and after that felt much better. I had a bad case of food poisioning but well this can take place anywhere, right?

Remembering that Taipei is a growing city with 2.5 million inhabitants but 1.9 million motorcycles plowing their way all over the city. You had to be careful when crossing as they are so stupid at driving you might get hit which I did and the driver just threw up his index finger at me and took off faster than a speeding bullet. Only if I had a rocket handy would i settle for that jerk. Off again back to the hospital by ambulance since I was banged up. The nurses and docs remembered me and once again gave me TLC. Then a cop came and tooka report. He felt sorry for me that as a foreigner iwa shuirt. He hoped he could locate the person but with so many of them driving around it was like mission impossible. Anyway if only I had a plate number. Sorry but then it happened so fast I could not get anything. A few months later I again was hit but not bad. Just a bad bump and this time a girl was the driver. She took off her helmet and fully seeing who I was started to cry. i gave her some reasurance that nothing was broken no blood coming out but I was ok. She was very sorry and I thanked her for being so kind.

More later