A new beginning

Today is my last day as a Halliburton contractor.

I have accepted a position that will take me around the world to a small town of Shenzhen.
Though I am skipping ahead of my story as I won't be there till September.

My trip begins at IAH in the early morning hours of Thursday August 4th with a plane trip to San Franciso. Once there I will meet up with several teachers who are flying in from around the nation for this program. At 1:55pm we will board our nonstop flight to Beijing and assume the positions we will be in for the next 12 hours.

The program opens with three weeks of intensive training in August at Beijing University. I will be studying Mandarin and earning a Teaching English as a Foreign Language professional certification. While we will be busy during the day with scholarly pursuits, they have plans to keep our evenings busy as well. Nightly dinners and a trip to the Beijing Opera are two events they have told us they have prepared for us. The first Saturday in Beijing is a special all-day trip to the Great Wall of China. Other tours they have scheduled for us are trips to the Forbidden City, the Imperial Palace Museum, Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven. As August comes to a close we will finish our training at Beijing University and take a first-class train ride across the China countryside to Shenzhen.

After more orientation and welcoming ceremonies in Shenzhen, I will move to free western-style faculity apartment with air conditioning, bathroom, telephone, television, Internet access and utilities.

Other benefits of my employment besides the apartment are round trip airfare, China entry visa and work permit/residency card with unlimited access between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, a paid 3-week vacation during Chinese New Year, January/February, plus usually one week in October and one week in May, and vacation travel bonus of 4000 RMB at the end of my contract.

Shenzhen, as China's first and most successful Special Economic Zone, attracts high-achieving people from all across China and ranks first in the nation in per-capita income. The Shenzhen government has placed a high priority on making its school system the best in the country. English training plays an important role in those efforts, and this very well-supported program is the result. Shenzhen is the only city in China that offers such a program.

Shenzhen, as China's first and most successful Special Economic Zone, attracts high-achieving people from all across China and ranks first in the nation in per-capita income. The Shenzhen government has placed a high priority on making its school system the best in the country. English training plays an important role in those efforts, and this very well-supported program is the result. Shenzhen is the only city in China that offers such a program.

Shenzhen has the linguistic advantage of being a Mandarin-speaking city, like Beijing, but with a warm climate. Because the city has grown to a population of 4 million in just 24 years, all the facilities are new and modern. The policy of assigning only one or two English teachers to each school will allow you to be well integrated into Chinese society, while the close proximity to Hong Kong gives you a convenient access to an English-language environment when you want it.