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I know a lot of people in Chengdu that play Dota 2 but like none that play LOL… which is odd because LOL is all I ever see people working in electronics markets playing. CS:GO is infinitely more popular here than any BF or CoD game, probably because of all the decent servers in and around China.
This is pretty much why you should buy AppleCare if you ever buy any fruit computers or devices. The normal warranty is really lacking, whereas the applecare one is quite good. On an iPad it includes free repairs for this kind of thing, worldwide. It’s pricy, but if you’re already paying a premium for an iThing you could probably swing the extra hundred bucks.
Lower back being sore isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If it’s sore and DOMS-y that’s pretty normal for deadlifts since you are (and should be) using your erector spine and stuff. If it’s actually in constant pain then you might have a problem.
Pretty much any gym will sort of rip you off for the short term. It’s almost always some scheme like 180rmb for a week, 400RMB for one month, 800 for six and 1200 for a year.
Your best bet is to find one a nice hole in the wall full of swole elderly Chinese guys or get one of the big gyms while they have a promotion going on. I haven’t found one in Chengdu yet, but I found a great gym in Qingdao when I lived there that was like 80RMB a month and had Soviet era weights but was really well maintained and fun to go to.
Again I only know Megafit since I go there, but there were a few months last year where they had a 110-ish/month promotion which isn’t too bad. I think most of the big gyms do this every now and again.
I’m surprised it took you so long to find a Guqin teacher. Between ChuanDa and the music school there are a lot of small-ish music schools in and around the place (kind of hidden, I guess) that normally cater to kids, but definitely teach adults as well. I’m learning Guzheng now and I’ve seen/heard pipa and guqin lessons around there as well.
oh davey,
There is no way to legally teach at a college without a FEC. You can probably still find employment of a legally dubious nature at many schools or universities anyway, though. You should go to the schools in person and ask if you don’t have any connections that could help you out.
Since you’re on a spousal L visa, it’s entirely possible for you to find a job and then get converted over to a legal Z visa/residence permit, though. Normally the laowai in question would do nothing besides provide a myriad of documents during the application of the FEC and worker’s permit, most of that stuff is handled by the Chinese employer. Really, even in a 100% legal and above board situation, the most the foreigner would have to do is get a check-up and head to the PSB to get a new visa and then the residence permit, and sometimes a big company or school will even do that for you. (Not the check-up, unfortunately)
So no, there is no way to work legally. Yes, there are “work arounds” insofar as you can find plenty of illegal, low-risk work. And yes, there is a way to possibly change your visa into a legal Z/Residence permit, but it depends more on your employer than anything.
Most big supermarkets like Auchan and Carrefour have them, as well as most of those smaller supermarkets in the basements of big shopping centers like Wangfujing and Ito Yokado. Chinese name is 青柠檬 which just means “Green Lemon”, but they are limes.
Those basement supermarkets are the best for strange and exotic produce. The Ito Yokado one even has avocados… for like 50快/斤 🙁
The new test is much better than the old one. It actually tests useful Chinese as opposed to the old one that tested Chinese for crazy people and you had to study specifically for the test if you wanted any hope at the higher levels. Even native, college-educated speakers had issues with it.
The new test I feel that, while knowing what’s on it helps, someone really good Chinese could still do well going in blind.
Warning: You have to handwrite a lot on 4 and above.
New or old? What level are you taking?
If you want to take the old test, which they still offer in a few locations around the country, Korea and Japan for some reason, you’re too late for this year.
The New HSK gets given a lot more and
http://www.chinesetesting.cn/gonewcontent.do?id=3174072 has a complete list of test dates and http://www.chinesetesting.cn/gokdinfo.do has a list of test sites which looks really annoying to look through as you can’t search by city or province and have to look at every damn place in China. I know Sichuan Daxue gives the test, so you could probably go to their office and ask as well.
Party Congress is in session, so yeah, everything’s been a bit shit for the last couple weeks and it’s coming to a head. We can hope it ends up clearing up in the next week or so, but I’ve been reading a lot of reports and weibo stuff that it might be here to stay…
Another thing for anyone having issues:
If your VPN is giving you a hassle, run it in TCP mode and it should work fine. UDP packets seem to be blocked the hardest right now. This is also why stuff like games/ventrillo/mumble/skype might have been acting up for you lately. Running a VPN or whatever will not fix this problem, however. Just gotta wait.
The N64 probably never saw any traction in China. Really, only the PS2, newer handhelds (DS, PSP and beyond), and current generation of consoles have had any real presence over here, despite still being technically illegal. You’d have more luck going to Hong Kong or looking on Taobao. Outside of some party heads’ kids, I doubt anyone has had one in China that didn’t bring it over from somewhere else.
You ain’t gonna find it at a second-hand shop, is what I’m sayin’
You might find one of those iQue things which is basically a controller with an N64 emulator and a bunch of preloaded N64 games, but I don’t think that’ll serve the purpose you want.
Here’s a bunch of N64’s on taobao, I couldn’t find smash bros for it though. A lot of Melee and Brawl, though!
Find out when the semester starts and just come to Chengdu a couple weeks before that. Generally the shortest visa you’ll get is a 90 day tourist, and that should be more than ample time to get set up and enrolled. Chengdu has a lot of really nice and affordable hostels so you can live very cheaply while you get settled.
People have already said it, you just need to hand over your tuition money and they will absolutely accept you into their language program and get you set up with a visa, if you need one. The language programs are not actual degree programs, so there is a whole lot less red-tape involved in and around them. When I lived in Hangzhou I know of people who showed up to Zhejiang University (One of the more prestigious unis in China, think Stanford or something to Tsinghua/Beida’s Harvard and Yale) a couple weeks into a semester and as long as they paid up, everything was fine.
I’ve heard mixed things about ChuanDa’s Chinese program and generally good things about the Southwest School for Nationalities. Really though, their programs won’t differ all that much so I’d just see who is cheaper (probably not ChuanDa) and go with that. You absolutely do not have to live on campus, as far as I know. I know ChuanDa makes you fill out a whole thing saying where you are living off campus, but that’s pretty standard if your visa is under their name.
http://www.google88.cn/web/scu/ here’s an incredibly sketchy looking site, but I promise it’s legit. It’s a bit hard to navigate, but it should have all the info surrounding Sichuan Daxue’s Chinese program.
Justin-
The problem is that you don’t have a bachelors, which is a necessity to get you a working visa, which is necessary for you to teach legally and the school to legally employ you. While, if a school really wanted you, could either 关系 their way around it or just photoshop some lame facsimile of a diploma to give the PSB, this is becoming less and less worth the effort for schools. This summer new legislation was passed making the fines and risks for employing illegal foreigners much more severe. There was also a pretty big crackdown in and around Beijing, Shanghai and even a bit in Chongqing and Chengdu… and as a result a lot of schools that used to hire illegally are not doing so any more.
I would say it’s still completely possible for you to find a job, but you would probably have to come here first. Most schools that deal in illegal hiring and the like don’t do a lot of overseas recruitment because it’s simply too much trouble. Schools that would hire you overseas are doing so because they are generally above board and you technically have to hire people from outside of China due to the whole rigamarole surrounding the Z-Visa. This is a huge gamble on the schools part (They will spend a lot of time and money and 关系 on a new FT before they even get over here, so if the teacher flakes out or fails at getting a visa the school gets burned), so a school just hiring any schmuck with a white face is definitely not going to go to all that trouble.
If you come here you’ll be able to find a job under the table very easily. I know plenty of students and people from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia who have teaching gigs when they should technically not be able to hold any English teaching job legally, so it’s not hard. I used to be a teacher, now I’m a grad student, and I get job offers almost every day just walking around downtown.
That said, if you legitimately have a passion for teaching, I wholeheartedly recommend NOT coming to China to teach ESL. Stay in Canada, get a degree in education, and if you want to come to China or Chengdu use those actual teaching credentials (Knowing French will make this much easier, as non-English foreign language teachers are harder to come by) to find a job at one of the many international schools there are around. You’ll get paid something between 10x and 20x the salary of your average 补习班 teacher, have far more vacation time, more benefits, be treated more fairly, and above all else given respect and actually treated as a teacher.
Any ESL job you get, especially if you’re teaching illegally like you will be doing, will not be anything close to actual teaching. At best you’ll have a few decent 1-to-1 students or teach some adults and high school kids who actually give a damn while being mistreated, underpaid and generally exploited by your school, and at worst you’ll be paid to be a white-face a babysit kids for a couple hours a week.
Sounds harsh, but I’m speaking from experience. I taught in China for over two years in both the public and private sectors, and now I’m getting a graduate degree in education because I’d like to teach at a real school and make a difference at some point. My two years teaching didn’t give me a whole lot of useful experience (Most schools in Europe and NA will sort of glance over teaching ESL in Asia on your resume, by the way) outside of learning and the ins and outs of how poorly run the English education system is in this country.
edit: internet is really weird today!
