We haven’t been able to say anything publicly about this yet, because Matt wanted to wait for the right time to make the announcement at work. But he did that yesterday, so now we can openly talk about a new adventure we’re embarking on.
In July, we’re going to China!
This has been our dream for a LONG time. We wanted to get married and live in the US first for a little while before going to China, but ultimately that’s where we feel led to be. We started looking at options about a year and a half ago, but things weren’t really panning out until just recently.
Now we have most of the details worked out, and we can give you a brief itinerary of our plans.
On July 12, we’re leaving the Chicago area and flying to San Francisco. We’ll spend a couple of days hanging out with some friends there, and then we’re flying to Hong Kong.
From July 18-28, we’ll be helping out at an English camp in the southwest part of China. Then we’ll have a couple of weeks to travel (probably to Hong Kong and the Xiamen area) before we need to be in the city where we’ll spend the next year teaching English.
In August, we’ll arrive in Tianjin, a city that is in the northeast part of China, close to Beijing. We’ll be teaching English writing at a university there for the 2011/2012 school year. We’ll be making a decent salary in Chinese standards. (Definitely not a great salary in US standards, less than $10,000/year each). But it’s a great way for us to start out in China and get our feet wet. We’re looking forward to everything God has in store for us this next year!
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We’re a little crazy right now trying to get things ready for our departure, but we’re planning to have goodbye parties both in Indiana and in Illinois before we leave so we’ll have a chance to see everyone at least in a group setting.
The Indiana party date will be Friday, June 17. We’ll be posting an event on Facebook, but if you don’t have Facebook, you can ask us for more details.
The Illinois party date is Saturday July 9th from 6pm-10pm, but we’ll make a Facebook event for that too once we figure it out.
The school where we'll be teaching next year, Tianjin Foreign Studies University. Photo by liangjinjian (flickr.com)