Welcome To C.I.T.

Well, I am continuing in preparing for our next trip to China as I practice writing Chinese characters.  Both Maureen and I are focused on this next teaching year in Changzhou as we do our shopping and cleaning the clutter out of our home here in Saskatchewan, Canada.  Part of the preparation is checking with friends still there to see what our technology needs will be.  Because of a national firewall as well as local firewalls, it sometimes becomes necessary to use proxy servers in order to access the web sites that are part of our world.  Many of our friends in China are using VPN (virtual private network) service in order to find a way around the firewall in order to access sites that are useful as a teacher as well as personal favourites that can get blocked.   Knowing that China isn’t a democracy, is important.  The same rules of society in terms of freedom of information don’t exist.  I won’t make any comment here other than to say, this is the way it is and one has to accept it and deal with it or else decide not to go to China.  That said, a few more photos from our first week in China in 2006.

At the start of a school year, students to check in and meet old friends and teachers in the first week of September at C.I.T.  Outside of the gates to the university grounds, a few companies try to sign up the students for local cellular service.  It’s all about tapping into the university student market for a number of service providers.

Wandering around the student grounds, one can see that many have already moved in and have hung out their clothing to air on the balconies of each university dorm apartment.  Each dorm usually sleeps six or eight students.  The building are not co-ed.  Each dorm building has a security office to ensure that the young men and young women don’t cross the lines of appropriate behaviour.  But, as we learnt while there, relationships will happen in spite of rules and regulations.  Of course, more will be said about this in future posts.