My Town!

While I am in rural China, I'm living in one of the larger towns for my district. In recent years, China has been pushing towards consolidating elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. My town doesn't have a high-school, but it does have a large middle school where kids come from villages up to three-four hours travel away to go to class, and that's where I teach.

Apart from the middle school, there are also a lot of businesses around here that are involved in buying produce from the surrounding fields. This industry means that the town also has things like multiple restaurants, a plethora of small shops, and tractors parked everywhere. It's also on the main (2-lane) road between Dali (population: 600,000) and Lijiang (population: 1,300,000) so that means that it has three small hotels. Thankfully, my small little town also has a supermarket, which is a huge luxury for rural China.

Despite the agricultural businesses and hotels that make their home here, it's still a very small village; if you walk in any direction for five minutes you'll end up in a field with Chinese farmers looking at you and wondering what the strange foreigner is doing. We also get to say things like, "meet at the intersection in 15 minutes," and it's not confusing because we only have the one intersection.

I've been really enjoying my town so far, and it's fun to have the shop owners slowly get to recognize me and meet people around here. It's going to be a nice place to live for the next two years. Sadly, I'm encouraged to not say the name of the town where I'm living because then people would be able to look up the name of the school. I'm also not allowed to share a lot of things on this blog, so just be aware that you're not necessarily getting the full story by reading this.