WHAT?

So, what will we be doing in Qinghai?

To be honest we will be doing a lot of what we do here at MSU. A big difference will be that instead of hanging out with international students from all over the world...we will be international students hanging out with Chinese students!

Bryan and I will both be students studying Mandarin at Qinghai Normal University. It is a school specifically to train teachers. The university actually has a good English department so the Chinese students we have been hanging out with the past two summers have been fluent in English (which makes it a lot easier)! The program we will be a part of actually looks kinda like a tutoring program. We are able to learn Chinese at our own pace and are assigned to a teacher with any other foreign student at our level. (This university actually has other westerners that are there to learn Chinese.) We have been told that on average it takes seven years for someone to learn Mandarin.

For Samuel...he will be enrolled in an international school in the city. We were able to visit the school and meet the principal this past summer. There is a community of foreigners (from the UK, Korea, the US and more) who have pooled resources together to form a school for their kids. We were very impressed with the school. He will learn in English in the mornings and Chinese in the afternoons. Sound familiar? It should! That is what his pre-school was like this past year.

One reason we are trying to leave the end of July is so that we have a few weeks to settle in before school starts for all of us at the end of August.

So that is what we will be up to. We have answered the "where" and "what" questions of this next phase in our journey. Now we are waiting to see how HE answers the "how" question!