It's finally going to happen. I'm going to China.
Well actually, it's 12 months away, but I'm going to need every moment of it to get my Chinese into any shape. My wife and I have decided to up stakes for 8 months and take our daughters around the world from December 2007 until August 2008 (I'm blogging about this separately).
Our first stop will be China, and although we'll only stay for 2 weeks, we'll hopefully fit in Beijing, Shanghai and Xi'an. We have an old friend who we met in Germany when we lived there, but who has since returned to Beijing. Hopefully I'll call in to the folks in Chinesepod to say ni hao (or zuijin zenme yang, or whatever ;-).
If anyone out there has any recommendations about what to see, how to see it, how to prepare from a language perspective, all advice is welcome. I'll already had some very useful advice from my teacher here in Cork.
The trip is obviously a very exciting enterprise with lots of preparation required, but it's also a great spur to turning up the effort in peeling Mandarin a bit further and faster.
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1 comment:
Envious I am.
I am making some longterm plans for a protracted holiday with my family but more like 2009 (at least I have three more years to practice as consolation).
I am sure you will be practically Chinese by the time you go ;)
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