Welcome to the Jim Shelley travelogue
Hello, and welcome to my site. I'm Jim Shelley, a 33 year old American man who has been living in the People's Republic of China teaching English and studying Chinese, among other things, for the last few years. I am using this site as an online photo album to post and share various pictures and stories of my experiences and travels. Inspiration for this site came from the "Night Of Ugali" section originally set up on my Uncle Ken's website. Some of these pictures could be previously seen at this weblog site. This is mostly meant for family and friends, but all are welcome to view. Click on the links and have a look around. Enjoy!
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A little about me: I was born on Oct. 2nd, 1976 in Ft. Worth, Texas, U.S.A. My parents are both from Louisiana, but my father was in the U.S. Air Force and so my family moved around a bit in the southern and eastern parts of the U.S. (Texas, Mississippi, Virginia, West Virginia, Missouri) while I was growing up (my family being made up of my father, my mother, my older sister Elise, my two younger brothers Johnny and Mark, and me). I usually tell people that I'm from Morgantown, West Virginia, although really I haven't lived there for quite some time. My parents currently live in Springfield, Missouri. I studied physics and Russian for a double major B.A. at the University of Virginia and graduated in May 1999. Soon afterwards I joined the U.S. Peace Corps and went to Tanzania, East Africa, where I taught mathematics and physics at a village secondary school from Sept. 1999 to Dec. 2001. I returned home for a short while after Peace Corps, then got a TEFL certificate and came to teach English in China. From Oct. 2002 to Aug. 2004 I taught English in several schools and studied Chinese at Lanzhou University in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, northwest China (refer to map below). I started teaching English to Tibetan high school students in Tongren (Rebgong), Qinghai Province, northwest China in Sept. 2004. I moved to south China to be closer to my now-wife Lan Lan in Aug. 2005, getting a job teaching English and math for one term at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, Guangdong (Canton) Province. Lan Lan and I were married in Sept. 2006. From Feb. 2006 to July 2008 I taught English and mathematics to grade school students at Oriental English College in Shenzhen, Guangdong (Canton) Province, south China. I also began a distance study master's degree in International Development through Tulane University in Sept. 2007. I returned with Lan Lan to Guangzhou in August 2008, where she and I began studying at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies--her for a master's degree in Translation (Chinese-English-Japanese) and me in an intermediate level Chinese language class. I have since put the Chinese studies on hold and am teaching English at the Alcanta Foreign Languages Vocational School. We now plan to move to the U.S. in summer 2011.
