First, there will be a “Birthday Party” on October 22nd, followed by a Halloween themed Movie Night on October 29th and finally, finally a real Halloween Party on October 31st.

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Right now, we are picturing the students attending classes along with the Chinese students for math, Chinese, physical education and other classes, like art and music. The classes will be primarily in Chinese, with an English speaking teacher to help students, who need it.

Other classes, like English, social studies and other humanities will be taught by a Western teacher, using Western methods. Individual thinking and creativity will be encouraged and cultivated.

Guilin Sunny School is a progressive, well appointed school, with professional, free thinking teachers. The school currently has some foreign students and is fully committed to the goal of creating a parallel program for international students, outside of the national testing system. Class rooms are available for our exclusive use.

As parents, we are bringing together curricula from our various home countries (US, UK and Australia) to create an effective program, designed to help our children learn to be not just scholars, but leaders and creative thinkers as well.

Unfortunately, the timing of our organization of this program is a little awkward, as school is about to begin. A few of the kids in our group, including our two children, currently attend Guilin Sunny School and our hope is to get the program up and running soon, so our kids can join the program this semester. Other parents have already paid for this semester at another school and they will join this program at the start of the next semester.

At this point, the program is starting to gather momentum and we invite all interested parents to join us and to help create the curriculum and environment for the school. I can be reached at scott@filley.net or at 139-773-96705. Contact me and I will add you to the online collaboration workspace for the international school project.

We will have a small “After-work Party” this Friday, march 19th in Shangri-la’s shiny new U-bar. Please feel free to pop in and bring your friends.

For the long version, please click here

As it was too late to inform everyone we decided to start the tour as planned but make a little hike a little further down the original destination and visit the house of the family of a sunny hiking club member:

Those of you that subscribed to our newsletter (hint, hint) had the chance of joining us and the Sunny Hiker Group last Saturday to the strawberry fields in Daxu. If you missed the tour or had to work, here are some photos:

After the great success of our first joint Foreign/Chinese hiking tours we decided to give our hiking group its own platform.

On http://www.guilinhiking.com you can find from now on the announcements of the new tours as well as a list of previous tours. We also included a bbs-forum so people can meet, share photos and discuss.

As always, the Guilin Hiking tours are free of charge (you only pay for your own transport and food). Just sign-up and join us.

The hiking leader, Mr. Johnson Xu, cordially invited the “Guilin Expat” population to join in the hikes and see a part of their chosen home that they may not experience otherwise. In his own words:

“Guilin is very popular and easy hiking place .You can find many hiking lines including river, hill and plain etc. For our local hikers, we don’t like the hot scenic place now. These places are too much commercial operation, so we design the hiking line by ourselves and seek for original and healthy points. After this, we connect those points in map and begin our hiking .We can use the mini money to earn max natural happiness. Sometimes we just spent thirty yuan per one hiking line.”

If you want to be informed about the next hikes scheduled, please click here and sign up for our newsletter. We will send out the route and description in time for you to decide to participate.

For some first impressions see the photos below, or go to the Photo Gallery for a more extensive collection of pictures.