Missed out on the last parties? No worries, we’ll let you compensate with our extra-high event-density for the rest of October:

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.

Click here to read our newsletter with more details.

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Guilin is a beautiful place to live, but schooling is a major problem for foreign parents, who are looking for something outside of the mainstream Chinese school system. Now, there is finally an international school in Guilin… almost. As a group of parents, we are working together with Guilin Sunny School in the Seven Star District to combine the best of the Chinese system with the best of the Western system.

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.

Ten little Guilin Expats went out to dine,
one fell into a pothole, reducing them to nine…

Guilin is situated in the “center of a 540,000 square km belt of some of the finest subtropical tower karst known”* Some people even call it the international capital of karst.

Now, karst has a feature of being water soluble, which often results in caves being created. Normally caves form underground, slowly moving upwards when the cave is getting bigger and rocks fall from the ceiling, thus reducing the thickness of the covering limestone.

When the covering limestone gets to thin, they collapse, producing collapse dolines. This is exactly what happened last week in Chuan Shan Dong Lu , creating a giant pothole in the middle of the street.

City management was busy shoveling dirt for a whole day before the hole was filled.

The downside of only shoveling dirt to close the hole is that now the water can not only continue its destructive process from underground, but also rain can enter from the top, speeding up the process. We are sure that this “pothole”will pop up (or cave in) again in the future.

Below two photos of a similar incident that happened in May 2007 in front of the entrance to Seven Star Park. That time it was filled properly by drilling boreholes into the ground and cement the rubble by pumping concrete into it.

* Source: Ru Jin Wen, Karst in Guilin, 1991 University of Science and Technology of China Publishing House
** First two pictures taken from news.xinmin.cn