Hmm, hello,

My name is Arkadiusz Giemza, but for a few years now I've been using another one - Eric. I am from Krosno, a small town in the south eastern corner of Poland.

For over nine years now I have been living in China, teaching English, travelling, and semi-professionally photographing and writing (which in reality means – wandering around the region with my camera and a notebook, taking lots and lots of pictures, and then putting these pictures on-line and describing my wanderings).

As I have a mountain of other things to do I don't actively promote my pictures/writings (they are available on the net, that is enough for now), so far my pictures/stories have been published in two regional weekly magazines from my home town (Podkarpacie and Nasz Glos), in a national daily paper Rzeczpospolita, and in a monthly Japanese-language from Shanghai called Hu-ism.

I arrived in China in 1999 at the age of 24, in pretty unusual circumstances, some day I will write a book about that, for now a shortened version must suffice.

In the summer of 1997 I graduated from the Foreign Language Teacher Training College of Jagiellonian University. After graduation I worked in the Regional Development Agency "Karpaty" in Krosno for over a year, spending the bulk of my time there writing emails and faxes in English and playing Blood on my computer. And from time to time going abroad, courtesy of the European Commission.

Finally I decided it was not what I wanted, and, as I started to suffer from wanderlust, I left the country and went to London. I loved it there but once again, after maybe ten months, I decided it was time to move on.
Just then, in a laundrette on a rainy Monday morning I found a copy of the Guardian, almost a week old, that someone had left.
Tube strike, drug smugglers in Dover, Arsenal, the funnies. Then I saw this ad: teachers of English wanted, Ankara, Turkey.
I'm a qualified, experienced teacher, I thought. I started sending emails and letters, it wasn't easy, only after sending about 80 (I'm not a native speaker of English after all, and no one wanted to believe I can really speak it), and two months later I got the job.
In Harbin, China.

I spent my first year in Star FLC, by the management called Foreign Language College, and by us, the staff - Foreigners' Labour Camp. The following two years were a blast, I worked for the Harbin University of Commerce. Twice I've been voted by my students 'the best teacher of the department.'
I try to divide my free time between my family (summer) and travel (winter).
I've seen a fair bit of China, went a few times to Hong Kong, to Macau, Thailand, spent two weeks in Laos, some time in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, twice I went to Cambodia. Next on the list is Nepal, then the Philippines, where a friend just bought a house, then the west of China and Pakistan.

In August 2002 I moved to Shanghai and I will probably stay here for a while. I spent five years working in a joint-venture program of Canadian Niagara College and Shanghai Commercial School. In September 2007 I started working for Sino-British College as an EAP and ESAP teacher.
I also do some freelance work for the British Council, as an examiner for IELTS and BULATS.

In September 2003 I became a member of International Press Association.

Regards,
A.Giemza
Zhabei, Shanghai,
10.2008