That Huadu place sounds alright! I wouldn't mind living there for a while. A lot of Hunan birds there eh? Sounds great! [edited]
I'll take whatever I can get, the local girls with loose morals, cheap booze, whores, sounds like a free for all, hehe!

It is exactly like that at times. I bet the whores have most disappeared due to the knock-on effects on the Dongguan crackdown, but you will always find gold digging [edited].

Not all of them are from Hunan though.

Not really a safe place mind, there's plenty of gangsters (mind you, they tend to be cool with the foreigners), people that want to have a scrap after drinking too much, etc.

It's not exactly paradise either, a tad grim and post apocalyptic in a sense but with loads of tacky flashing lights shining from the walls of every second dodgy KTV.

If you've more or less lost the will to live, it's a perfect place to be.

I worked in Huadu for a bit one year. I worked in Guangzhou for about two years.
Indeed they are two very different places. Guangzhou is mostly very first-world. Huadu is mostly second-world but not at all bad. For me, it was Guangzhou 20 years ago, or so.

I actually liked Huadu. It can be decent value for money so to speak. Re all of these hordes of Hunnanites running all over, I actually did not run into that many.

I even managed to learn Cantonese, or a fraction of it in Huada while in Guangzhou I would say that the mix was 40% Cantonese, 60% Mandarin.

There is a great night market in Huada, and no, I don't mean a sex market at all, but an entire part of the downtown core that converts to outside stalls in the evening, all of them run by shopkeepers anxious to get of their goods that don't sell well. I redid my entire wardrobe for a pittance, bought great electronic stuff, mobile phones, etc., etc., bicycles, you name it, even an air-conditioner that was not selling well, way below market or store prices.

Like someone wrote, all of the major department store chains are in Huadu, most of them quite nice, and all of them offer free bus service to and from from various neighborhoods from about 10h00 until about 20h30. Taxis are plentiful and cheap.

People in Huada are generally innurred to foreigners and they tend not to stare, not to gawk and not to make blatantly rude comments. I could sit in the KFC at RT Mart and not be subject to endless laowai remarks. I miss it.

Greater Huadu is also one of the automobile manufacturing centers of China so while there is industry, it tends to be more green friendly.

Now, Almayca. One of my best friends worked for years at Almacya. He was always paid on time and he was provided with a proper visa (meaning a Z visa). He had his own private apartment, although some teachers did share (I don't know whether by choice or not). Yes, he did go to different schools but he was ferried around in the company van, most of the time, at not charg and he did have two days off every week. After about 3 years at Almayca (and I think that the co-owner is Canadian, not Taiwanese), he went to work for one of the major employers of foreign teachers in Huadu (Peizheng College) and once at that College, he regretted it every day. Eventually he left that College, returned to Almayca, worked another year-and-several months...and God bless his soul, then he went to Thailand for winter vacation, took a stroke and passed. My friend, who could be as difficult as the day can be long, had nothing but moderately good things to say about the place.

As I am getting old, I cannot for the life of me remember the other LTC in Huadu that is indeed Taiwanese-owned (not Almayca for sure). It is that LTC that is the job from hell in Huadi. The co-owner, a lady who name is ??????, a Taiwanese, is the bitch from hell. She cheats her staff regularly; they are made to attend meaningless, endless and unpaid staff meetings; they live together in slum apartments, and yes, they are raided all the time by the PSB because she only provides F visas, and the teachers are caught and deported. It is that school that is infamous, truly infamous, in Huada, for its wacko foreign teachers. She actually hires people on the dole from Canada with no experience, cooks up false papers, etc., etc. During my time in Huadu, we all knew that the DOS for that school, a Canadian guy with no education at all but a nice body and handsome (if you get the picture) had been a Day Shift Manager at Harvey's Hamburgers in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and thus he was qualified by Lidia, yes, that's her name, to be the DOS.

If I wanted Guangdong, but not Guangzhou or Huizhou or Meizhou, then I might choose Huadu. And I wouldn't turn my nose up at Almacya. My poor departed friend was making more at Almacya than he did when he went to Peizheng.

Cheers and beers to all of you.

Sure, Almayca really is probably better than Peizheng College. In the same way that catching gonorrhoea or syphilis is not quite as bad as getting A.I.D.S.

As I said, Huadu is cool place, but is sleazy and grimey. Not a good place to take your mother on vacation really.

If you actually want a good job there, don't teach. It is actually arguably better to start up a business there, if you've got the capital.

There are shitloads of people from Hunan there. Explains a few of the great Xiang Cai street restaurants across the Darunfa supermarket (when the hell is that going to get it's standard Wal-Mart re-branding like the rest of them?) and some of the woman looking slighter hotter than your average Cantonese bird too. Their accents are bloody weird though.

As for the attitudes towards foreigners, you get it both ways. There's a mixture of both backwards farmer people and the internationally educated sons and daughters of wealthy factory bosses. You get a fair bit of racism aimed at you, yet at the same time some people love foreigners to the point where it creeps you out a bit.

A lot of the illegally employed teachers actually never dip their hands in their pockets when they go out for a drink, they just constantly free-load from various wealthy local people that they know at clubs such as Rolls or Phoebe. So yeah, locals can be quite nice to foreigners, but it gets out of hand at times.

That sounds like hell. I don't think I could describe a worse ESL job even if I tried to!
Reread what you wrote Farmed out/ long hours/ deductions/5 out of 10 and then you said "go for it"
By "go for it" do you mean " run from it"?
Why on earth would you tell someone to sign up for a year of that when they could take a comfortable job teaching in a public school?
less hours/ less stress/ no changing schools/ no offcie hours/ pleanty of free time/ a proper time table

Certainly wouldn't take that job indeed, lol.

Although Huadu is quite a cool, mad, little, place that is a tad grimey (at least in Xinhua town) with great street food, the most hilarious examples of Chinese disco clubs where you may struggle to even buy your own drink due to curiosity from the wealthier locals (don't be a freeloading twat though) and good cheap massages (and apparently good cheap whores too), there's not many good options for work there unless you are starting up your own sweatshop type factory, or simply living up there because of the cheaper rent and are willing to commute. A few of the Africans are now doing this as their trade work does not really require them to report in to an office everyday.

By the way, I got the chance to go to Shiling town once, that's a mental little migrant worker town, apparently there's a few fun places there.

The only two universities that I'm aware of in Huadu are Peizheng college, a private university with an absolutely terrible reputation as shown by posts on here and the administration college, which will probably never employ a foreigner. Most other working options comes from agents and private schools that are not licensed to employ foreigners. Most foreigners that do work there, only come up from central Guangzhou do work up there part-time on days off for extra cash.

That's another negative/positive in a comical way aspect of working in Huadu, it does attract some proper weirdos and nutcases. Teachers that are placed there by agents and have stopped giving a f**k about their work and get smashed and bang random tarts every other night, people on tourist visas, people who have spent time in prison etc.

Although one or two of the foreigners actually turn out to be a good laugh, you will get inevitably get bored of some of them of the fresh out of uni types telling you how hilarious it was to get stoned the other day. You are better off spending time up there with Chinese friends who actually find good places, not just that shitty barbecue next to the river. A lot of the Chinese people in Huadu are quite sound compared to those in central GZ, but the sleazier ones might offer you most shocking of whores in the most shocking of places.

I would not really recommend actually living in Huadu (it will corrupt your mind, haha), I'd only suggest staying there for the odd weekend to see a darker and grimmer side of GZ away from all the bright lights and flashy stuff of the centre. Don't bother staying in the Crowne Plaza or Sheraton though, they are miles away from everything. Just get a 7 days/Home Inn type room in a more central place.

The OP, I think that I can answer your question, at least partially.

Firstly, don't let them put Huada down. Indeed it doesn't feel like the rest of Guangzhou but it has a lot going for it. It is not small by any means and you can find everything that you need in Huadu. Compared to Guangzhou -- it's actually a rather pleasant place. There are lots of huge, huge shopping centers and all of the major department stores are there but the usual panoply of Western fast food restaurants in abundance. It may or may not be filled with Hunan migrant workers -- that is something that just wasn't on my radar when I there.

There are several small sized ESL schools in Huadu and Almayca is about the best of the lot, and considering how awful the others are, that isn't saying much. I think that it is partially Western-owned and its competitor is Taiwanese-owned. You can be expect to be farmed out all over Huadu and the surrounding areas, perhaps even to the western fringers of Guangzhou proper, to various primary and middle-school and even companies, too. Your visa status may or may not be regular -- perhaps you will be offered a Z visa, perhaps you will be offered an F visa with frequent runs to Hong Kong. In any case, please be careful. The Huadu PSB are particularly vigilant these days in terms of foreigners' status in Huadu. You will be offered a shared apartment, in most cases, and your roommates most likely will be 100% psycho cases. None of the ESL schools in Huadu attract particularly sane teachers, to say the least. Few have bachelor's degrees and more often than not, they come run off the welfare rolls. They are "white" however and "native speakers", such as they are.

You will be paid on time but you may find yourself with sudden little deductions from your pay. Overall, I would rate the other LTC's in Huadu as 3.5/10. I would rate Almacya at least as 5/10.

In any case, go into it with your eyes wide open. Your days will be longer -- you will start many times at 06h30 in the morning and finish many days at 21h00 with large gapes in between.

I have recently been offered a position with Almayca Language Centre in Huadu, Guangzhou and I was wondering if any current or past teachers could provide a brief summary of their experience with Almayca Language Centre and Huadu in general.

Also, from what I understand, Almayca does not offer Mandarin lessons. Are there any Mandarin schools in Huadu that offer Mandarin lessons at a reasonable price?