Day One

Day 1 - Sept 1 2007

    Wow. I feel like I might have just aged a few years. Today was one of the longer days of my life. Party because of the jet lag; partly because I cannot communicate with anyone and feel like a one year old; and partly because I went on a mini adventure and survived! It all really started at about 8am after I had been awake for over 3 hours, had already walked around to find no one, nothing, and no way of finding anything I needed, came back to my room (which is really nice, btw...all brand new furniture, a cool sun room for a kitchen, and in house laundry) with my tail between my legs and feeling completely helpless. So, very uncharacteristically, I started to cry. I think it will be the first on many culture shock moments. A great character builder? It's a good thing I have been working on a book on coping, cause I used a lot of my little tricks today. All day today I kept waivering between 'this was a dumb idea' and 'this is amazing, I am living in China!' I can pretty much guarantee I would never live here long term, mainly due to the communication issues and also people are just different here. I don't want to say they are rude or terrible because they aren't. It just kinda seems that way because they are not boring, proper, overly polite Canadians ...and every culture values different things and the environment is different, etc. I digress...
   
    Culture shock and all, I climbed back into bed, thinking maybe I could just sleep the day away but was awoken by a sound outside my door... English??? I practically threw open the door and came face to face with three other, tall nosed, white faced, native English speakers! Alas, I wouldn't be lonely for the rest of my life! It turns out there are 7 of us crazy foreign teachers. Two Canadians, three (twitch) Americans, and two Brits. I have been blessed with a British boy in the room beside me who just so happens to have lived in China for 12 years so I hope he will want to go on some adventures and be our guide. The only bummer is, so far, none of the foreign teachers seem like people I'd want to spend more than 10 minutes talking with, except two 20 something American girls from Virginia but they are best friends and live together off campus and threes a croud...or so they say...so we'll see.
It turns out I am the only one who is teaching a subject (everyone else is basically teaching kindergarten to grade 3 english). And I got my class schedule today and OMS (Oh my shit) I feel like the balance of these kids' lives is in my hands and I have no idea what I am doing!! Turns out I am teaching a bit of oral English (which is like home EC...a joke and no prep or tests required) a bit of grade 7 and 8 science (which will be mostly vocabulary and maybe a few field trips??? I am working on it) and then grade 7, 8, 10, and 11 math. Booourns! Now, grade 7 and 8 math is no big deal. But then there is Canada prep math 10. This is for students who enroll into this school specifically for an education to prepare them to attend Uni in Canada. So they are pretty hard workers and will probably know more math than I do (oh god,,,what is the quadratic equation again?) But the absolute drama of the whole thing will be my grade 11 "Cambridge Prep" class. That is right. 5 days a week, I get to teach grade 11 students math so that they will write some sort of important test to determine their future. (A levels??? Are those important?) I have ONE text book for the entire span of grade 7s to 11s and better yet, none of them have a text book so mine is The Word. I purposely forgot highschool math the second I wrote the provincial exams...guess there will never be a better time to crack the books and start remembering it again.
Anyways, I have no camera yet because I went to buy one (the adventure part which I will tell you a bit about) but they were all a hellofa lot more money than I was expecting. So it will be a few weeks before I get some pics up. But until then I will make up for it with more verbiage. (I know, not nearly as exciting and I am sure my mum is the only one still reading this far).

    The adventure.....I left the gates of my 5 star hotel/private school today. Wow, big deal. Someone from the school drove me downtown and took me into the bank and practically held my hand through all of it. I would say maybe 2% of Chinese speak English as a foreign language ( I wonder what the real stat is?). So needless to say, bank tellers, salesmen, and bus drivers do not understand me. And I sure as hell do not understand them right now.  But the adventure began when she dropped me off at the 'market' and briefly tod me how to get back when I was done. I really wish we had the technology to pass smells over the internet. The combination of weird, horrible smells I had never experienced, hot, humid air, and a culture that pay no head to lineups, had my head spinning in a matter of minutes. Sensory overload!

    I ended up buying oranges, plums, rice, cleaner (I have no idea what it does but there is a sparkling sink on it so it must be good) an iron, and laundry detergent. Now, without pictures or video I cant really begin to describe to you why I am so proud of myself for managing to get those things. Lets just say I was not buying  the 'when in Rome' philosophy while I walked around watching people gut live fish and put the guts into a bag for people to take home and fry, or when I recognized maybe 5% of the vegetables in the produce section and it turns out I didn't do something properly when I went to buy the bell peppers and they confiscated them from me. (huh?). The bus ride back was equally as much of an adventure. I was to the point where the next person who brushed up against me or bumped into without saying sorry (how dare they;)!?) was going to get a bag of oranges to the head. Also...the staring thing. Yeah, they said people would stare at me a lot. And they were right. I'll just say this though, I can tell the difference between someone staring at me to undress me with their eyes, and someone staring at me because I am an exotic looking woman to them who they are just curious about. I'd much rather get starred at in China any day.