First Day in China Part I

Lots of interesting stuff has happened since I’ve gotten here. During my first day I was constantly writing little notes to myself in my notebook so that I wouldn’t forget to write about stuff on here. Hopefully I get around to writing about all of it one day.

I arrived in Chengdu late Thursday/early early Friday. My first full day here started at 7am as I grabbed what I needed for the day, at a breakfast of milk and bread, and went out to the car.

**Sidenote #1: I haven’t always been the biggest fan of milk, but I can still drink it when necessary. The milk here is so think it’s like half-and-half. When I already have a problem drinking 1%, drinking something as thick as half-and-half seems impossible. I have only been able to drink about ¼ cup at a time.**

**Sidenote #2: Bread is another thing that I do not eat all too often. It’s not that I dislike bread…I just don’t prefer to eat it. However, since I’ve arrived, I’ve eaten more bread than anything else just because it is one of the few foods I’ve seen that I actually recognize.**

I will be teaching at two different schools: Number 4 and Number 7. School Number 4 is far away, so I have a car that picks me up when I go there. However, I only teach at #4 twice a week.

The other school is #7. I teach here all of the other days. I have been told it is about a 45 minute walk from my house, but so far I’ve just taken the tricycle or the bus there. I will write more about the schools later.

On my first day in Chengdu the car took us to #4. There, I met the three other teachers who will be teaching in my same program. One is teaching ESL and math, another is teaching math and chemistry, and the third is teaching ESL and economics. During the meeting, the bell rang. Turns out, the bell was the Chinese National Anthem.

The meeting consisted of going over school rules, classroom expectations, health insurance, and banking. One of the other teachers was very interesting. He is from England, but he has a house in Tennessee. He kept cracking jokes and spoke with a southern twang, but always had a straight face, so we could never tell if he was actually joking or not.

There are no drinking fountains here because it is not good to drink the water. Instead, there are water coolers in every room with little water cups. This proved to be a problem, because when I am thirsty, I like to drink a lot of water. As in, more than what can fit in one tiny paper cup. Each tiny cup was good enough for three gulps of water, and then I’d have to refill it. I believe I refilled it at least 8 times during the meeting.

After the meeting, Tristan was told he had to teach one class. He was okay with such short notice because he taught here last year as well. I sat in on his class. During the meeting I kept thinking “Why the heck did I decide to do this??? I must be crazy! This is all too different!” But then, I watched the students as Tristan spoke with them. They are all so eager to learn and willing to participate that I suddenly felt like this was something I could do.