The Apartments

Our living Quarters in Nanjing

Highlight of the day...

Emily:

As I was observing Krista's class today I experienced one of those awesome moments that only happen to white people in China.  Honey, one of our students, gave me the strangest look.  Her mouth hung open and she started pointing at her eyebrow. "Teacher--yellow!  Teacher--yellow!"  I bent down until I was eye level with her.  "Yeah, my eyebrow is yellow, huh?" I said, "Do you want to touch it?"  She reached out her tiny finger and stroked my eyebrow.  "Teacher--yellow!" She exclaimed again, and recoiled her hand.  The fact that I have yellow eyebrows is apparently unnerving to Chinese children.

Soren:

So! I am in charge of walking the students from class to class at the end of each period. Today... who was it.... I think it was Cindy... but I might be wrong. (They all blend into each other.) (Eww... that's a strange image.)
ANYWAY! She took my had as we were walking down the hall. As I was thinking, "Oh what an iconic moment!" She looked at my hand and began to pull on my arm hair. "Teacher!" She said, "Teacher- uh!"
I looked down and said, "Yeah, my arm is hairy. Funky huh?"
She then proceeded to scratch her head with one hand and her armpit with the other and then chattered something in Chinese to the students behind her. They all answered with laughter. Apparently I have now become 'teacher monkey.'
In other news I have suddenly become immensely fond of bananas.

The Lantern Festival

 

Sunday turned out to be a day of adventure.  Although the plan had been that after church we’d come back and rest, we ended up navigating our way through the heart of Nanjing’s Confucius Temple.

Getting to Church is about an hour metro trip from our school.  We meet on the second floor of a snazzy hotel.  The hotel refers to us as the “BYU group,” since they apparently can’t post anything having to do with a church. The branch is basically made up of English teachers.  There’s us, a large China Horizons group, and several other freelance teachers.  One member of the branch actually teaches at our same school. 

During Relief Society, one of the sisters announced that the lantern festival would be that night at the Confucius temple.  (The lantern festival is the official end of the Chinese New Year).  Maddie, Morgan, Krista, Heather, and Jenna stared me down as if to say “we MUST go to that!”  Since it was the chance of a lifetime, we decided to go. 

I had one of the sisters tell me what metro stop to get off at and we headed out.  I was excited, but I had two concerns: 1. I was wearing weird Chinese tights that, although warm, were falling off me. And 2. I had high heels on.  But going back to the school for a change of clothes was out of the question, so I just decided to deal with it.

Getting to the right metro stop ended up being quite the debacle. The stop I had gotten from the sister at the branch didn’t match any of the stops at the token station.  We played a serious round of charades with the metro workers until Soren finally got one of them to come over to a token station to help us figure out where we were going.

When we finally got there, we emerged from the metro and got some food.  I shimmied out of my tights, since they were half way down my thighs and Soren put them in his jacket (I think I gave a few Chinese girls a good scare during this process). It was Soren’s birthday, and he was determined to get some chicken feet to nibble on.  He was really enjoying them, but loved me enough to let me have a quick bite.  After filling our stomachs, we entered the flow of Asians heading toward the temple.

Soren's birthday treat

The chicken foot

Me trying a bit

Nom nom nom

 

The temple was in the center of a whole temple-area thing.  It was a neat place filled with shops, lanterns, dragon decorations, and lots and lots of people.  We took pictures of the things around us, but the Chinese people took pictures of us.  One guy finally worked up the courage and asked to take a picture with us.  We agreed and for the next 45 minutes we were stuck there taking pictures with random Chinese people.  Some just wanted pictures with me and Maddie (the blondes), some just wanted pictures with Soren (the tall handsome man), and some didn’t care who they got their picture taken with so long as they were white.  It was hilarious.

Unfortunately, my feet had started killing me at this point.  I was wearing comfortable wedges, but I had been on my feet for about 3 hours, and I knew I had several more hours to go.  I tried to maintain a positive attitude, but I was desperate for a place to sit down.

We tried KFC, but there were NO available seats. We were able to snag one chair and we took turns sitting in it as we ate.

We hung around for a few more hours and finally found some empty “seats” on a round about.  It was a cool festival—we even saw a couple Tangled-style lanterns go up. One fun thing about the lantern festival was seeing all of the fun masks people were wearing.  Maddie bought a cute one, but the rest of us were content just looking at them.  While we were sitting on the roundabout, however, a few Chinese men approached me with a mask.  They indicated that they wanted me to put the mask on, so I did.  Why not?  The men then took a few pictures with me.  That started it all over again, and we were swept into another photo shoot.  This one didn’t last as long.

The man who gave me the mask eventually approached me again, and I took it off to give back to him.  He smiled and shook his hand, indicating that he didn’t want it back and that I could keep it.  It wasn’t as cute as Maddie’s, but hey, it was free!

Getting back to the school was really painful for me.  Soren was a dear and gave me a piggy back for a little bit.

Other than that, it was a wonderfully successful outing and lots of fun.  For Soren, it was a birthday he’ll never forget.  

Preparing ourselves for the festival

Soren is jealous

Soren and the dragons

My mask

The Adventure Continues...

 

Compared to my first China dorm room experience, we’re living in the Grand Hotel. Soren and I have a nice double bed with an actual mattress…I know, impressive.  The shower actually has hot water and there’s a toilet paper holder next to the toilet (this means that the toilet paper doesn’t get soaked every time we take a shower…kind of a problem last time).  Each room also has a flat screen tv, so we’re able to access Asian soap operas and Chinese Mickey Mouse 24/7.  We even have heaters!  Unfortunately, we froze for the first few nights because we weren’t able to figure out how they worked.

Our first morning here, we were introduced to the cafeteria food and Phoenix (our native coordinator for those of you with short term memory loss) gave us a tour of the campus.  It is a gorgeous school.  We have a bamboo forest right in the middle of it.  There are also ping pong tables and badminton nets set up all over the place.

When Phoenix showed us our classrooms, I was shocked.  We have our own bright yellow building for our classes.  It has a supply room with a printer, two drama rooms with stages, a gym room, several other classrooms, and two stocked kitchen rooms.  The only thing the building doesn’t have is a heater, which means we’re pretty cold by the end of the day.  I have to keep my gloves on the whole time. 

Our Yellow ILP Building

Soren behind the Bank of China desk for our students' store.

Typical Cafeteria food...don't ask what it is

Catfish Head...Soren's favorite

After Phoenix finished the tour, we decided to head back down to the ILP building to put some supplies away.  We basically dumped everything in there and then went out to explore Nanjing.  We found a fun area we can the smorgasbord where you can get all kinds of tasty Chinese treats like milk tea, meat on a stick, cane sugar juice, fruit, pretty much anything you could want.

Eating the amazing "burritos" China style

Squid, fish, veggies--all on a stick

 

 

 

The next morning was Saturday.  As the head teacher, I had scheduled a full day of meetings, classroom set-up, and supply room organization.  I had a bunch of copies to make, and the teachers had a bunch of lesson plans to write. Soren and I headed down to the ILP building early to unlock everything and get started. 

Let me just say, convenience is not China’s strong point.  The door to the ILP building turned out to be nothing more than a storage unit-type door.  To unlock it, you have to step on it with your foot and insert the screwdriver-like key into the inlaid lock.  We had not had great success with this the day before, but Soren approached the task undaunted.  He inserted the key into the lock as I held the door down with my foot.  He began to turn the key, but the lock didn’t turn with it.  The handle of the key popped right off, without much of a struggle.   Meanwhile, the blade of the key was stuck in the lock, and there was nothing we could do to get it out.

Soren and I stared at each other for a few moments before we burst out laughing.  We made the trek back up to our dorm rooms where I had to call Phoenix with the unhappy news.  She replied with an astonished, “Oh my Gosh,” and proceeded to tell me that she couldn’t do anything about it until Monday. 

I was not very happy.

I ended up conducting the training meetings outside in the warmth of the sun.  I got a killer sunburn on my nose, but at least we were warm.

I’m going to skip over Sunday for now…there will be a separate blog post about it (be excited).

On Monday morning, Phoenix had the repairman fix the door, but we still weren’t able to get into the classrooms until 1:30 pm.  Since the teachers had their first lessons with the kids at 2:30, there was a fair bit of scrambling going on.  All things considered, the first day actually went pretty darn well.

Now they have a whole week of teaching behind them, and I’m hoping this next week goes a lot smoother.

The broken key

The broken key and the sad Head Teacher

Training meetings outside

The Campus

The Journey to China

As Soren and I awaited our flight in the Salt Lake Airport, I was filled with hope: hope that everything would run smoothly, hope that the school would be ready for us, and hope that we’d get to the school early enough to do some training meetings.  I was hopeful…but I was also expecting the worst.

My expectations were met.

Surprisingly, all the flights went exceptionally well and everyone got their luggage when we reached Shanghai.  We met up with all of our teachers and they are great.  Their names are Maddie, Morgan, Krista, Heather, and Jenna.  I was feeling bad for Maddie because the day we flew out was her birthday, but Korean Air (which is a fantastic airline) ended up giving her a cake on the flight.  Not just a slice of cake…a whole cake. She shared it with us during the layover in Seoul.  We were all feeling pretty good about things as we landed in Shanghai.

At the baggage claim I tried to ignore the worries that plagued my mind: what if we don’t get all our bags? What if there’s no one to meet us? What if…what if…what if?  But once we had our bags, my mind eased a little bit.  We breezed our way through the customs line and found ourselves entering a cattle run surrounded by dozens of people with names on signs.  There were so many signs that I wasn’t sure where to look first.  We made it all the way through the cattle run without seeing a sign for the Nanjing ILP teachers and I was worried that I might have missed it.  I pulled our group over to the left and discovered, to my dismay, that all the other ILP groups were doing the same. 

There were four ILP groups that had traveled to Shanghai together: Nanjing, Changzhou, Nangbo, and Bungbo. None of us saw signs for our schools.  This was the exact kind of situation I had wanted to avoid.  The other Head Teachers and I spent the next hour and a half going back and forth between an information desk with a phone and our groups, trying to get a hold of someone.  I tried calling my school, but none of the numbers I had went through.  One of the groups was able to get in touch with their school and they told us that an email had been sent to them from ILP informing them that the teachers wouldn’t be arriving until Saturday.  It was Thursday. 

I kept trying to hook up to the Internet, but the airport connection required a password, and the instruction page was only in Chinese.  We convinced the lady at the information desk to let us use the Internet there for a small fee and we sent ILP an email.  Nothing seemed to be working and I was getting worried.

Finally, I resorted to borrowing Maddie and Morgan’s iphones to text the ILP directors. That established a direct line of communication.  They let us know that the schools were on their way.  In the end, my group spent about 7 hours in the Shanghai airport.  We took up a huge section with all our luggage. It must have been pretty funny to the airport staff.

We rode on a bus with the Changzhou group and I don’t think the school had anticipated how much luggage we would have.  The Changzhou group had 20 people and our group had 7.  Each of us had two big bags along with two carryon items.  When the bottom of the bus was full, they had to fill the back of the bus with the rest of the luggage.  The men in the groups formed an assembly line to get it all back there.

I was told that the Nanjing group would be dropped off on the highway somewhere until our own bus could come to pick us up.  Fortunately, this ended up not being the case.  The bus took us all the way to the Changzhou school and we met our bus there.  Once again, we had to form an assembly line to get all the luggage off the first bus, and then a new assembly line to get it on the second bus—or I should say van. 

We were finally on the last leg of our journey.  I sat next to our coordinator (her name is Phoenix), and began to sort things out for the semester.  Upon arriving in Nanjing, she took us to McDonalds and then took us to the school.  We arrived at about 11 p.m. and began to haul our luggage up the 5 flights of stairs to our dorm rooms. You could say we were exhausted, but that would be an understatement.

I’m grateful for the experience.  If we can get through that big of an ordeal, we can get through just about anything. Right?

Maddie and her birthday cake

Waiting in the Airport

Still Waiting in the Airport

The luggage in the back of the bus

 

Facelift

I’ve decided that the blog needed to undergo a facelift since I’m no longer just me, I’m part of a we.  The new title of this blog is “Two to Tango” for the following reasons: First of all, Soren and I love to dance and the Tango is one of the most difficult and complex.  Both partners have to work together in perfect synchronization to complete even the most basic steps. The second reason is that since getting married I’ve come to realize that married life works a lot like a Tango—you have to work together if you’re going to succeed. None of the moves work if only one partner is doing them.  We’ll still trip and fall and make mistakes, but we’ll be there for each other.

So, as Soren and I dance into a new world of adventure and excitement, we hope you’ll glide along with us, because even though it takes two to Tango, there’s plenty of room on the dance floor!

Step #43-- Perspective (or first world problems)

The other night I put up a big stink because we ended up going to Wendy's for dinner instead of Chuck o Rama.  Now in my defense, I was promised Chuck o Rama, and I'd been looking forward to it all evening...but it was still kind of a dumb thing to make a big deal about.  After all, I got a spicy chicken sandwich and a frosty.

I'm amazed by the kind of mindset I get into living here in the states.  It's sort of a "I can, so I should."  But shouldn't it be a "just because I can, doesn't mean I should"? I have so many things at my fingertips here and I should just be grateful for whatever I get.  After all, in a few weeks I'll be back in China where I may or may not have hot water to shower with.

Sometimes I catch myself complaining about "first world problems."  Things like: running out of room on my ipod, the phone charger being out of arm's reach, or thinking there's nothing to eat in the house (when really there's a fully stocked fridge and food storage in the basement).  As I prepare to go back to China soon, I'm trying to change my perspective on these things.  In China I won't have a fridge, or food storage.  I won't even have a mattress.  So I think it's time to be grateful that I have an ipod, a phone, and wonderful parents who are willing to take me out to eat.

So thanks, Dad, for taking us out to Wendy's.  One of these days Soren and I will take you and mom to Chuck o Rama--our treat.