As I look back at my journal (which I ended up keeping for less than a month because I am terribly slack) I am amused by my first few days of my new life.
I arrived in China late on a Saturday night and began teaching on Monday, two days later. Talk about a period of adjustment!
1st Full Day (Sunday): It's customary, it seems, to greet new and 'honored' staff with a wonderful Chinese meal to introduce them to the culture and the staff with whom they will have the privilege of working. So on Sunday I had this customary dinner with my boss and at least 12 to 15 other people. We went into the restaurant and my boss took me to the seafood area and asked me to point out which seafood I might like cooked. (There were tanks all over the walls in the room, holding fish, lobster, crab, and other things I don't like to mention or name.) Sadly, I hadn't realized what a picky eater I was until I moved here... so I kindly tried to tell him I rather liked vegetables instead. So he ordered the seafood for everyone else and 'mountain food' to please me, too. (To this day, almost 2 years later, I am still a pseudo vegetarian when I dine out. My province is very famous for its seafood.)
We sat down at the table and I was overwhelmed with Chinese people. smiles. It still hadn't really hit me that I was living in a foreign land and would be surround by people who, to me, were all Chinese and therefore looked the same. (Please forgive the stereotype, I rather feel it is instinctive, for better or worse, and until I started getting to know people, I had difficulty telling them apart. Beautiful black hair, black eyes, a wonderful golden skin color... all. of. them.) We were seated at a large round table with the biggest lazy susan I had ever seen before. And that was just the beginning of the differences. The people. The table. The lazy susan. The utensils (chopsticks, which I didn't practice with at all at home. sighs. silly me.). The foods. The aromas (some good, some fishy, some... interesting.). The amount of food. It was all so overwhelming!
Then I went to Walmart. Hahahaha. I know what you're thinking. Holy cow?! There's a Walmart there? Yep. It'd just opened a couple of months before I got here. smiles. The Father provides for His children, I tell ya. (Although it's not quite like the one at home, it's still a blessing to have something familiar nearby.) So I was able to gather some snacks and supplies for my new home, which was temporarily a hotel room.
My hotel room was pretty nice, a 3 star kinda place. Very nice. The beds, however, are very Chinese there, which in vernacular means hard. Very, very hard. Like the box part without the mattress. And they rationed the TP, only giving me about 1/3 of a role!! Well, you know how quickly I went through that. In any case, yes, it was different from home, but not a bad place to lay my head.
The end of my first day came with wonderful, exciting, glorious fireworks. I didn't know then that the celebration wasn't for me, or that they weren't that infrequent. In fact, I was to learn to live with them most everyday.
But that night, though I was tired, it felt like a party to me.
I arrived in China late on a Saturday night and began teaching on Monday, two days later. Talk about a period of adjustment!
1st Full Day (Sunday): It's customary, it seems, to greet new and 'honored' staff with a wonderful Chinese meal to introduce them to the culture and the staff with whom they will have the privilege of working. So on Sunday I had this customary dinner with my boss and at least 12 to 15 other people. We went into the restaurant and my boss took me to the seafood area and asked me to point out which seafood I might like cooked. (There were tanks all over the walls in the room, holding fish, lobster, crab, and other things I don't like to mention or name.) Sadly, I hadn't realized what a picky eater I was until I moved here... so I kindly tried to tell him I rather liked vegetables instead. So he ordered the seafood for everyone else and 'mountain food' to please me, too. (To this day, almost 2 years later, I am still a pseudo vegetarian when I dine out. My province is very famous for its seafood.)
We sat down at the table and I was overwhelmed with Chinese people. smiles. It still hadn't really hit me that I was living in a foreign land and would be surround by people who, to me, were all Chinese and therefore looked the same. (Please forgive the stereotype, I rather feel it is instinctive, for better or worse, and until I started getting to know people, I had difficulty telling them apart. Beautiful black hair, black eyes, a wonderful golden skin color... all. of. them.) We were seated at a large round table with the biggest lazy susan I had ever seen before. And that was just the beginning of the differences. The people. The table. The lazy susan. The utensils (chopsticks, which I didn't practice with at all at home. sighs. silly me.). The foods. The aromas (some good, some fishy, some... interesting.). The amount of food. It was all so overwhelming!
Then I went to Walmart. Hahahaha. I know what you're thinking. Holy cow?! There's a Walmart there? Yep. It'd just opened a couple of months before I got here. smiles. The Father provides for His children, I tell ya. (Although it's not quite like the one at home, it's still a blessing to have something familiar nearby.) So I was able to gather some snacks and supplies for my new home, which was temporarily a hotel room.
My hotel room was pretty nice, a 3 star kinda place. Very nice. The beds, however, are very Chinese there, which in vernacular means hard. Very, very hard. Like the box part without the mattress. And they rationed the TP, only giving me about 1/3 of a role!! Well, you know how quickly I went through that. In any case, yes, it was different from home, but not a bad place to lay my head.
The end of my first day came with wonderful, exciting, glorious fireworks. I didn't know then that the celebration wasn't for me, or that they weren't that infrequent. In fact, I was to learn to live with them most everyday.
But that night, though I was tired, it felt like a party to me.
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