Traveling the World

Next we struggled through a 25 hour train journey to Chengdu in which we had to sit the entire way. In Chengdu, we experienced a minority performance and were treated like royalty by the staff at the theater. We played with pandas and raccoons and ate spicy hot pot food. We hiked to the Fuhu Monastery and slept with the monks for a night and got to see their prayer service in the morning. We went to the world’s largest known Buddha at Leshan.

From Chengdu we went to Xi’an, a city filled with terrible pollution much worse than what I experience in Wuhan. It’s so bad that the 5 of us couldn’t breathe after riding rented bikes on top of the old fortress walls (Xi’an is 1 of two cities in China that has a wall still completely intact). In Xi’an, we also saw the Terracotta Warriors, which turned out to be quite boring for me. In Beijing, we went to the Forbidden City (another boring tourist trap) and took a bus three hours north of Beijing to hike up to a little-known and rarely-visited section of the Great Wall called Simatai.

After 16 grueling days of travel, I’m glad to be back in my new apartment. I went to my school and got my schedule and met my students and co-teachers. I’ll be teaching 2nd grade, which means my kids are 7 years old! My school is 3 metro stations south of my apartment, and the metro station is an 8 minute walk from my building. My other option is to ride the public bikes about 25 minutes, which I think is a much better option for my health! I’m excited to be teaching at a public school because it means I can be a real teacher and not just another white face being paid ridiculous amounts of money for no reason. Stay tuned to see what happens next!

I left the Fort Lauderdale airport at 9pm EST and arrived 5 hours later in Los Angeles at 11pm PST. While waiting in line to check-in with Air China, a cute Chinese girl passed by me. About an hour later while waiting to board the flight, the girl approached me and we start talking. It turned out the seat next to her was empty, so I sat next to her for the flight. Her English name is Landy and she’s very sweet! She lives in Beijing, but she helped me find my way through the airport and got one of the employees in the airport to show me where to go. He got me first in line at the check-in counter!

The flight to LA was crappy, but the flight to beijing was 10 times worse. I didn’t sleep more than an hour and a half or so. The upside was that unlike American companies, Air China gave us several free meals and all the drinks we could down. I helped myself to some wine.

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I’ve already experienced the huge language barrier, but I’m trying to figure out what people are saying I’ve also received a few stares from the locals, and I haven’t even left the airport. I’ve also received some nice smiles from the ladies

Update: I’m finally in my hotel room and have internet, though it’s very slow. I met with the foreign director and other staff members from the school. I’m staying in this hotel for a week while they get me an apartment. Their summer interns are also being quartered here. I’ve gotten a Chinese cell phone number, so feel free to call me at +8613554632163.