My Nomadic Life

Scratch that apartment thing. Apparently I don’t really have an apartment. Kelly and I paid for $10 days to stay at our apt., and the 10th day was yesterday. We were promised that the land lord was coming back this past weekend to fix all of the broken things in the apt and give us a contract. As of yesterday, he wasn’t picking up his phone and can’t be found. Now I’m realizing that we don’t actually have an apt., even though I have a super official piece of notebook paper that is signed by myself and the owner of the apartment.

I should have realized that we didn’t have an apartment all of these past 10 days, but it really was clear to me when I explained it to another teacher. Kelly and I only have one key, no contract, no internet, no showerhead, no door or gate key for the complex (which sometimes means waiting for another person going in to let us in.) If that didn’t make it clear enough, I really realized when I opened our door to two angry Chinese officials who were looking for our apartment ID cards and asking us to sign the census form. All the pantomiming in the world couldn’t get me out of that one. We had to call a friend to explain…what? That we don’t really live there? (Please excuse the cooked dinner on the table.)

Regardless of how I’ve just made the apartment sound, the worst part is I really loved that place. It was huge with giant windows and this awesome bubble/circle window room that Kelly turned into a meditation room. Worse than that is that I have to move AGAIN, which I feel like I’ve been doing since the end of March.

Send me vibes if you can in your sleep. What I’m telling myself is that it’s meant to be, like when I was bug-driven out of Clinton Street apt #2, but then got the chance to move in with Maggie (& Suzy).

Ps..I finally found internet radio (no Pandora in China!) and I’ve been jamming to “Retro 80’s & 90’s” in all my breaks. Don’t mind if I do, Barenaked Ladies!

Beginning Beijing

I arrived in Beijing on Sunday night, August 15, and was luckily picked up from the airport and brought to my dorm, or I’d still be standing next to baggage claim 3. Kelly and I stayed in the dorms on the Tsinghua campus until we found an apartment. Tsinghua (ching-wah) University, the campus where my little international school is on, is actually a gorgeous and huge space with lots of parks, other schools, lotus ponds, swimming pools (oh yeah, that’s plural), etc. People stand outside the west gate and take pictures all the time. It’s the Harvard of Beijing universities. Who knew?

I’m going to keep to snippets so that people might actually read this in their busy lives.

Best experience so far: Successfully teaching my first week of my own 2^nd grade class! (I have 14 wiggly, adorable, bilingual 6 and 7 year-olds, which they’re calling 2^nd grade.)

Worst experience so far: Riding a bike for the first time for 5 min. before hitting a car. (No one injured, but a crazy pissed Chinese woman did scare the living shit out of me, called the police, and it took 3 hours and multiple translators for her to calm down.)

Biggest Success with Chinese: Understanding that the cashier wanted one more yuan and handing it to him without him knowing I’m basically illiterate, deaf, and dumb in this country.

Biggest Failure with Chinese: Attempting to show a taxi driver Chinese cards for my schools address and ending up damn far away in an unknown area in the rain with no umbrella at 9 am.

Things I’m getting used to: shopping for English books on a cart on the street with multiple copies of “Why Men Marry Bitches”, asking “What are the tones in that word?”, carrying lots of water and serious cash

Things I can’t yet get used to: not being able to just “google” anything, remembering which tone is which and adding “rrrr” to the end of everything for Beijing dialect, not using tap water to brush my teeth