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