Baby It's Cold Outside

Now that Michael has finished writing his ‘book’ about our last day in India, I can do a quick update on our time in China so far.

Our flight from Delhi to Beijing was on Ethiopian Airlines, which seemed kind of strange but we’d had good experiences with them traveling from Ghana to Uganda, so why not? The 6 hour flight seemed really short, probably because of all our long train rides recently. We had no idea what to expect in China or at our new volunteer situation. That’s the difference between traveling from place to place for a year and taking separate trips to each destination separately. If we were coming to China as it’s own trip we would have researched and read up on it as much as we could. But the way we’re traveling we’re always so busy trying to take in our current environment that it’s hard enough just trying to remember to confirm our flight. That was especially the case in India because we felt our time there was so short. We didn’t even look at the volunteer website again or read through past emails to find out the name of the school we would be teaching at—very unprepared. But I guess that makes it exciting, and that way we arrive without any expectations, which is often better anyways.

So we arrived at Beijing airport (very new and nicer than most in the States) at 6:30 PM. We knew there was an eight o’clock flight to Yantai but we didn’t have tickets yet so we had to hurry. Luckily we made it through passport control quickly (we were a little worried that they would make us show an onward air ticket which we didn’t have, and I had lost the itinerary that we had created the day before). We bought our tickets, bought a phone card, called the volunteer coordinator to tell him our flight, and made it to the gate just as the last bus was leaving to take passengers out to the plane.

As we walked outside to the bus we were hit by a blast of cold air—something we hadn’t felt in quite a while. It was a shock, but also exciting—that cold air smell was nice. The Chinese people on the bus kind of laughed at us and told us (without words) that we should put on some warmer clothes (we were wearing our warmest). The novelty and excitement about the cold quickly wore off as we stood shivering waiting for the driver outside the Yantai airport. We were driven to the college and Byron (Mr. Wong), a local English teacher, showed us to our room. The room is really nice—we have a desk, refrigerator, TV, computer with internet (though internet is not working at the moment), and most importantly hot water and heat! It stays nice and warm in here, but it seems to be the only place on campus that is heated. The classrooms and cafeteria are quite cold, and according to the students so are their rooms. On Wednesday we went shopping for some warmer clothes, that has helped and I think we are starting to get used to the cold.

I’m teaching 2 different classes of English prep. These students need two more years of English instruction and practice before they can go on to be freshman English majors. Michael is teaching the freshman and sophomore English majors. The students are between 17 and 22 and the class size varies greatly from 8 to 40. The college focuses mainly on languages (English, Japanese, and Korean) and prepares students to work as teachers, translators, tourist guides, commercial artists, and mainly flight attendants. Right now our schedule is pretty light and we’re feeling a little lazy (and a little bad too because we keep disappearing into our room to warm up). But starting next week we’re going to try to help out in some of the other English classes.

There’s more to say about the great people we’ve met so far and the great meals they’ve taken us to, but I think I’ll stop here and save some for later. Bye!