upon checking the calendar about 2 seconds ago, i realized that i have, indeed, been in china now for a week. considering i feel like there have been enough experiences to constitute about a month, this entry may be long, but i will try not to bore anyone. i can basically break my china stay into two main events (if i must), one being our arrival (and the 2 abandonments) and the other being our trip to the Shiz...so here goes...
1) arrival: fortunately jeremy and i had a relatively safe and smooth travel to our city of Chengde. our screen went out on the plane so we had no movies, but there was no lost luggage, someone was at the airport to pick us up, etc, etc. when we finally arrived in Chengde after a 3 hour drive from Beijing, there were a few instances where jeremy and i would look at each other and jokingly say we would never want to stay in some of the apartments that we were passing...we should have kept our mouths shut. you know the crazy asian markets in movies? with the dilapidated apartments in the background that look like no one lives in them? we live in those. there some perks, i suppose. jeremy has a living room (sort of) and i have an office (barely), but we do both have computers with internet! although...jeremy's internet doesnt work right now so we have one computer with internet. this brings me to the day after arrival. along with jeremy's internet not working, his toilet didnt either at first. day 1 after arrival: i break my key off trying to get into my apartment and leave us stranded in jeremy's apartment with no internet or toilet. as soon as i get a new key from our wai ban, jeremy locks his key in his apartment and we are now stranded in mine. oh! and i forgot to mention that this day began with abandonment #1 by Maggie, our wai ban's assistant. she took us to some police station thing to register for...something...and then left us on the street corner completely lost so she could go to work! we tried shopping at the supermarket at that street corner only to be swarmed by the 2485728490750 employees they have working- all of whom talked to us incessantly in chinese even though we apparently had no clue what anyone was saying. i did buy a pink umbrella on this day and it brightened my mood for a good 12 hours...mark one up for being easily entertained.
2)trip to the Shiz: after putzing for a day or two, taking a bus by ourselves to the new medical campus, interacting with the repair men that neither spoke english nor successfully repaired jeremy's toilet (j fixed it himself finally), and encountering many things im probably forgetting to write about, Jeremy and I were informed we had to travel to the Shiz (capital of our province) to redo our physical. Mind you, this had already been completed in the US. Maggie came to our apartments around 9pm on Wed evening to take us on the sleeper train that would take us 10 hours to the Shiz. we arrived at the train station and Maggie left us to wait while she went and found some train 'director' that she obviously had some connection with to get us on the train. (she had to find him because they wouldnt let us through the gates originally due to the fact that we are scary foreigners.) this 'director' that maggie mysteriously found then took us through some shady back passageway onto a really nice area of the train. he then gave us fruit...'hospitality' as maggie called it. like i said, we dont know how maggie knew this guy or how he was hooking us up, but ill take it i guess. we rode to the Shiz, did the physical which was more of an assembly line down a hall of different rooms, showered in maggie's hotel room, shopped, and ate. while shopping, my two favorite occurrences of the trip occurred. first, jeremy was followed by a homeless man wanting money for a good 30 meters through crowds. he had maggie laughing so hard she was cryng, and she doesnt laugh like that! secondly, i knocked over some guys sign on the sidewalk (shocker) and about got beat up until the guys figured out i was american. they started to tell me that everything was ok (in chinese of course) when i decided to brilliantly respond 'youre welcome, youre welcome!' to them in chinese when i meant to say i was sorry. jeremy thought it was histerical, i felt like a huge jackass, but what can you do? after all this, we were back at the train station. this is where abandonment #2 occurred. Maggie put us on the train home BY OURSELVES! we proceeded to be harassed by a lady that kept touching me and showing me to her friends. after restlessly sleeping in the obnoxiously small bunks, we were then coaxed off the train at our stop by some lady that refused to believe we lived in Chengde and wanted us to stay at her hotel. finally, a taxi driver successfully- shockingly- took us from our train station to our apartments when we showed him our address. he charged us too much for the cab fare, but at that point, we could care less.
