CHINAAAAA!

I'll post something longer later, but I just wanted to get the word out that, YES, I am in China after much anitcipation, and I am alive (as of yet).

My travel was horribly long, but eased by the wonderful food (not a sarcastic comment, surprisingly) and unbeleivable larger film and TV show selection on my 13 hour flight to Beijing. My total travel time to Jinan was around 30 hours, so one can imagine that my first night in Jinan I was, for lack of eloquence, dead.

Life in China is so very different from life as I have known it. For one, the pollution is awful. I can see blue-ish grey sky directly above me during the day, but apart from that, only smokey abyss. The traffic is insane, but doubled with the cyclists, bring certain doom. The cyclists put themselves in a class separate from the rest, assuming the right and privelages of both the motorists and the pedestrians. I will be shocked if I leave here with out being hit once by one of them.

Jinan is a big city, but is not a tourist stop. Hence, 95% of everything is in chinese only. Since I do not speak a word of Chinese, though I'm learning a bit here and there, this presents a bit of a problem. My first stop in the supermarket, I basically stocked up on fruits and veggies, and grabbed other things and hoped they turned out to be something I liked. Chicken feet and beetles were avoided. All of the bread is sweet. Milk and yogurt is sold in little plastic bags. There are gallons and gallons of oils lining the shelves (which I mistook for juice, lol) and a million different types of soy sauce.

My apartment is nice. I live in a building in a college type compound with 30 other foreign teachers for Aston. My roommate is really nice, from Australia. My room is larger than expected, and we have a western style toilet, thank GOONESS. THe Chinese ones are in the ground, so you have to bend and squat really low. I giggled the whole time when I first did it because I felt so ridiculous. Also, they reek like you would not believe.

I start teaching today. I have 3 1/2 hour tutoring sessions, so that should be a nice introduction for me. I will write more later, for there is much more to tell ... this uber slow internet in the single computer (from around the early 1500s) is very inhibiting.

Ziajian! (goodbye!)