Bon Voyage

After several months of planning, packing, and preparing, I’m off to live in China for a spell. I’ll be teaching English at a university in Nanjing, a couple hours outside Shanghai until mid summer. I’ve been inching towards China for a few years now, going further and further east, until it just made sense to go. Israel got me closer, India got my feet wet, but I suppose it wasn’t official until I landed in the Tokyo airport (Okay, airports don’t officially count, so I suppose it really wasn’t official until we stepped into the congested air of Shanghai). We flew in rather late, and tried to sleep in some sketch hotel in Shanghai (blood on the sheets kind of sketchy), then woke to manage breakfast equipped only with chopsticks. I’ll be taking the bullet train to Shanghai in the future, but a 3-4 hour bus ride to Nanjing did allow more of glimpse of China. Eventually, we arrived. The Nanjing campus is huge and gorgeous, and oddly reminds me of college in the States. The foreign teachers live up on the 5th floor which meant maneuvering several suitcases up a slippery staircase to our floor.  There’s a tiny little kitchen on one end, with a set of teeny little washing machines at the other end, with rooms sandwiched inbetween. The rooms are quite nice, with cubbies and lockers for clothes,  a mid sized fridge, a shower curtain-less shower and bathroom, and a flat screen for all the Netflix we won’t be watching.  Unpacking and settling in took most of the afternoon, but even eating dinner in the huge cafeteria didn’t seem to let China sink in all that much. The lovely miss Hannah is joining me on my adventure, and we both concurred the best way to celebrate our arrival was to sleep a solid 11 or so hours to get a solid start on the next day. 

We will start teaching on Monday, which leaves the weekend for teaching orientation, a tour of campus, and time to figure out the internet. We’ve already stumbled into a smattering of cultural differences, mainly the 2 inch “mattress” on the bed frames and a temperamental heater which means pajamas have expanded to include a coat and doubled up socks. But it sorta already feels like home, even with the Chinese character Crest toothpaste.