Teaching English in China - Day 1 and 2!!

            First full day – check! After leaving Cedar Rapids around 6:30 am Thursday morning and spending a fun 5-hour layover in Chicago, the 15 and a half hour plane ride to Hong Kong went very smooth. I sat next to an older Chinese woman who did not know how to work her personal TV, and she did not have a problem with waking me up from two different naps to ask for help. It wouldn’t have been so terrible except her screen was in Mandarin, so I had to look back and forth from my screen in English to help her, which of course caused me to lose my spot in whatever movie or TV show I was watching at the time. That was my first eye opener to the Chinese culture. J

            After going through immigration and luggage claim, Yana, my professor and I, met a driver who drove us three hours to Dongguan. We also had to go through a security checkpoint in the van to leave Hong Kong then another checkpoint and customs to enter China. I had no clue that the two countries hated each other so much! There are so many unnecessary differences between the two even though they are neighbors – for example, in Hong Kong the steering wheels in cars are on the right and in China they are on the left.

            I got to my room on the university campus I am teaching at around 11 pm on Friday, which is 10 am Iowa time. My first night of sleep was terrible. The beds are hard as rock and have absolutely no give. My shower was an experience considering they don’t use shower curtains in China. After going outside this morning, within the first five minutes I wasn’t sure why I had even showered because I was drenched in sweat.

            The humidity here is unbelievable. The canteen where we (the 10 of us teachers) eat a family style breakfast, lunch, and dinner is a ten-minute walk and if we aren’t drenched in sweat from being outside, we are drenched in rain water. It rains at very random times throughout the day and when it rains, it rains hard. 

            After breakfast today we had a campus tour by our teaching assistants that are all English majors of some sort at this university and each of us have one or to TAs assigned to us for the duration of the camp to help with random tasks or to translate if necessary. They are also working on their English, so it is a great program for them.

            If you have any questions about anything I am experiencing here in China feel free to email me! schantza@uni.edu