Dinking Down the DaDou! (Avenue)

Today I had my first meeting at my school. I am teaching 3 year olds! Should be fun and a challenge, and tomorrow is my first day teaching. I’m pretty sure I’m just going to do a lot of singing and dancing. The preschool is an international education school, meaning the each class has a Chinese teacher, and an international teacher (me). The teachers consist of a Pakistani, an Australian, two Pilipino, and myself the American. After the meeting I joined the guys on the roof for a smoke (I didn’t smoke though), just to talk. Surrounding us were skyscrapers and a blue sky (surprisingly). It’s crazy being here, feels almost like I’m dreaming because everywhere I look is exactly like Shanghai Noon, or some other movie that takes place in China.

The past few days I have really done a lot of things that otherwise would be unthinkable in America. Such as dinking. Dinking is the act of jumping on the back of someone else’s bike and riding with them. Tonight we did extreme dinking (which I guess is pretty normal for locals). Zooming in and out of massive amounts of traffic, huge buses whizzing by within touching distance, and scooters and people buzzing around everywhere in between, we made our way through the city to a restaurant. It was surreal. So dangerous but I didn’t feel scared at all. In fact, I was laughing and smiling almost the whole time because it was so ridiculous! At one point, with skyscrapers lined with red Chinese characters above and bumpy road below, we were surrounded by buses on our left and scooters galore to the right, just biking in the middle of the road. Everyone else does this as well, it is the best orchestrated chaos I’ve ever seen. Today I also had to do a few simple things on my own (but not so simple when you don’t speak Chinese). I had to take out the garbage and fill up my phone with money. So I just went around saying “trash located where?” and found it pretty quick. Then the phone store went smoothly too, just said “help, this (and pointed at my phone and money)”and they showed me how to fill it up with money. It’s a lot of fun being challenged in such a way.

The street market right by our apartment.

 

After dinking and hanging out a bit, Andrew had to bike home with his new bike (which broke down) but he got it fixed by tearing off some parts that we rubbing on the tire. I had to wave down a taxi and communicate with him how to get to our apartment. Thank goodness Jess (a fellow FOC teacher) sent me our address written in Chinese to my phone. So I basically just said “here”and ‘over there’and ‘thanks.’ Made it back safe and sound.

Tomorrow is my first day of class, pr-ying it will go smoothly. Until next time, G-d bl-ss! Sorry these blogs are kind of long, I’ll try to keep them a little shorter.