In China, Doing Well, and Accomplishing A Lot

Ni Hao (Hello) from China! I have officially been here 5 days, and have had no problems adjusting to being here. I was able to stay awake 11 hours after arriving on Thursday, but definitely slept for 12 hours that night as well as the next night to fight off jet-lag. I have been to street markets and Metro (a store very similar to a Sam's or Costco), and have done pretty well in remembering which direction to go to get to these places. I have also eaten at a Subway and a Turkish restaurant since being here. Xi'an definitely has a wider variety of foods than I anticipated since there are restaurants that specialize in American, Italian, Mexican, Turkish, and Korean in addition to all the Chinese food - which is delicious, by the way.

As far as getting things accomplished, I found an apartment and have put down a deposit and should be signing the contract in the next day or two. How apartments are done here is very similar to someone owning a condo in the States - you have a landlord (or owner) for each apartment and you go through a realtor to negotiate a price with the landlord to rent an apartment. Due to this fact all the apartments are very different from appearance to flexibility in what you can do in your apartment. We looked at 5 apartments in 2 days, and I have to say that they were all different, with things I liked in each one, but the one that I liked the best and felt "at home" in was the very first one. It is also in the same apartment complex as the rest of my friends. All of my friends here have apartments in the same complex, we are all just in different buildings. My friends have told me that I am very lucky to have a landlord who is so nice and accommodating. He has allowed me the option of painting (the Chinese use some crazy colors in places), if I so desire in the future, and he asked if he could buy me a plant or flowers for my place for when I moved in. He also showed me how to work the washing machine, considering you have to hook it up to the water source in the bathroom and the directions are written in Chinese. I feel good about the choice I made and look forward to making it home over the next several months. I will post pictures once I am moved in.

School.......my friends and I met with the Director this morning of a new school that we are going to go to for classes, and we will start on September 7. The school is associated with a University, but is a smaller version run out of two apartments that were converted to a classroom and office space. This school option is a little cheaper price wise, is located in our apartment complex, and has like-minded people. A few of us (including myself) are going to do 2 to 1, meaning it will be 2 of us to 1 teacher for 10 hours a week, while a few others will do 1 to 1 for 8 hours a week. We will also have 2 teachers that will rotate throughout the week to give us different teaching styles as well as different experiences with dialect and pronunciation. I am excited about the school and feel this was the best option to get more attention to learning the language. There is also the option of getting a tutor for a few hours a week to help with language if needed.

Finally, things are coming together for work as well, but I am going to leave those details to be filled in later once they are finalized. What I will say in the meantime is that I will be working with Olympic athletes that are here in Xi'an teaching them English and life skills. I will have to go to Beijing for a few days or possibly a week for training before starting work, but I will let you know once I have the details. I am pretty excited though.

I plan to post another blog in a few days to update you on more and to give you an insight to the little quirky things I have discovered about Xi'an and China in general. Hope you have a wonderful week.