Chinarchy

What’s Been Going On…

by Anderson | 03/23/10 | 2 comments

I wanted to write a quick update about the last couple weeks. As of Sunday, McCoy and I have been here for a full month, and it has flown by.

After buying some extra furniture and making a few runs to Carrefour our apartment is finally — what I would call — settled. There were some interesting moments of communication failure with the delivery people. They never showed up at the times we previously agreed to, sometimes not even at the right place.

One truck dropped off our new coffee table at my school instead of the apartment. I had to convince a taxi driver to let me shove the huge glass table into his back seat and take it to our place. I finally got it there and with the help of some strangers managed to get it into my building.

We’ve also settled into the routines at our jobs. Between teaching and lessoning planning and dealing with the politics of working in a school the weeks have gone by super fast. And the weekends go even faster.

Most weekends we have spent hanging out with other teachers and usually the main focus is go out eating and drinking and don’t think about how soon Monday will come. We’re making a few good Chinese friends too, in addition to the crowd of Western teachers. I’ll let McCoy talk more about that in his next post.

(Oh by the way, one of our Chinese friends got me a free VIP haircut at Toni & Guy. So yes, I’m officially gay now. Just kidding radies! *flexes muscles* *applies eyeliner*)

My biggest regret is that I still haven’t seen a lot of the tourist sites around Beijing. I keep telling myself, “This weekend you will go to Tiananmen Square and take pictures and then make a great post on Chinarchy that includes jokes about Mao’s ghost.” Unfortunately, it hasn’t happened yet. But I do have a whole year. And once we get paid (our first real paycheck is April 15) it’ll be a lot easier to see the sites.

I promise that posts about Tiananmen and the Great Wall and all of that stuff will happen eventually. And I’ll try to include a lot of pretty pictures so you don’t have to read a Great Wall of Text. [Groan. The jokes won't ever improve.]

Besides the touristy stuff, we also have a lot of posts planned about cultural stuff. We’re not sure how to dig into it yet, but we know the differences and similarities between Chinese culture and Western culture would make for interesting stories. We just have to figure out the best way to handle that stuff. [Did I really say 'stuff' three times in that paragraph?]

And, as always, I have a queue of maybe six or seven posts related to teaching. I just need the time to flesh them out.

Alright, well that’s it. Expect more in the next few days. Oh, and we’ll announce the winner of the caption contest soon too, so if you haven’t posted go do it now.

And to everyone reading and commenting and following us on Facebook and Twitter, we love you!