Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Living on the other side of the world

Well sorry I have not yet updated this since we got to our actual city. It has been a week...a very long week of trying to settle in and get a routine in place. We arrived and found out we are living on the 5th floor of a teachers dormitory  no elevator :( needless to say my legs are getting quite the daily workout! We are living 2 people per room...single beds, a desk, nightstand, small closets, mini fridge/freezer (thank heaven for something cold!), a small enclosed patio, and a very small...smelly...bathroom.





The food....well I am not an adventurous food eater, i rather enjoy my PB&J...The Chinese have two flavors to most of their food, extremely spicy or no flavor at all. Then again we are eating cafeteria food so it isn't the greatest anyways. Breakfast usually consists of some boiled/pickled vegetable, a hard boiled egg, and a roll (that tastes like absolutely nothing...). They don't serve anything to drink when you eat so you have to bring your own. They are also quite particular about you eating the food the way they served it...as in you don't add soy sauce to your rice, pretty sure one of our groupies offended the chef by adding it to their rice. Lunch is usually rice, another roll, another spicy veggie concoction, and some stew looking thing that can hold anything from meat looking tofu or slugs to chicken feet. Dinner...the same as lunch. So basically we go to the JinjinYue (like a super wal-mart), and buy whatever we can that looks somewhat normal! We have found lots of fruit, and things like peanut butter, and we found instant oatmeal today as well as a Chinese version of top ramen, which Kate so gratefully tested out for me to make sure it wasn't gross :) You can find quite a few items from home here just by seeing their packaging...it looks cooler in Chinese! 



It is really hard to fall asleep here. One because it is so hot and we have zero breeze on our side of the hallway and secondly because we are basically sleeping on a wooden box that is upside down with a layer of quilting batting as a mattress. So after 3 nights of no sleep and waking up with sore hips and a sore back I decided I needed to fix it. We went down to the super market and I bought four fluffy pillows which are now lined up underneath my fitted sheet as a make shift mattress. It is almost as comfy as a normal bed! I am thinking I will sleep much better tonight!


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