Our Trip to the Great Wall

Beijing

Dq and Mcdonalds

Weekends are great! Alisa and I are starting to create our own routine – take the bus downtown and eat North American fast food. Today we had McDonalds and Dairy Queen. It sounds gross, but it’s a nice change after eating Chinese food all week. While most food and restaurants in China are very cheap, North American fast food places charge almost as much as they would in Canada, so by local standards they are very expensive.

Most outings have some kind of adventure, especially since almost nobody speaks English in our city. Things that would be easy at home, take extra patience and sometimes creative explanations. For instance, getting a new battery for my watch took about 15 minutes and 6 store employees to finally get what I needed. They were all very friendly, and the repairman even set my watch to the correct time. But paying was a bit difficult because he didn’t have a cash register, so I couldn’t just look and see the price. He did the hand signal for six (Chinese have a different system of counting on their fingers, where all the numbers can be done on one hand), I thought this was a really good deal and gave him 6RMB (about 90cents). At this point I already had the watch and was ready to go, but I could tell there was something wrong. I got out my translation book and figured out the price was 60, so he was probably a bit confused when I gave him only 6!

Week 3 of teaching starts tomorrow! Two more weeks of work then we get 1 week off for the Autumn festival!

We're settled in China!

We’ve been in China for almost 3 weeks now! It feels like a lot more than that so I guess that means we’ve settled in.

Living in China is great, we can walk to the city and downtown from our apartment, and we have a driver who picks us up at 6:45am for the 15minute drive to school. Our school is on the outskirts of town and we pass many corn fields and farms, so it feels a lot like Chilliwack. It’s interesting to see how people farm in China, as most of the field work here is done by shovels and manual labour. There are tractors, but the look like motorcycle or generator engines attached to a long metal frame. These are used to carry the crops off the field, which get piled 15 feet high behind the driver!

 It’s hard to explain, but it feels like a small town even though there are 5 million people where we live, in the city of Kaifeng. We teach at a small school, in its second year of operation, there are approximately 100 students split between grade 10 and 11. Me and Alisa teach across the hall from eachother which is pretty neat! The school provides hot lunch for students and staff, so I think that makes life a lot better not having to pack a lunch. I think the food is good, but sometimes too spicy for me!

I will try to update the blog more regularly, but have been having trouble accessing it because China has controls on their internet and it hasn’t been working.

Cheers,

Ben

Departing for China on August 24, 2012

We are boarding the plane from Vancouver to Beijing, China on August 24, 2012. Beijing is 15 hours ahead of Vancouver!