3 Week Photo Recap

Right now its almost incredible to think that I've only been here for 3 weeks.. So much has happened and so many things about life have changed that I think the easiest way to update everyone will  just be a re-cap through the photos I've taken to show what its been like. Then after I can move forward writing about specific experiences that I have.

One of the buildings where students live.

Here's our dorm building! The 20 of us are on the 5th and 6th floors. The lower floors are filled with other chinese teachers and security guards, cooks etc.

The building to the right of the photo is where the younger children stay. Across the street (on the left) is the building where we teach, and our dorms are just out of the shot to the right. Also at the end of the road you'll find the Dinning Hall. (no, not the dining hall. The dinning hall. It says so above the door.

Here we've got my bed on the left and Colby's on the right! The beds are just wooden with a thin pad-like thing covering it. Takes some getting used to at first.. but now I feel like I could lie down on any hard surface and sleep like a baby. So its been good.

Here's a shot from the other side of the classrooms building.

This represents the most delicious meal of all time for us.. On the weekends when the Chinese teachers and students aren't here, they get us fried chicken from KFC. During the week its a lot more fish, chicken feet, cabbage, little shrimp things that stare at you, and other unidentifiable goodness. 

Now doesn't this just make you happy...

So about a 10 minute walk from our school we have the night market! Every single night of the week vendors come to sell food, smoothies, fruit, electronics, shoes, clothing, and basically anything you could ever dream of. 

shoes.

This old man was sitting on the steps to the supermarket at the back of the night market. I really wanted to get a picture of him playing his instrument, so I managed to communicate that I wanted a photo. He agreed and after I had taken a few pictures I dropped a coin in his dish. His face just absolutely lit up and I could see how thankful he was for it.. Really puts things into perspective when you realize that the coin he was so pleased with is only worth about 15 cents in US dollars. 

People absolutely love photos here. Pretty much anywhere we go people are asking for photos of us and wanting us to star in their instagram pictures. I just gestured at this man and his grandson with my camera, and he patiently waited while I messed with my settings enough to get a semi-clear picture. 

On the train to suzhou

The train ran out of seats so I joined the group of people that were sitting around the table completely perplexed and enthralled by our uno match.

Suzhou is the closest city with a functioning branch of the church so we've gone there twice to attend. The branch just meets in the house of the branch president inside a gated community, and all you need to be able to atttend is a foreign passport. I never realized that there are such well established branches of foreigners in China. Suzhou isn't a major city but we've had about 50 people attending, with a functioning elders quorum, relief society, primary, the whole nine yards. They were making announcements about how the scout troop was going to camp in the yellow mountains this weekend.. made me a little bit jealous.   

A worker at the silk museum we visited

Some of the buildings in downtown Suzhou

This is the gated community where some of the branch members live. They let us spend the evening eating tacos, playing games and watching Harry Potter on their big screen. So not a bad weekend.

We had our first experience staying a night an an international youth hostel in Suzhou. 8 bucks a night for a bed, a lounge and a bar. And some adorable pets running all over the place. 

The view of the hostel from outside.. Tucked back inside an alley.

Don't pet him. He will bite you. 

Colby, Sydnee, Krystal, Sam, Hannah, Kendrick, and Lisa
Colby really was having fun.

This weekend a group of us are going to Shanghai for the extended weekend! Once we're all back i'll post on how everything went with photos of the whole experience! Stay tuned!

How Did I Get Here......
 
About 6 months ago I was living in Provo for my first semester at BYU. I had returned from a 2 year mission to Uruguay last September, and was finally but apprehensively in the process of trying to figure out what to do with my life, how to settle down, and what to study whilst trapped behind a desk for the next 3 1/2 years of my life. But like it says in the description, this blog is about my experiences living at a childrens' boarding school in Changzhou, China... so obviously that plan didn't work
   It all started with an iphone app. One of my closest friends, who had served with me on the Brazilian border came and showed me an app somebody had developed called Lunchbox, which basically kept us informed of all the places on campus where we could be bums and snag free food. Well, it quickly became a hobby of ours, and we set out on a quest to bum as much food as possible by sitting through presentations and meetings that didn't apply to us in any way whatsoever. There was free pizza everywhere. Free pizza at Brick Oven for someone explaining why we should sell DVDs back east...free pizza for sitting through a computer science department gathering...so much free pizza.
   After about a week of not paying for our meals.. we were invincible. No salesman was too persuasive, and no meeting was too exclusive. We became these pizza-consuming brick walls to anyone that was trying to convince us to sell something or join their club. But one Friday night... it all came crashing down. Free pizza + a five dollar bill for anyone who would come listen to an hour long presentation about International Language Programs at the Provo library.... Seemed like child's play to seasoned professionals like ourselves. But as I sat in that chair I made a fatal mistake... something happened that changed this series of events for good..........I payed attention.
This blog is me admitting defeat.

So here I am! Tsing Ying Foreign Language School. It didn't take much thought nor much time for me to sign up... I did the paperwork, and quickly was assigned to teach at a school in Weihai. Once Colby joined the bandwagon we got reassigned to Changzhou, one of the smaller Chinese cities with a population of only about 5.03 million people.
We arrived the last week of August and will be here until just before Christmas. There are 20 of us here living on the 5th and 6th floors of the dorms, the girls up top and the guys down below. I'm hoping to spend this time experiencing as much of china as I can, while working on music and photography. So you'll find a little bit of everything in here.. there isn't really a fixed agenda. Maybe if I get ambitious I'll even throw some vlogging in. But everything one step at a time.

PS. Check out this blog my friend has here! searchgreatperhaps.blogspot.com