Stressful Week

So I'm sorry that I haven't updated in awhile, I really thought that I updated last week.
It's been a really frustrating/stressful past couple of days. Last weekend I told Tony that my visa expires next week and him giving me my passport back would be great. I was hoping he would get me a work visa, but on Sunday he gave me my passport, saying I need to get my visa renewed. In order to do that, among other things, I need to have a Chinese bank account in my name with 20,000 yuan ($3,000) in it to prove that I can live in China without working (since I'm not supposed to be working with a tourist visa), and the latest I can get that done is Tuesday, since the couple days after that are holidays (another story for farther down in the post) and after that my visa will be expired. Getting $3,000 into a bank account in 2 days is not fun, nor easy. We had to go to multiple ATMS, since we didn't want to risk trying it with a 3rd party and having it take longer, and on the day I went to get it renewed the ATMs wouldn't work with our bank cards until after 12pm (midnight your time, which makes sense since we can only withdraw a certain amount each day), but I didn't think about that at first and I was freaking out. I did turn it in on time, so with $130 I'm buying another 30 days here, hopefully I'll have a work visa soon, I think we're still waiting on the school (who should've said last week) to decide if they want to keep me. It's been really frustrating. The other thing is I had to prove I have 20,000 Yuan, it also has to be frozen in the account for two weeks, so now we have all this money, but we can't use it for two weeks and neither of us get our first paycheck until October 15th.

I have two random things that I don't like about China.

1. The subway. I know it's crowded and people love to travel on it, but I don't see why China rigs it so both trains come at practically the same time, especially at transfer stations when everyone is trying to run up the stairs to the next train. It would be a lot better if they came about a minute apart, so there will be less people running at one time. I think the reason is that there are soooo many trains, they come very frequently, so that they all just happen to come at the same time, but it still makes me sad.

2. Holidays. China is so weird. Today (Wednesday) is the moon cake festival. Since it's not close to a weekend the government decided that it should change what days the weekends are, which means we have Wednesday-Friday off. Normally that would be a good thing, except now I have to go to work Saturday - Thursday. I went into work last Sunday and it was soooo confusing, threw off my whole week. But, China likes to change weekends, they do it multiple times.

Other than my ranting above (which is pretty significant, since I want to stay in China and not go back to the U.S.), we're doing pretty well. We had our first first-try successful dinner last week, pork and mushrooms, red pepper, onions, and rice, which was really good. A guy moved in upstairs today and he seems pretty cool, it'll be interesting. I took pictures of dinner, so you can see.

Please keep praying for us, we really want this job to work out and I need a work visa. Dan's studies are going well, but you can continue to pray for that too. :) We miss you all!

Teacher's Day!

So yesterday was teacher's day, which means that you get cards from students, flowers from the school (not really big flowers) and Lindt's chocolate from parents, which happens to be the most amazing chocolate I have ever had in my entire life.

Classes were ok this week. Apparently I'm having trouble controlling my classes and teachers have complained to the principal who has told the person who placed me in the school who then told me and if it continues to be a problem they're going to find someone else to teach instead of me. I think yesterday was a lot better though. We finally got this reward system set up so that when kids do things or are good they get fake money and can buy things with them once a week, they really liked that idea and were pretty good yesterday.

Sooooo since Kristina wants to know, the title of my last blog was referring to when Dan and I were at a super market and we were looking for dried fruit and I was in dried fruit mode trying to find something cheap and I saw dried grapes (that's what the package said:
Julie: Look! Dried grapes!
Dan: Those are raisins.
Julie: No, they're dried...oh...

Yes, so that's the story.

I'm really enjoying the other teacher's at my school. Two of them are from England and one is from the States, so not only do we have to get used to the Chinese culture, but we have to get used to each other and how we have completely different names for things, like this for example:

Julie: Do you guys have any band-aids?
Claire: No
Dave: A what?
Claire: She means a plaster (same word as what you call wall plaster)

It just makes me laugh. Tomorrow (Sunday) I'm going to do some editing work or something, I'm not completely sure. They said something about reading a book. Hopefully it won't be too boring.

There was more I wanted to say, but I can't remember what it was. I feel like I'm learning a lot about things, life in general. It's been fun, very tiring, but fun.

A Dried Grape = A Raisin

I had my first day of classes today. It went ok, the first class didn't go too well cause the kids didn't know how to be quiet and listen, and my boss was in there watching me and he wasn't too happy. The second class was the best one, and the other two (I had the same class twice) went pretty well. Hopefully it will get better.

I have this theory that when non-Chinese people walk into stores, some will start playing American music. Dan and I walked into a supermarket in Beijing and noticed pretty soon after we walked in that we heard the words "all I wanna do is find a way back into love" which is lyrics to a song in music and lyrics, so it was completely random, and the next song was Chinese. We also heard Love Story one time, but we were just walking down the street.

Another thing I wanted to say is that you would think, with all the people and stuff, China would make people want to have more children, but it just makes me want to get a puppy (which won't happen, not for at least a year or two) because they have dogs everywhere, and their dogs are soooooo much more behaved than dogs in America. Half of them walk around behind their owners without leashes, and I was going to say that the only time I have heard a dog bark was when they were in the pet store, but that changed today cause there was this dog the size of a kitten that was barking or yapping or something, but it was soooooo cute.

Dan also has a blog, just so you know. It's twolimbs.blogspot.com. It'll have similar things to mine, but he's a guy so it won't have as much detail, so some people might prefer that. Dan's birthday is tomorrow, we're going to Mcdonalds.

I am now doing two after school classes twice a week. I'm starting that tomorrow (and found out about it today) so it should be interesting. I think it pays pretty well, and Dan is teaching little kindergartners on Sundays, so we're staying pretty busy.

We're Moved In!

Sooooo, we're not dead, we just got internet yesterday and since blogs and facebook are illegal in China, I couldn't get onto one from an internet cafe'. We're finally moved in and settling down. We moved into this "cozy" duplex (no one lives up top yet) on Sunday, and we got internet yesterday. We didn't care how small it was, we just wanted something cheap. There IS an interesting problem with it, which you will see if you watch the video. We're living in a Beijing Hutong, which is something like...I don't know...we live off an alley, it almost looks like a sketchy place, but China is apparently a lot safer than Baltimore, so it's fine. There's this little boy who lives next to us who says hi every time he sees us then is so happy and proud of himself when we say hi back.

I don't have too many funny stories, I haven't been speaking a lot of Chinese because I just don't remember too much. I have frustrating stories about people telling me to check out my stuff on the first floor of the 3 story "hypermarket" even though all my stuff came from the third floor, but there were funny things like Dan trying to order a kilometer of meat instead of a kilogram, and me finding "bowl-loosening tea" in a store. There were other things I wanted to take pictures of, like a sign in an elevator saying "frolicking, jump not allowed" or signs on an escalator saying to watch your hair instead of your head, but Dan said people would be upset with me for taking pictures in a supermarket and the one in the elevator just didn't work out.

I "started" my job last Friday. I haven't actually signed a contract yet, nor have I taught a class. They're waiting to see everyone teach before they're signing contracts with people to make sure the students and the school don't have problems with them, so I'm just waiting for an opportunity to teach a class, sitting in on some while I'm waiting to get an idea of what I should be doing, so keeping that in your prayers would be awesome. The school I got set up with is actually an International School, one where people who work at embassies send their children and stuff. It's one of the best in China and people say that once you teach English there you could at least teach anywhere else in China if not other places. Too bad I don't want to teach English after this, but it should make a good reference.
Half of the teachers are from England, which is cool and we all get along really well. My new goal while I'm here is not to learn Chinese, but to come back with a British accent.
There were other funny stories with that, like a teacher from the UK learning that you should always capitalize the letter I when it stands alone in the middle of a sentence (after a student told him that he was wrong) and I can't remember other ones, but they will be there later.

Sorry I write so much, but yeah, I like blogs. I'm going to put another video of the Old Summer Palace, which I meant to post earlier, except I never posted anything.





We went to the Old Summer Palace on Saturday which was lots of fun. It's kind of like a park with lots of lakes that also has the remains of buildings, which helps you imagine what the place used to look like. We also went to Beida University, and they have a lake and an island on their campus, which is totally not fair. There were also little kids getting their picture taken there, which made me a little sad cause it's probably a lot of parents dream that their kids go there and it probably puts lots of pressure on their kids.