It is the closest thing to a Ace Hardware Store that we could find.

Phil and I were walking the streets of Fuyang one day trying to find a place to eat. We were starving. We were tired. And we were hot. (This is before we started teaching by the way.)

I would have never imagined it would be hard to find food in a city that houses 600,000, but apparently it is. In Hangzhou, all you had to do was walk down an alley way and see a tasty and interesting shop you might feel brave enough eating at. Here in Fuyang it is a little bit different. If you can’t read the signs – you probably won’t know it is a restaurant – unless of course there is a window and you see people eating. A lot of places are upstairs, and unless you know that it is there, you probably won’t be a paying customer. Finding a restaurant can be hard, but it is even more difficult finding food that you can eat – or rather food you know you want to eat. If you find a picture menu – you have found heaven. If you find a restaurant that understands your broken Chinese and doesn’t rip you off because you are foreign, you better thank your Guardian Angel. A part of me feels I am back in Portugal – meaning that there are about 100 billion more shoes, clothes, cell phones, and snack shops than there are actually restaurants. But anyway, that is beyond the point. Onto the key master. . .

In the very beginning, Mr. Zhou,the Foreign Affairs Director of the school, gave us one key to our apartment. One key. There are two of us. Two. And one key. Which means that either we had to go everywhere together or chance leaving the one or the other stranded on the door step. Quite by chance, while trying to put food in our tummies, we came across a key making street vendor. We had asked for another key prior to this, but in China, things are never certain, so we decided to take a chance and get one made ourselves.

I took the key out of my pocket and walked over to the man. I pointed at it, hoping he would understand, and then said how much in Chinese. He held up his fingers in a cross shape which means 10 yuan. Seemed like a good deal to me, so I said sure, why not?

The Chinese Key Master proceeded to make a key more or less by hand right in front of us. It wasn’t like anything you would see at Wal-Mart or a Hardware store. He had to measure and gauge every little notch and then reproduce it on the new key. If this computer wasn’t being such a retard, I would post more pictures, but it will only let me upload the one. Grr. But anyway, about 5 or so minutes later he handed us the key back – we looked at it, thought it seemed ok and handed over the 10 yuan. We had a key. The question was whether it was going to work or not.

We got back to the apartment after trying a noodle shop – where we ate noodles and avoided the intestines. Gross. Phil put the key in the door and it wouldn’t turn. Well, I thought, at least it wasn’t Y100. Phil twisted it a bit more. Still nothing. I went to give him my key, but he told me to wait. He jiggled it a little more and the door opened. The key isn’t perfect, but hey, we both have a key now. And now we have a key that Mr. Zhou and company don’t know exists. Maybe in a few years, we can come back to Fuyang, and take a nap or come in to watch TV or something crazy like that, although I doubt the new people living there would like that very much. Heh.

I’ll post again soon. Maybe tonight. But the school computer hates me and won’t let me do much.

No, I am not dead, although I really did feel like it.

Phil was ever so kind to take this picture of me when I zonked out last Friday night after my first week of teaching. 20 classes at 40 minutes each doesn’t sound like a whole lot, and in a perfect world it isn’t, but when you are teaching little devils, those 20 classes feel like 2 years.

And the good news is . . . I get to begin those two years all over again tomorrow. Yea, for me, I guess.

This week I am teaching the little brats about friendship and best friends. Maybe they will be so into it that they will be hanging on every word that comes out of my mouth. Maybe they will actually ask me questions and want to participate and pay attention. Maybe they will actually stop talking in Chinese the entire class and become fluent in English. Ha. I’m allowed to dream, aren’t I? I’ll faint if just the boys behave themselves.

Guess this is enough for now. I will continue to post pictures over the next few days. I have a lot of them.

Until then.

Zaijian.

I have not gone into much of our flight over here, so I guess I will take the opportunity to do that now.

The flight was about 14.5 hours long. I don’t care what anyone says. 14.5 hours is a long time to spend on a plane – too long. I was doing ok for the first 6 or so hours, but then I just started going crazy. Crazy is a word I introduced to my students this past week. The way I describe it to them is how I felt for the last long leg of our journey.

Picture someone standing silent and very still and looking very happy right in front of your face. Imagine yourself standing right in front of this person and thinking he or she appears to be the most sane person you have ever seen. Ok? Do you have a good image stuck there behind your eyes? Alright, good. KWAMABMO!!! The person now starts screaming and running around like a mad monkey, throwing his or her arms in the air and then finally puts his or her hands on your shoulder and starts shaking you. ~ Shake shake, shake shake, shake your booty. ~

That is exactly how I felt, except I also had an urge to puke on the pretty attendant that would walk by offering me random stupid things that I really didn’t need. Toward the very end I went pretty nuts and came really close to using the barf bag that I have always seen but never needed. I couldn’t even bring myself to eat my last meal. The thought of it made my tummy turn.

When I act out crazy, my student’s flip out and nearly have a heart attack – especially the girls, but I get the boys sometimes, too. I love scaring the crap out of them. It brings much joy to my life. It helps me sleep at night knowing I have forever scarred them. Insert evil laughter. Hehe.

Here are a few more pictures of our flight over. The screen on the seat in front of me really helped me through the 14.5 hours of insanity. I never fell asleep. When we go home, I am so taking some sleeping pills, damnit.

Just seeing the word Shanghai got me excited. Although, it also made this part of the trip drag, and drag, and drag. I thought after 3 hours that our plane had maybe gone 2 inches. I was probably just delirious. I probably was. All in all I was up for about 30 some hours. And we all know that a tired Gabe is not a happy Gabe. I have been nicknamed Grumpy on occasion for a reason. I think I would have been happy landing in Beijing at one point and living there. Anything just to off that damn plane.

After sitting in the airport for 30 minutes waiting for more teachers to arrive we got on bus that took us to a bus station where we got on another bus that took us Hangzhou. I remember at least 3 things vividly. 1 – I wanted to die because I felt like crap. 2 – I thought I was going to die because we had the craziest bus driver in the entire world. It was like we were in a game of Crazy Taxi, but worse. 3 – Are we there, YET?! I didn’t think we would ever get to Hangzhou. It was the longest 70 KM I had ever driven.

We stayed at a place called the Babel Language Center for a few days. Besides the beds being harder then the floor (no I am not lying – it truly was like sleeping on the floor) it wasn’t all that bad. After getting some sleep, though, and some food and water, I was much happier. The picture to the left shows the excitement of my first day in China. The heat of China soon came, though, and wiped that happy smile off my face. As you can see from the picture below, the heat did not make me happy. I should have paid more attention to this day, though. It was one of the last days that I saw a blue sky. I miss my blue skies.

These pictures were taken at West Lake, as was the one taken of me above. West Lake was beautiful. Beautiful and hot. I need to go back when it is cooler. I would enjoy it more that way.

West Lake was covered in Lotus flowers in bloom.

Here are some Chinese tourists enjoying West Lake, the view, and the heat that could of fried an egg on the pavement. I would pay someone to send me a piece of a South Carolina sky or any western sky for that matter. I didn’t know how important a blue sky was until I didn’t have one anymore. I guess that is how things work.

And that means pictures!! Lots of pictures.

Well, where do I begin? There is so much to talk about. So much has happened since we have been here.

Phil has now taught 2 weeks and I just finished my first week. It is hard to believe that I am in China, but it is even harder to believe that I am a teacher in charge of about 680 students(total). In Phil’s classes, he has about 50 students. I am a bit more lucky. At the the middle school they divide the class into two. So, instead of having 50 – 70 students, I have about 30-40 students and sometimes less than that – depending on the class itself. Teaching in China is very, very interesting, and I have a lot to say on that matter, but I want to talk about a few other things first.

I didn’t think that we were ever going to get internet, especially after we found out that the last people that lived here never got it, but I guess our nonstop, “We want internet!” finally sunk in. So, at 9:30am(Saturday the 16th) our doorbell rang. I was half tempted to stay in bed for I was very tired, but decided that who ever was ringing our bell that early in the morning had climbed our 90 steps for a good reason. And that he did. Peter said that he had come with some people to fix our internet. Peter is a teacher at the high school. His English is ok, not perfect, but we can understand each other pretty well. A few minutes later, two geeky looking China Telecom computer techs walked in. They plugged us into the wall, gave us our user name and password.  The password is so retardedly easy that we laughed. Watch Space Balls, and you will understand. After that, they left. It took them maybe 3 minutes to give us the internet we had been asking for something like 2 and half weeks. Grr. And so now, hopefully, unless China decides that they hate me, I can now post pictures and comments to this blog. That will make me happy and give someone something to do when they are bored out of their freaking minds.

Pictures. I was only able to post a few pictures of our apartment. Here are a few more. Remember that there is another floor below us, but I haven’t gone down there to take pictures yet. And thinking it not that important, I may not.

This our dinning room table. The door leads to our balcony. The entire wall is made of windows. This in turn will probably make it very cool in our apartment come winter. I am not looking forward to winter. Not at all.

This is our living room. The sofa and chairs are very comfortable. That is Tim standing in the picture. He lives across town. He is jealous of our living room furniture because he does not have any. I don’t know why he was not provided any. The flowers were a gift to us from the school. I got some more flowers when they took us to the banquet. They laughed at me because I am not a drinker. I mean it. They laughed at me. Grr.

There is a little room dividing our bathroom and our kitchen. Our refrigerator is in this room.  The freezer is on the bottom and the refrigerator is on the top. I keep out of habit, opening the bottom. Hehe. You can see in the picture that there are two types of toilets. I told Phil he no longer has an excuse to leave the toilet seat up ever again. So far, he has been good.

Here is a picture of the walk way on the way to our apartment or to the high school depending on which way you are facing. I really like the trees. They remind me of Charleston in the way that they are all wavy and stuff. It sucks that we have to walk all the way around the wall in order to get to the school. There is no way to get there unless you walk all the way around to the front gates. I’ve been tempted to swim through the lotus pond.

I am going to go ahead and post these and then write a new blog. I don’t like it when my blogs get too long. I hope you enjoy them. And remember – post comments. They keep me alive!!

But still no internet in our apartment. Grr.

Doubting that the promises of the foreign affairs director will actually come into to being, I have finally relented and brought my camera to school. They have provided me with a computer and internet connection here, and that is good, but it would be nice to have it hooked up in our apartment. It would make calling home much easier.

Well, first things first. Pictures. I know you guys want to see some pictures. Let me introduce our apartment. I have not taken any pictures of the down stairs yet, but I will get around to that later.

The stairs to the second floor of our apartment adds an additional 17 steps on top of the 90 stairs that it takes to get to the 6th floor. It is a spiral stair case, if you can’t tell.

Our bedroom is right next to the stairs – the first door to the left in the picture. The other door to the right leads to the study that we have turned into a storage room for all the crap we found in the apartment that we didn’t want. We found an internet connection in the study, but we can’t get on with a password. And no one can tell us what it is.

That is the study, and it looks clean only in this picture because it was taken before we threw everything in it. The glass cabinets in the room are a nice touch, but we have no real reason to use them.

Hello to all.

Right now I am sitting in the kitchen because this is the only place that we can pick up on a wireless internet connection. It took forever to find. We’ve been walking all over our apartment trying to pick up on a signal. As long as the connection holds, and we don’t move the computer, I should be able to call you soon and blog more frequently than I have been.

Fuyang. . .lets see. We really haven’t seen that much of it. We went to KFC last night for dinner. The Chinese love their fried chicken. I sorta get tired of trying to figure out what Chinese characters on a menu will be good or not, sSo to make up for that I have been trying to eat some western food every once in awhile. Pizza Hut, KFC, and McDonald’s will be my savior these next 10 months. Fuyang does not have a Pizza Hut ora  McDonald’s  We have to go to Hangzhou for that.  It’s about 45 minutes away

Our apartment. It is on the sixth floor and there is no elevator. It sucks, but at least we will get in shape. Our apartment is more than I could have imagined. It is two floors. You first walk into a foyer or big hall way. And right as you enter there is a spiral staircase. On that first floor, on the right side, there are 3 doors. The first room is more or less empty – except for a piano. I wish I knew how to play it. There is also an ironing board and a washing machine. The next two rooms are bedrooms. I think that that is where the two Australians will be staying whenever they get here. On the other side of the hallway are two more doors. One goes to a bathroom and I can’t figure out what the other room is because it is locked. Upstairs is the living room and mine and Phil’s bedroom. Yes, it appears that we are sharing a room. Oh well. At least the bed is nice and soft. It is so much softer than the last bed we slept on. There is also an office, another bathroom, a kitchen, and another little space for our refrigerator. The apartment is more or less dirty, and we have to clean it. Icky.

When we first got here Mr. Zhou(Joe) and our “helpers” took us to lunch. Oh my goodness – there was so much food. It was just never ending. I don’t know what half of it was. But I liked the dumplings that I asked for. I had been craving them since we got here.It seems that I will be teaching middle school and Phil will be at the High School. Lucky for him, we live right by the high school. Me on the other hand, I have to walk, get a cab, ride the bus, or a bike 3-4 miles to the middle school. That should be oh so much fun. I’ve seen the high school and it seems small – smaller than I imagined, but they have track and a inside pool with workout stations.It is very beautiful here. We are surrounded by large mountains, and the river runs right beside the school. We can see it from our window. It is really hot here, though. Oh so hot. Hotter than anything I can remember. If you walk outside, you start sweating – everywhere.

I’ll post some pictures and write more about Fuyang. There is so much to talk about. Until then I guess . . . Zaijian – goodbye in Chinese.