Life in China!

So. A lot has happened since we last talked.
Sorry it's been so long but this website, along with other things, was blocked in China. But we've found a way around it! The things I do for my readers.....

So I'll start from the beginning.

Me, my mum and dad left home on Thursday the 23th August - about three weeks ago! We drove to London and arrived at our hotel at about 7pm.. I knew that some of my closest friends who'd be coming to China with me were staying in a hotel nearby and I persuaded my parents to let me go and see them. We started the walk there and about half way there I saw three figures dressed in bright hoodies reading 'Project Trust'. I then wiggled my arms to the side as a test and they did the same. We ran to each other and I through my arms around Jony and he spun me around. I then did the same to Jamie (these two are really my favourite guys in China. I can't explain my love for them...) and hugged the third, Alex. We then walked and chatted about how mad it was that we were together and that we'd be finally flying to China, not to return to Britain for a whole year. We had talked about it for months and it was so surreal that it was about to happen... After a last meal out with my parents, we met up again with them and some other volunteers and talked for hours about everything.

The next morning was mad. We woke up at 5am and ran around trying to get everything sorted and checking that I brought everything I needed for the year. We left to go to the airport, met up with the 26 other volunteers and said our farewells to our family. Again, it was surreal to say goodbye to my family, but knowing what my year had in store for me, made leaving so much easier.

Tessa, Alice, Hannah, Jamie, Me, Pete, Alex, Jony and Georgina - the Xinjiang group (excluding Pete and Alex)

Last photo with mum and dad

Mum and dad took a last minute photo of me just before I went through the gate...

Once we walked through the gate, we went straight for breakfast then jumped on the plane. We all had seats on completely different places on the plane but in the grand scheme of things it turned out that me and Jamie were sitting next to each other. We spent the following 7 hours watching films and being brain dead. Once we got closer to Abu Dhabi, it was amazing. The views of busy and green England had turned into an empty, dusty desert. It was towards the end of the day in local time so the sun was setting and again, it was beyond surreal.

The roof in Abu Dhabi airport was cool and it was like we were in a doughnut. Jony thought he'd be cultural and have a Costa followed by a McDonald's.

Anyway this blog is taking a while to write so I'm going to skip over a few things...
We got back on the plane, made Chinese friends (again I was sitting next to Jamie), watched films, ate GOOD plane food, got off the plane, went through Chinese security (scary times.....) and to the main building.
Time for a story.
We met Alicia and Mike - our country reps. They're the English people who live in China who are linked to PT in some way. So they looked after us for our first week in Beijing and if something goes wrong that is specific to China, it's good to ask them as they know what's what.
Anyway, we met them in the last building so then the 27 (now 29 of us) made our way out into the big wide world. There was a travelator leading from the building to the outside so we all piled onto it. I was enjoying a nice, pleasant ride and awaiting my first step into China. Then suddenly... I heard a few crashes and saw Jony jumping around. We got word that there was a pile up on the travelator as someone at the front forgot to move the luggage trolley once they reached the end... We were further back so though we were ok but then as the travelator continued, more and more trolleys got stuck behind each other and people were being crushed and THERE WAS NO ESCAPE. Quickly, the panic reached us and I managed to avoid some of the pain by crawling up the sides of the travelator. Anyway, Alicia stood in to save the day before any Chinese people got hurt by some stupid Westerners. But that was our first step into China. Falling out of a travelator surrounded by bags and screaming teenagers. It was a beautiful moment.

Bus ride through Beijing, it was huge. Arrived at our hostel (very nice actually, good rooms and really nice bar area, I recommend it.) Then after about 1 hour of having a shower and putting our bags in our rooms and recovering, we left for Tienanmen Square. It was all just so huge and still so alien to us and the whole thing didn't really sink in for many of us as we were all so exhausted.
Me, Jony, Jamie, Ned, Tessa and Hannah went into the Forbidden City. We took a lot around and found some benches in the shade by this beautiful lake. We saw that Chinese people were lying on them so we thought that it was ok. We joined in with the lying and basically fell asleep in the Forbidden City for 2 hours.
We met up with the others (after awakening to Chinese people staring at us) and went back to the hostel and had our first Chinese banquet. The food served wasn't what we were expecting at all. There was this thing that was basically chips fried in a way that they stick together so were basically slices of chips.. So that was cool. There was also delicacies like whole fried fish and mashed potato!
We then explored Beijing for the first time before going to bed and having a well deserved, long sleep.

Day two in Beijing was filled with a cooking lesson and a scavenger hunt. In the cooking lesson we made Stir Fry Noodles (everything made from scratch, including the noodles. I'm a pro noodle maker.) and Gong Bao Chicken. They were both so tasty and I will make these dishes whenever I can. In fact for the first night at our flat, I made the noodle dish!

Tessa being all proud with her noodles

After this, we ate the food obviously (yum) and then went back into the centre of Beijing for a 'scavenger hunt'. Alicia gave us a sheet of paper on with challenges and we had to walk around Beijing to complete them. These included finding and trying a local drink (it was like yogurt in a grey clay pot.... really really nice!), asking a stranger if they were hungry and finding and writing the characters for male and female. We went around as the Xinjiang group and stumbled upon a bar. I tried a drink called 'plum nectar' which was pretty nice! There was live music playing and the general atmosphere was pretty lovely.
That evening we jumped on a bus to take us to a hostel near the Great Wall. We had another weird and slightly wonderful meal here then about 20 of us crammed into one of the girls rooms. The 'bed' was for 10 people but we managed more. It was pretty cool though, it was just one huge pile of bricks with a layer of padding and some duvets and they called it a bed. It was painful but friendly...
That night we sang songs (with Dan and Jono playing the guitar), drank Baijiu for the first time and generally had a merry time!

The morning after, we set off for our epic hike up to the Great Wall. We were expecting the tourist-y part of it and we were greeted by the completely wild part. Apparently the section we were on was actually banned because it's pretty wild.. But the locals let us. It took us about 30 minutes to climb to the top (no luxury of a chair lift..) and I am proud to say that I was the first girl out of the group to be on the wall! Also I kept up with the fast guys at the front so I'm proud of all sorts of things. Once we got up there, we waited for the others and wandered around. You could only see about 10 yards in front of you before the fog decided that you had seen enough.. But I think that that's what made the views so amazing. It felt like we were so high up and it was amazing seeing the wall disappear off into white.

Once we got back to the bottom, we jumped back onto the bus and it took us to our beloved hostel. That evening we had the best meal of our lives. It was really really good. There were 3 banquet tables with plates and plates of food coming out and being put in front of us. There was a sweet fried pork dish which was so tasty, a beef thing in some sort of sauce thing and Peking duck. The duck came with pancakes and cucumber and plum sauce (the whole shibang) and it was just so good. After the meal, Alicia and Mike took us out for an evening of karaoke!

We walked into the building and into this huge reception room with marble floors where everything was shiny and beautiful. We then made our way down this huge, wide staircase and into this other huge reception room. Then through a few more doors and we were in this smaller (but still big) room by ourselves. There were 4 sets of sofas/posh chairs to sit at, each with a coffee table. It worked nicely because us 27 can easily split into 4 mini-groups! I was sitting with my breth obviously.
Then a Chinese man walked in and gave each group a few microphones and took drink orders.
Then we all sung terrible songs.. Including Adele, Gotye, Party Rock, My hump my hump my hump my hump my lovely lady lumps (etc), Barbie girl and many MANY others. Those ones are just slightly easier to remember as they were hilarious.
I took a staring role with a couple of other people in the Adele and Gotye and the my hump one was played a few times and we rocked it every time. I didn't know the words before then but I surely do now!
Jony sung Pink by Areosmith by himself and it was the funniest thing any of us have witnessed. He just read the lyrics in his deep, depressed, serious Scottish voice and it lasted for 3 minutes and oh, we were all wetting ourselves.
After the karaoke, we decided to go to McDonald's because we are cultured and like learning about the Chinese food. I was pulled into a 4 seater taxi which already had 4 people in, so I was lying on top of the back 3 people. But in the transition into the taxi, my arm hit the top of the door which was really rather painful as my BCG injection was STILL healing... So I bled quite a bit back there.
We got out of the taxi and toddled into McDonald's and I asked behind the till for a plaster IN CHINESE and they actually gave me one. So that was a proud moment.
We then all went off to different bars and had yet more alcohol. We ended up in a bar called the Pool Bar (it had a pool table in it believe it or not!) so we sat and made friends with other English people there and obviously, played a lot of pool!

The day after was much less eventful. We had 2 meetings to sit through which was a challenge seeing as we were all shattered from the previous night. However that evening was lovely as we all went back to the Pool Bar and chatted and just had a lovely time. We also spent a lot of time in the bar in the hostel. We sat in the outside area where it was still warm from 11-1! Oh China. So warm.... Dan and Jono played the guitar and sang again and life was just lovely.

The morning after we had to get up nice and early in order to leave for our train to Xinjiang! About half of us left the hostel in the morning and once we got to the station, we split again to just 9 of us. There was us 7 going to Xinjiang and 2 boys going to the most north-west side of Gansu. After successfully getting our huge bags into the top bag compartment (with the help of some very nice Chinese people), me, Alice and Georgina went exploring to find the others. That journey was spent as a group in Jony, Hannah and Jamie's carriage as they had the nicer company! We made many friends along the train - Alana 1, Alana 2 and her Grandmother, London/Canadian man, Tom and Bob, Bob's younger brother and younger brother's friends!
Alana 2 was a little girl (she was our favourite) who was basically our teacher as she understood how terrible we all were at the language! So for example I asked her in Chinese if the boy near her was her 'didi' (brother) and she looked at me with horror in her face and shook her head.. I was trying to work out what I did wrong and lept to my phrasebook and then shouted 'gege' (with a 'g' like 'genie') and she again looked confused after shouting back 'gege' with a 'g' like 'got'. Basically this means that he was her older brother (gege) and not younger (didi)... So from that journey, it was already so interesting and we were learning new words from the start!

After being force fed seeds by Alana 2 and her Grandmother, we taught the kids some patty cake games, ate some more, sung, chatted and wrote to our new friends. They found it much easier understanding things when they were written down!

Alana 2 and her Grandmother. What a lovely picture.

The long train journey was made much longer by a few hours of delays.. So we got off of the train after 42 hours at about 1:30am in Urumqi. The smell of barbeques suddenly hit us and we were happy people. We walked towards a piece of paper with 'PT' written on it and met a few Chinese people who we assumed were people we'd be staying with for the next year... It was a strange feeling. We were introduced to our Waiban (waiban is Chinese for 'mentor'. They are the people living in your city and working in you school who take most responsibility for you. They are really helpful and we love them lots.). Ours is called Rosie and we've found out she is 27 and single and LOVELY, so if you happen to live in Kuitun and fancy a lovely gal, then there she is.

She took us to stay in a hotel in Urumqi that night and the following morning we were poked and prodded at the hospital in Urumqi. We had all sorts of tests done and us 3 girls had a weirdly fun time! Since it was pitch black the night we arrived, this was the day when we got to actually see Urumqi. It is such a beautiful city - much nicer the Beijing! Also the smell tops everything. After one last lunch in Urumqi we got into a mini van and they took us to Kuitun - the city where we'll be staying for the whole year. After a nice nap, we arrived and straight away we were taken to No. 1 High School - my school! We met Kai, who is a teacher at the school with good English and me and him are now pretty close.
We went round the other schools and met Mrs Liang from No 1 Middle School (Tessa's school) and found out that Rosie was from No 2 Middle School (Georgina's school). All of us then went around different serious looking places to get serious forms and things filled out. Rosie then took us to our apartment and we were all surprised with how lovely it is! There's a wall in the living room completely painted with mountains, branches with blossom, a stream, a tiger and a panda on some bamboo! There's a little balcony and 3 decent sized rooms and there's even a working(ish) shower, western loo and washing machine. We were obviously very happy.
The next few days were spent out shopping with Rosie to get things to make our new place prettier. We got pillows, cushions, a huge rug, a throw for the sofa, turtles, new bed sheets, a mirror, pretty boxes for our clothes, paint and EVERYTHING you could need. We spent about 500 yuan each all together which is only about £50! So China is very, very cheap. Happy us.

I've now been in Kuitun for two weeks.
We've gotten into the swing of teaching pretty quickly! There are some classes which are much harder work than others and there are some which think that they have perfect English so don't pay any attention! I wasn't told anything about my classes other than Grade 2 Class 24 is going to be much better than Grade 2 Class 5 as that's how the school system works.. But once I taught them, I found out that actually Class 5 are lovely and so much better than Class 24! So the first week was improvised to the max.
The last week was much easier. Not because I knew which classes were better than others, but simply because I was more confident as a teacher. I already have a pretty good balance between joking with my students, helping them and telling them off if they're being annoying. So that's handy!
We've made quite a few friends already and have favourite places to eat and go in our lunch breaks. After just 2 weeks we have a pretty solid routine! The usual lunch break is spent by going to a restaurant, then to the cake shop (the cakes here are just too good. We need to get booked into the gym...) and then to the park. The park here is the most beautiful thing I've been in and we just lie down on benches and soak up the sun. Because Xinjiang is so far away from Beijing, the hottest part of the day is at about 3-4pm which is the end of the lunch break! So we take that opportunity for sun bathing. Kuitun really is a lovely city though and every now and then we decide to break the routine and explore!

The cakes I talked about...

Last weekend Alice and Hannah came down from Bagang. We took them to all of our favourite places and let them meet our favourite people. We had a really nice weekend and spent Saturday night watching scary films and all sleeping on the living room floor. Then on Sunday, Hannah and Alice needed to go and find the bus in order to leave to go back to Bagang. Georgina took a taxi with them to the bus station (in the end, it was the wrong bus station so they needed another one in the other direction and only just caught the bus even though they were 5 minutes late!) so me and Tessa were left to roam the city by ourselves...... bad idea. Basically we walked past Dicos which is the Chinese version of KFC/Burger King. We popped in and got an ice cream (very nice thanks) and went on a hunt for the shopping centre. There are huge buildings with shops everywhere but one of them is the shopping centre with EVERYTHING in. We walked past the door for it and peeked inside and there were dusty Chinese men all doing work on the door. But we saw a little Uighur women walking in with a scarf around her face so we assumed that we must be allowed to go in too. We went inside and soon realised that the whole level of the shopping centre was being re-done. Also, the woman we were following wasn't Uighur or anything, the scarf was just to protect her from the dust as she was working there too. But because me and Tessa are proud, we didn't want to walk out straight away. We quietly followed a man who looked in charge of things to pretend we were with him and then made a loop of the whole level while nodding at the workers and saying 'good job' in Chinese as though we were just Westerners hired to oversee the work. It didn't work as well as we hoped though, seeing as we were in shorts and vests and eating ice cream... It was an adventure though!

So hot and sunny, even the camera thought so...

Me and Tessa covered in our shopping

A Xinjiang market

Lots of spices

LOTS of fruit and vegetables!



Tessa, Georgina, me and Rosie

Just a bit of the beautiful park

I'm picking up the language quickly too. I've had 2 Chinese lessons so far and try to talk to people every day. At first, when I wanted to translate something in my head, I automatically translated it into French... But now I'm struggling to even think of the French as the Chinese is just screaming at me!

It's pretty cool thinking that I'm actually in China and I can actually speak a bit of the language. We've made the flat more into a home now, with cushions and blankets everywhere. Also we spent yesterday painting the living room and my bedroom. Two Chinese men came round this morning to put up some shelves we bought and so I finally have places to put my things! I spent today putting up photos and cards and tickets or anything that I brought with me from England that reminds me of anyone or anything I love from home. So now, my room is finished! I am so glad as it actually feels like my bedroom now.

Tomorrow, we are going to Fukang to see Jamie and Jony for the weekend. Apparently we might be going to a wedding (?) and seeing the city. Nothing in China is ever really planned, things just happen and you have to go with the flow. It'll be lovely seeing them again though. We've found that we're missing other volunteers in China more than some people from Britain which probably just shows how close we've all become!

So that's basically three weeks worth of blogging condensed into this. I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to get around to doing this but as you can see, I've been pretty busy!
I'm having a brilliant time already and I weirdly love how everything is different and how we can't understand anything - be it the Chinese language, culture or any of it! I'm missing a lot of people from home and think about you all every now and then. I've got a lot to keep me busy though so that makes it a lot easier!

I might upload another blog in the next week if something huge happens, but if not I'll upload a huge one in two weeks time. We're leaving for our language course in Gansu next Friday and will be travelling for a week after - so there will be lots to talk about!

Much love to everyone! If you want to ask me anything or just talk to me then email me at msquibb94@gmail.com
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