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Published: April 2nd 2009
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The big day arrives - my first day of teaching, and being the worry wort that I am I woke up at the ungodly hour of 5am. Sat in what was now a very untidy hotel room I went over the different classes I had that day and what I planned to teach them. It is at this point that I have to make two confessions, one I think is forgivable, the other can only be explained by temporary madness!
As mentioned, I had woken up at 5am and by 6.30am I was not only ravenous but in dire need of a cup of coffee. And here, we come to my first confession - Nanqiao is a fairly small town and not really a twenty four hour place so at 6.30am if I wanted food and caffine my only recourse was .....McDonalds!
Now I think the coffee at Maccy D's is perfectly acceptable, but the food is a pile of crap and considering I won't eat McDonalds in the UK I felt slightly guilty eating it in China, though not as guilty as I had felt the night before committing my most heineous food crime EVER. I ate KFC,
room of no specified use!
Now being used as a gym space/disco room ;p when there were
other food options available. In my defence it was 11 o'clock at night, I was pretty tired, fairly nervous about the next days teaching and I just wanted to go, point at some food and know what I was going to get. Orignially, McDonalds had been my first recourse, but even the digitally editied pictures of the food they were serving looked grim and unfamiliar so I decided to give it a miss and look to the colonal for 'sustanence'. Now, the last time I ate KFC was about 7 years ago, so I have to admit I'm not totally familiar with the menu, however I am pretty sure that it's not usually spicy. The KFC in Nanqiao is, and it comes with toxic orange squash that makes gatorade look like a savoury drink. Despite being spicy it still tastes like crap, and so left me feeling mostly unsatisfied and a bit guilty that I had turned down the delights of chinese cuisine for Kentucky's finest.
So after a night with the colonal and a morning with the red headed clown it was, whether I felt ready or not, time for me to go and teach. The teaching was, fortunately uneventful, none of the kids ran off in fear and neither did I and by the end of the day no one had died cried or come to tell me I was fired. And so I returned to my room relived that I had got through the first day but mostly looking forward to the fact that the next day I would finally get to leave the hotel and move into my flat.
I had only been to the flat once and couldn't quite remember where it was, fortunately Ian the other teacher was on hand to give me directions to where I lived. Now these directions where walk down the road cross at the park and the block is next to the park. Pretty easy?! Apparently not if you are me and so by the time I had got to the park the directions in my head had morphed into the block being accross from the park. So I go to the block that I think is mine and try what I think is the right key in the door, no luck so I try all the other keys on my key chain,
seven in all, nothing nothing will get me in. May be it's a different door and so I try the gate to the next block and the one behind, no luck there. Various swear words are mumbled under my breath as I start to panic a tiny bit about the fact I am in China, it's dark and despite being given directions I can't figure out where I live. Suddenly it occurs to me that when I went to the flat before we crossed through the park to get there, so I cross the road hoping to fuck that this gate will be the winner, thankfully it is. So I climb the stairs and after trying the wrong floor first, let myself in to my new home.
After checking that all my stuff had made it from the hotel to the flat I decide to go out explore my new surroundings and go buy some food to cook. Which I managed to do, no problem. It seemed however that the flat did not want me to stay. As not only did it scramble my brain so that I tried three different blocks before finding mine when I returned from
my brief food shop my front door would not open.
At first I thought perhaps I had got the wrong key, so I tried all the different keys I had, many, many, many times. Then I wondered if I was at the wrong flat and perhaps the lock for the mosquito netted door was the same for all the flats, so I went and tried to open that door in the flat above, I also decided to ring on the doorbell just to make sure I wasn't desparately trying to enter someone elses abode. I did all of these things several times, even going back outside to make sure I was in the block next to the park! When I was about as sure as I could be that I was at my flat, and that the door wasn't opening for no one, I phoned Jin, one of the owners of the school for help. 'Have you tried all the keys?' he asks 'Are you at the right flat?' answering affirmative to both Jin replies that he better come over. 'Please let this be my flat' I think to myself.
Jin arrives tries all my keys, twice as
many times as I did concludes that the door isn't opening and so calls a locksmith. Although I am fairly sure that this is definitely my flat, the fact it is only the third time I have been there, there are no numbers outside to confirm this one is mine and of course not forgetting that my key won't open the door leaves a quite a large grain of doubt in my mind. Locksmith comes, can't open the lock with the key, takes his magical pins of door opening, they don't work either, so takes off the whole bloody lock from my door. Only after doing this, does he ask Jin (in chinese) 'this is her flat, right?'. Thankfully after a quick check of the bedroom where my bags are I confirm, that yes, this is my flat. Locksmith presents me with a new set of keys and he and Jin leaves. I decide I can't really be bothered to cook dinner any more, have yet another serving of chinese pot noodles and head off to bed wondering what other excitement the coming days, weeks and months will have in store.
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Ingrid
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tee hee
I confess I ate McDonalds in Russia cause i was exhausted, no one spoke English and i needed to eat and all other attempts were not working. It seems Big Mac is universally understood. ;-) I too felt cheap and dirty.