From the beginning

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Our Journey So far

So, from the beginning.
On around the 7th May 2009 we received confirmation that we had a job waiting for us with Joy Children's Language School in Daqing, China. After a week of rushing around preparing our belongings and making trips from Toowoomba to Brisbane to secure our documents we finally received our Visa's on the 12th May. On the 13th May we flew to China.

After a 8hr flight with Singapore Airlines we arrived in Singapore. Each seat had it's own TV screen and remote. You could watch movies, play games, learn languages, look at exactly where you were flying and at what height. I had beef stew (which had red wine in it for lunch and salad) and a chicken something pie for dinner, as well as refreshments the whole trip. They even provided a pillow and blanket 😊 Unfortunately we hadn't considered Wayne being a vegetarian so he didn't receive as tasty meals - he mainly ate bread rolls the whole trip. When we arrived in Singapore we caught the skytrain to our terminal and also had some food at a restaurant. After looking around we relaxed and waited for our 1am flight to Beijing.

At about 7.20am we arrived in Beijing, went through customs, picked up our lugguage and then quickly went to secure tickets to fly from Beijing to Harbin. Soon after we went on a mission to locate some tasty food. Of which we found! We had dumplings and a mixture of mushrooms and fungi's.

We took an Air China plain to Harbin. This trip only took about 2 hours. Waiting for us was Irene, Jason's wife (our boss), she presented me with flowers and a bag of food for our bus trip as Jason was unable to collect us from the airport because he had opening day preparations for the new school to attend to. The bus trip was good, a little weird as this was the first time people were taking a keen interest in the way we looked. The bus trip took about 3 hours. As we got off the bus in Daqing we were suddenly completely surrounded by Chinese 'taxi drivers' saying Come with me etc, one even said 'hello' and for a second Wayne thought it might have been Jason. These guys try to push you into jumping in the cab so they can make a hot fare. Fortunately Irene had given us her cell phone and we had been in contact with jason, so we gave him a call (as we had arrived earlier than expected) and he was there in no time to pick us up. A guy on a bike cart thing kept riding past, smiling at us - as if to say hey, jump in my cart and pay me a sweet fare. Wayne mentioned how they wouldn't understand us and vice versa so it'd be a great ploy to have the meter running.
Jason took us to our temporary apartment in Donghu. We were so excited at the thought of a shower but soon discovered the one thing they had forgotten to organise was plugging in the hot water. lol and i forgot to pack shampoo so washed my hair with soap, and yes it was as dry as straw. We then went for dinner with Jason at a restaurant in Ranghulu. We were able to try a lot of new food and the Chinese beer. That night and the next day we just slept and slept and slept as we were awake for about 50 hours straight.

Next on the agenda was attending Lishui Joy Children's Language School's opening day. There were heaps of drums and drummers, a trumpet player and also some fire-crackers. The children did a performance of their ABC song with gestures/actions and the official business of cutting the ribbon was done by Jason. After this we went to have lunch with Jason, his wife Irene, the Vice Principal Scott and other important people from Joy School in Daqing and Harbin. Here we tried more delicious food and noted that in the restaurant foyer there was just about every type of sea animal/fish/shell fish thing you could imagine all alive ready to be served up. On our table we were served live shrimp, the poor little guys were still twitching.

Emily from Donghu took us grocery shopping. While we were there, Wayne was standing near the fish section - they're so fresh you buy them fresh out of the tank where they're swimming around. Before he knew it a fish jumped right of the tank! He was so amazed and thought it was completely hilarious.

The next day was Monday the 18th, we were both a bit sick but powered on to Lishui Joy School to commence our training. We learnt about the history of Joy School, all of the teaching methods and practiced some of the units during our training that week. The next weekend we sat in on about 8 classes at Donghu Joy School. This was an excellent way to conclude our training week as we were able to see all of the methods we had been taught come together. One of the classes we sat in on was one of Tony's K classes. It was a real blast, he's an excellent teacher.
The following week Wayne started teaching at Donghu Joy School and the week after that I started teaching at Lishui Joy School and at the Middle School.

An important lesson
We discovered that Eastern toilets can't handle poop, wee, water AND toilet paper, so now we have to put the toilet paper in a bin next to the toilet. It sounds gross but it's much better than the toilet being clogged. I ended up holding on for the whole night until someone came to fix it, lol. After speaking to a fellow Aussie, he mentioned that it's actually an unspoken rule that you shouldn't flush your toilet paper.


A friendly encounter
One night Wayne and I went to a restaurant for dinner and halfway through our meal a guy wrote us a note in Chinese and said (in a round about way with gestures and facial expressions)he wanted us to figure out what it said using our phrasebook. After about half an hour we called him over and we tried to explain that we couldn't understand. He ended up calling up a friend of his who had to wake up her 8 year old son at 9:10pm and drive to the restaurant and she tried to explain the note. She was a high school teacher and has two brothers, one lives in Canada, and the other is an engineer who lives here in Daqing. After chatting with her for about 20 minutes her husband asked (in a round about way as his English was far more limited than our Mandarin) if we would mind staying a little longer and we said that we didn't. So they called the brother that was the engineer and he came down and was very happy to speak English with us.
They were all such beautiful people! Amongst all of that we figured out what the note said. The guy who wrote it was the boss/owner of the restaurant and his note said that on behalf of all of the staff and cooks, he warmly welcomed us to his restaurant and to china, we a more than welcome to come back any time we like and If we have any special requests just to phone ahead and he will try to organize it for us before we get there. We explained that Wayne was a vegetarian and he was more than happy to try and find dishes that would suit. After a long conversation we finally parted ways and they insisted on making sure we had a safe journey back home, ie did they need us to organise a cab or a bus or did we need them to drive us. Fortunately we were living up the road at the time so it was no hassle.

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Comments

[Kim]

Where do get the time
This is really cool, a way to tell us all what you are doing, all great tips and it makes us feel like we are with you