Wednesday November 21

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Today we woke up at 5am to get ready for our medical examination. We took our showers and were ready to leave by 7am. It took about one hour to get to Taizhou city from Xinghua city where we live. We got chest x-rays taken, blood work, ECG, eye vision tests and ultrasounds done just to make sure we’re healthy enough to work in the school.

We then went for breakfast and had these bread/pastry things which you dip in soy milk, dumplings and a rice filled pastry thing. We’re slowly getting used to the different foods here and we’re getting really good at using chopsticks! After breakfast we drove back home and we pretty much slept the whole way back.

When we got home, I saw that both my mom and dad were on MSN so I got to talk to them which made me really happy and I even cried a bit because it was the first time I really got time to talk to them for more than one minuet at the hotel in Beijing. My mom has an older version of MSN so she can’t use a mic or cam or anything but my dad has the newer one and he was able to talk with me using mics…it’s the cheaper way to talk.

Around 3pm we went over to the school to negotiate our contract and even though we didn’t like some of the options we did manage to compromise and I believe we are going to sign them on Thursday. They offered us to stay for dinner in the teacher’s lounge but we decided to come back to the apartment and relax a bit.

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