My phone was a worthy investment to bring along, even if it wasn’t working. The dictionary app I downloaded has become very useful in communicating. So through using that and a lot of gestures (that you hope are not offending anyone) we can communicate well enough to get around. Went out for dinner today to this western place called Helen’s Cafe. They play ninety’s music and the food almost tastes like home... Almost. Haha did not think we would want western food so fast, but the stuff on campus isn’t the greatest cafeteria food and there is not much selection since the students are not here yet. It’s noodles with a choice of mystery sauces or what appears to be stir fry with mystery meat (mostly we assume it’s pork). I think we will be cooking at home a lot once we can get back to a grocery store. Oh ya, on the way back we show the taxi driver the address and he starts driving and then at a stop light he ever so slyly takes out a map. I say HEY and he starts laughing, this guy was hilarious, he kept just rambling on, and I had no idea what he was saying. I think he thought I knew some mandarin because I knew the street name we had to go to, but I don’t know how to say ‘I don’t understand you’ haha. He was pretty awesome though, and we got home on a fairly direct route.
I described the traffic before so you can kind of imagine what it is like crossing the road. Kind of like frogger, go ahead, stop, go ahead, stop, and whatever you do don’t run. Apparently it freaks drivers out and they don’t know what to do. So you end up standing in the middle of the road a lot. We tend to wait for locals and follow them.
We are super busy, it seems like there is a never ending list of work to do, what with planning, and shopping and people are always doing things after school. We finally have our teaching assignments and tomorrow we should have our classrooms and I really hope we have our class lists as school starts on Monday!
