Settling In

Ni hao!

Slowly but surely I'm getting settled in to my apartment and adjusting to the fact that I now live in China! This week we've been touring Beibei and the Southwest University campus as well as exploring sites of Chongqing.

Yesterday we spent the whole day in Chongqing seeing all the sights. We went to the three gorges museum which is pretty cool, visited their equivalent of a parliament hall or central government building, and saw the point where the Jialing and Yangtze rivers meet. Then we went to two different places with a whole bunch of shops, but the exteriors of the places were designed like the old towns and ancient villages, it was very cool. I bought a brush painting of chinese plum blossoms to decorate my apartment. We then went to a beautiful restaurant to have hot pot! Ok so hot pot is like fondue where you have a giant pot of boiling liquid and you cook meat and vegetables in it. Traditionally, hot pot is very spicy but they have half and half pots where one side is the red spices and the other more of a broth. The meat selections were beef, sheep, cow stomach, chicken stomach, chicken noodles, beef meatballs, and sausages. The veggies were mushrooms, lotus root, potatos, chinese root (they couldn't translate it), rice noodles, sweet potato noodles, black fungus, white fungus, and probably a few other things I don't know the name of. Anyways everyone would just sort of dump a bunch of stuff into both the hot and mild side and you let it cook for a few minutes and then dip it in either a sesame oil or spicy soy sauce and enjoy! And we did enjoy :) Now if the spices didn't numb your mouth and make you sweat enough as it is, our director bought a 220 RMB bottle of baijiu, which we had to COMPLETELY FINISH before we could get beer. Baijiu is a distilled liquor made from rice; most baijiu is around 80-120 proof. It's not very good, but the more expensive the bottle the more tolerable it gets. So, eight shots later, we're all feeling pretty nice. We'll probably go out again for hot pot for my birthday, and it'll be very nice for the winter months.

Today April, one of the assistants in the international exchange office, gave me my teaching schedule and showed me the buildings and classrooms I will be teaching in, which begins on Monday! Most of my classes will have over 60 students in them but their English skills should be fairly high. I will also be teaching at a technical college in Chongqing on Thursday mornings. I'm excited and nervous to start teaching but I've already met a few students and they are all very eager and excited to use and practice English, so that'll help.

I'm still figuring out a way to post pictures. I can't directly post them into the blog for reasons unknown but hopefully album links will be coming soon.

Zaijian!