The Rest of Day 1

After we saw my place - our first apartment - we were both a little disturbed.

I have to be honest here.
We Americans have a certain image of the world - forgive the generalizations. And when we were confronted with the cloudy skies (It's not always cloudy, but it often is), the dirty streets (Here.. yes. Always is. Almost always is.), and our dark apartments (the flash actually made the apartment look a lot better)... well, we didn't look all that happy.

The part of me that was somewhat imagining a small city in China to look like a smaller version of Hong Kong or Beijing was surprised.

Of course, another part of me - the part that wanted to come to China and the anthropologist part of me - was ecstatic. Yeah. People pour trash into the street gutters?

No problem!

People throw trash everywhere, you see. Leftovers, scrap food, and just... trash... gets dumped onto the sides of the roads by street food vendors. Even some small restaurants dump their trash out in the open. Mostly, they try to pour it down the sewage system, but of course not everything falls through the sewage grates.

Inside restaurants, people throw stuff on the ground. Used napkins, bones, shrimp peels, and whatever it is that people don't want to eat... that gets thrown onto the ground too.

Even at tourist sites, people just casually throw their water bottles over their shoulders into the bush.

One of my students told me that she cried when she first moved to Baoding for university. She took one look - and one sniff - and spent the entire day in tears. "Baoding is really dirty," she said.

Understatement, much?

I get the sense that localers are a little embarrassed by the trash in the streets - at least, when they're talking to foreigners about it. They don't want to say too much... but two months here (that's not a very long time, I know) have shown me that hey! The trash doesn't actually pile up over time. It's always there, but there isn't any more of it.

"I wouldn't throw it on the ground if I didn't know that someone was going to sweep it up," says an American teacher who has taken to heart the When in Rome... thingy.

So yeah. All this trash creates loads and loads and loads and LOADS of jobs, even if it's not particularly efficient.

Just a thought.
AH!
I went on a tangent. Why was I talking about trash?

Right- So that first day, the two people from the foreign affairs office who showed us around noticed the look on our faces (I was grinning maniacally, I think. Why? I don't know). So someone decided to introduce us to one of my neighbors.

Out came Maggie, a 50-some year old American English teacher who has lived and taught in China for the past five (I think?) years. She came out, smiled at us, saw the look on our faces, and immediately proceeded to calm our fears. She's one of those people you get to know without needing to talk to at all - she makes eye contact, smiles a little, and nods in understanding.

Emotional damage control? Check.
Then we needed to move Hannah's luggage up five flight of stairs. Someone made a phone call, and BAM, just like that - we met our second American English teacher.

This really tall expat came into my apartment, where we were all waiting.
He looked around the room.
"We have some new foreign teachers here," one of our leaders said.
And this guy - we'll call him John - looked right past me, extended his hand to shake Hannah's, then relaxed. He was ready to help out with the luggage.

I stood, a little awkwardly. Raised my hand a little bit.

"Oh, uh. Hey. I'm an American teacher," I say.

He looked at me for a second, surprised. And then suddenly - apologetic. OH!

Yeah, that's right. American here! He thought that I was a new employee from the office.

...Yeah.
Actually, all this build-up and introduction of some other American teachers?
I just really wanted to tell that one story.

Hm.
Yeah.
Well.

While I'm at it, I might as well tell you what happened the rest of that day.

John helped with the luggage. We relaxed for a moment. Then Mr. Kou proceeded to take out a cigarette. He offered one each to both Maggie and John (sorry about all these names), and I did a double take. Inside Hannah's new apartment, they were literally taking a smoke break.

INSIDE the apartment.
No questions or permission asked.

It was interesting.
I think Hannah might have been screaming inside, and I wouldn't blame her.

Then our leaders (aka bosses aka people from the foreign affairs office) left. We grabbed dinner with John and Maggie at a nearby restaurant, where we quickly ran into another facet of Chinese culture - and one that I was very familiar with.

When we were done eating, before we were ready to pay the bill, John stood up casually, walked over to the cashier, and paid for all of us.

My response?
"Oh wow. That's very Chinese of him."
And then a quick but failed struggle in which my own cultural background pushed me into the fight to pay the bill.

After dinner - and an awfully long day - we each went home to absorb in the facts and details of our new lives in Baoding, China.

My internet wasn't working, my kitchen was a literal grease field, my bathroom was flooded (I had showered), my couches were moldy, and I didn't have a pillow.

Still, armed with a taste for adventure like the Gryffindor I am (It was nearly a 3 way tie, but the online tests say my Gryffindorness edge out a couple of points ahead of Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff!), I was ready.

...Yes. I just ruined a dramatic final sentence with an unnecessary parenthesized thought.
Oh well.