Three Weeks....

Wow!  Time is flying by! 

We now have 3 weeks of teaching under our belts and it is feeling better every day.  Jordan’s teaching schedule is M,T,W,F from 8am-12pm, but basically since we leave the house at 7am and get back at 1pm it adds an hour on each end. My teaching schedule on Tues is 7am-5pm and W,Th 7am-1pm.  Tuesday is a long day and I’m beat by the time I get home, but it is a wonderful opportunity to be here and be working with these beautiful people.  I’m really starting to enjoy my students, more and more each day.  They are so kind and try so hard to do their best.  Other than our nightmare in the airport with the one old cranky Chinese man yelling at us and calling us criminals, EVERYONE else has been GREAT!! 

Here are a few things you may find interesting..

School:

We ride a faculty bus to/from school to teach.  We live on the old campus and teach at the new campus.  It is about a 45 min bus ride each way.  The bus driver refuses to turn on the AC so it is usually a sauna on the bus.  This past week has been particularly bad, very hot and humid. 

The classrooms have no AC, just ceiling fans, but the students aren’t fans of the fans!  So, I turn them on and when I turn my back, they turn them off, then I turn them on and they turn them off….it just goes back and forth.  I usually win!  The classrooms are also VERY dirty.  The students are in charge of cleaning the classrooms, so as you can imagine, it doesn’t get done very often.  We generally come home feeling dirty and grungy from the day.  One of these days I will take a picture of the classroom conditions.  It isn’t great, but we deal with it and so do the students. 

This week, two of my students wanted me to go and have lunch with them to the “canteen” (their lunchroom) where there are a hundred choices for food.  It was probably about 100 degrees inside the cafeteria and the students took me to get their favorite bowl of noodles.  It was REALLY yummy but sweat was running down my face as I ate hot noodles in a hot cafeteria!!  The back of my hair was drenched!  It is just so funny that we are sweating to death here!  Maybe that helps sweat off pounds!! Woo hoo!

Church:

We belong to the Xi’an Branch and there are about 20 people who attend, or who are on our records.  We both have callings now: Jordan is the EQ pres and I am 1^st counselor in the RS.  We belong to the Central China International District (CCID).  It covers a vast amount of China and we are what is considered a virtual district.  Because our district covers a vast amount of area, we have meetings over the Polycom, which is basically a speakerphone so we can all hear from our various locations across China via conference call.  This past Sunday we had District Conference on Saturday evening and Sunday morning.  We dialed in and listened to the speakers.  Kind of a strange way to conduct meetings, but interesting, quite doable and enjoyable.

For Sunday meetings, we meet in a conference room here on our old XISU campus, just a couple minutes from our apt.  It is actually in the small hotel on campus in an upstairs conference room. There are 6 of us China Teacher Program (CTP) teachers here on this campus.   The other Xi’an teachers are located at 2 other universities across the city and have to travel by taxi or bus to get here each Sunday.  We are very fortunate to have it here on our campus!  Just a hop, skip and a jump away!!!

Foreign Teachers:

There are MANY foreign teachers here in Xi’an, especially on our campus because we are the international studies university.  In our little apt building where there are 2 units on each floor and 3 floors, we have:  A family from Turkey living directly above us and a family with 2 children from California living across from the Turkey family, a family from Iran living directly below us with 2 children and across the hall from them are two Cuban teachers.  Once the other CTP/BYU teachers arrive (they found a couple to fill in for the couple that couldn't come with us because she got sick), they will live directly across the hall from us.  We have teachers from Spain, Germany, Japan, Korea, France, Argentina, Turkey, Iran, Cuba, England, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Portugal, Egypt/Sudan and the US. I’m sure there are more I haven’t met yet.  We had a gathering in the courtyard last Sunday evening where everyone brought something from their home country.  I bought a huge watermelon and cut it up and everyone loved it!  It was fun getting to know many of the foreign teachers. 

Well, off to bed I go!  Tomorrow is a big day with much to do…. as usual.  We definitely don’t have a minute to spare here!  We  love it and it is starting to feel more normal every day!