Woah.

So very much has happened in such a short time that I can’t cover it all right now. Instead, I’ll just focus on the past few days.

I left Decatur, AL at 4:40 a.m. on Friday morning. I didn’t arrive in Wuhan until 12:30 a.m. on Sunday (11 p.m. on Saturday Central time).

what. a. long. travel day.

It was super crazy and tiring, but I made it to China and that is what counts! On the flight over, I started feeling very sick. My ears were stopped up and the pressure in the plane made it almost unbearable. On top of that, my nose wouldn’t stop running. I carry a kleenex packet in my purse and it usually last 3-4 months. On this flight, it only lasted 3-4 minutes. It was so bad and I felt really bad for my fellow passengers that had to keep seeing me scramble for tissues and had to keep seeing me blow my nose. But, I arrived!

Once I landed in Wuhan, I was exhausted. I had stayed up the entire night before I left to get my sleep pattern on China’s schedule, but it had backfired when all of my flights were delayed for hours, so I was dreaming of sleeping in Wuhan. Little did I know, there wasn’t a hotel booked for me yet so I ended up not getting into a bed until 3 a.m. on Sunday morning just to check out and go get my medical check at 8 a.m. that same morning. What a mess. haha.

I was picked up at the airport by my school’s foreign teacher director, William, and our school’s driver Mr. Yang. I had never seen or spoken to either of the men before so when I got in their car from the airport and then had to ride around looking for hotels with them I just prayed a lot (and sent my dad their tag numbers in case I went missing haha). The next morning William asked me if I had my original medical documents from America and I didn’t (because no one told me to bring them) so we had to figure out how to make a copy look like the original.

How do you make a scanned document look like an original in a town that neither you or the men you are with are familiar with? I have some good ideas, but in this case William and I just walked down the street in hopes to run into a copy/printing store. I thought he was a little crazy because I was in heels and in Alabama you could walk from one end to the other and never com across a printing store. He was right though. It only took a few blocks for us to get there and then a worker there tried to make my document look original.

The document didn’t look good enough to slide by & when the girl at the medical clinic asked, we were honest. So she threw out my previous medical form. This meant that I had to do all the medical exams again. ehh.

It wasn’t too bad. I had to have pictures taken, my measurements, an x-ray, and other typical things, but one procedure was not normal for me. Keep in mind that all these doctors don’t speak English. They may know a few key words to describe what they need you to do for the procedure, but they definitely don’t really know it. So just imagine… I have on a dress and I go behind this curtain and the doctor tells me to lift my dress up. I had no idea what was happening or what kind of exam I was about to get, but I knew I had to get it so I lifted up my dress while laying on this table. Then she says, “lift up to your neck.” I was really confused but also thought it was kinda funny in a weird, what-the-heck-did-I-get-myself-into kind of way. So I did what she said and then she pointed at my bra and said again, “lift up to your neck.” Now I was really confused, but I just did it. Then she put clamps on my wrists and ankles and put about 6 of these weird, metal suction cup things on my chest. At this point, I started to freak out a little. If laying on a table with my dress up to my neck wasn’t vulnerable enough already and now I’m hooked to a foreign machine. I was so afraid it was going to shock me or hurt me and no one was going to warn me because she couldn’t speak English. Turns out, she was just checking out my heart. WHEW!

After all the crazy medical things were completed, it was finally time to go to Xiantao- the city where I am living and working. Xiantao is about an hour and a half away by car from Wuhan, the province’s capital. As soon as we arrive in Xiantao, William took Mr. Yang and I out for a traditional lunch. It was really good! We had beef, catfish, rice, fish balls, steamed bread, and ladder gourd(?). I really liked the fish balls until I had the realization halfway through the meal that I am in China and these could be literal fish private parts. That made me feel sickly.

After we finished eating, we took a selfie together and hit the road to my new apartment! I was so excited to finally see the school and the apartment! This is my school at first glance…

I’ll talk more about the school and my apartment in my next blog! Thanks for keeping up with my journey.

**Chitchatting for Xiantao and my health would be so appreciated right now since my voice is gone and classes start tomorrow! I will be teaching 60 10th graders English! Ahhh!!

P.s. If you’d like to see a traditional Chinese bathroom stall, keep scrolling. haha