Living in China is different. Living in Xiantao, China is really different. In many of the bigger cities, foreign teachers will connect with other foreign teachers and they will often run into fellow English speakers. In Xiantao, this never happens…like ever. In the 7 months I have lived here, I have only seen 3 other foreigners (excluding the 3 foreign teachers who are at my school) and those 3 men were Hungarian and their English was poor. I have one Chinese friend (Shu) who speaks English really well and I am becoming friends with her best friend (Zoe) as well. So I’m at a total of 2 friends in my city- who both have families and jobs that keep them extremely busy. I don’t say that because I want people to feel sorry for me at all! I’m just putting it out there for people to understand my life here a little more and to hopefully help anyone who is thinking about taking a job in a “smaller” Chinese city.

That being said, a lot of my weekends are extremely boring, but also very busy. Everything takes longer to do in China than it would at home so I wanted to post a blog that is somewhat of an hour-by-hour account of one of my weekends. I hope this gives you a glimpse of life here in Xiantao.

Friday afternoon:

2:45 pm– My class ended and my weekend started. While I was leaving my last class one of my students caught me. This sweet student tends to “bump” into me after almost every class and asks me random questions and tells me random stories. On this day, he wanted to know my home address in America and handed me a water nozzle and asked me what it was. haha. 10 minutes later, I was off to the store across the street.

3:00– I arrived at the Lovely Town store. There is a girl that works there named Cathy who speaks some English. I usually try to talk to her so that maybe we can become friends, but on this day she wasn’t there, so I bought the 2 pens I needed and headed back to my apartment (3:07). On my walk back, my friend Shu texted me to tell me that her aunt was waiting for me at the pet store for me to take Charlie to get his hair cut and nails trimmed. This is a perfect example of how things work in China. I had talked to Shu about wanting to take Charlie to get groomed earlier in the week, but we hadn’t made any specific plans. Then, on my walk home after work, I found out that not only was today a good day to get Charlie groomed, but that her aunt was already waiting for me. haha. I rushed home to pick up Charlie and get things together.

3:17-Arrived back at my apartment, changed clothes, got Charlie ready and started my trek to the pet shop (3:30).

3:55– Made it to the #8 bus stop after having to carry Charlie part of the way (due to lack of sidewalks and traffic) & got on the bus.

4:05– Dropped Char off to get groomed and decided to walk around and window shop a little before I found something to eat for my extremely late lunch.

4:30– Hot Pot. Hot Pot is one of my favorite things to eat in China. Basically, you pick the foods you’d like to eat and then cook them yourself in a boiling soup in the center of the table. The hot pot place I went to on this day is “fast” food. This means that they quickly cook it for you after you pick it out and you eat all the foods together.

     


4:50– Finished my “fast” food and walked back to the pet shop.

5:15– Back at the pet shop, Char wasn’t ready yet so I sat and waited patiently.

 6:10– After 2 hours of killing time and waiting, Char was finally ready so that I could take him home. Since I was already out and in that part of town, I decided to walk with Charlie to the Watson’s pharmacy to see if maybe, just maybe, they had some vitamins that I had been needing. They didn’t have them. No where does. I wasn’t too let down though. I had figured I wouldn’t find any, but I knew Char and I could hop on the #10 bus at the bus stop across the street from Watson’s so I figured it was worth the shot.

  

 6:35– Hopped on bus #10 that stops directly in front of my school.

 6:50– Arrived at the school. Crossed the street to pick up some dishes to eat for dinner and have for leftovers and went into the bakery to buy some delicious bread.

  
 7:20– Finally home!!

I’m not sure about all the timing of everything, but pretty much, I got home, cleaned up a little, rested, played with Char, ate dinner and vegged out.

  
9:45– Fell asleep. (I tend to wake up around 4am on work days so I fall asleep early)

Saturday

6:30 am– Woke up to the sound of Charlie throwing up in my floor. ugh. I usually wake up early so when I “sleep in” and he goes too long without breakfast, he vomits. So I jumped out of bed and rushed to clean up the mess and feed him. After he was fed, I heated up a glass of lemon-cucumber water (a healthy habit I attempt to keep), crawled back in bed, had my quiet time for the day, and fell back to sleep because a sleepy, cuddly Charlie is a bad influence.

 

   Around 9 am– Woke back up and got my day started. I had expected to go volunteer at the children’s home in Xiantao or go to the hair salon on this day, but I can’t go alone and my plans with my friends fell through- which was probably a good thing. After my blog about depression, I had been urged by many to go gluten free and test if maybe a gluten intolerance was affecting my mood, so I did until Friday night. Results of my testing: I’m pretty certain I’m gluten intolerant and lucky me* (sarcasm*) my intolerance seems to mainly affect me neurologically.

I spent most of Saturday sulking and feeling depressed and irritable and then sulking more because I realized that the foods I love the most more than likely were making me feel that way. Besides sulking and mourning the end of my relationship with pizza, I ate leftovers, did a ton of laundry (which takes forever because my washer is really small and I don’t have a dryer), watched Friends, wrote out my lesson plans for the week and pinned a lot of gluten free foods on pinterest.

Sunday [Easter]

I’m not really sure about what time I woke up and got ready on Easter Sunday, but I do remember I was really excited. It sucks not having a church or a community of believers here to celebrate Easter with, but for some reason I was more focused and connected to what Easter means to me than the lack of community that day.

10:30 am– I decided to share some Easter love with my students and friends by telling them Happy Easter and posting it on my Chinese social media accounts. It made me happy to share and it made me giggle when my friend Shu responded by asking if my family would be eating a ham for Easter (Shu likes to know about western culture and knows a lot) and then asked, “Who’s grace??” haha 🙂

 11:30– I decided to take Char for a walk along the canal in my Sunday dress. Yes, I’m a weirdo for wearing an “Easter” dress when I couldn’t go to church and no one here even celebrates Easter. Anyways, I figured that since the hot pot place isn’t far off the street from the canal, Char and I could just get off the bus at an earlier stop and walk along the canal to lunch. So we did. Only, I got off the bus way too early. Once I realized, I thought, “oh well, we need the exercise.” and I wasn’t too concerned about it.

     I was on the phone texting friends from home and just merrily walking down the canal, soaking up the sun, and enjoying the day like it was no big deal until my stomach started growling really loudly. At that point, I felt like we had walked forever, but I hadn’t seen my turn yet. A little confused, I walked up to the street and realized we had passed our turn. It was about half a mile behind us at this point and while I was playing on the phone during my walk, I had made plans to meet Shu after lunch to go to the hair salon. oh geez. I pushed back my plans with Shu and made the trek back to the hot pot shop.

   2 pm (after my long lunch excursion)– I met Shu at the school gate to go to the hair salon. She said her friend John couldn’t work on my hair until 3pm, so we walked around the shops and played with makeup until then.

 3:00– Arrived to get my hair “fixed”. A little back story, I got my hair colored purple before I went to Thailand because I had a month off from work and I thought it would be cute and fun- which it was- for Thailand. Since then, my hair has been so damaged that I cut it off and on this day, I was hoping and praying that somehow we could restore it to looking somewhat like the hair God intended for me to have. That didn’t happen. They tried a color removing process where they put gel on my hair and ran a straightener through each wet piece and then they washed it and bleached it. The result, red hair with tons of damage. Moral of the story, be happy with what God gave you and if you want to do something fun and different to your hair, use hair chalk.

 The hair process took a long time. 3 hours to be exact. During that time, I hung out and talked with Shu, ate a snickers bar, tried some dried fish street food that John (the hair stylist) offered me, and got a small fish bone stuck in my throat.

6:00– I gave up on my hair and told them I would just live with the red. They offered to dye it dark brown to attempt to cover the red,but I just waved the white flag and Shu and I went to get dinner. And just guess where she wanted to go- the hot pot place. haha. I didn’t object, I love it there.

7:00– Shu and I arrived by taxi back to school (she lives in the apartments across the street) and we decided to go get some groceries together.

 7:45ish– Finally back home.

8:45 pm– Attempted to watch Easter services online, but for some reason I couldn’t get any to load. I was pretty disappointed, but then got on Facebook and strangely, I was so encouraged. It’s like everyone on Facebook was posting scriptures and praises about God rather than (the expected) posts solely about Easter baskets and Easter outfits.

10 pm– Officially gave up on being able to watch an Easter service live and went to sleep.

So there you have it. An inside detailed look about what my not-so-glamorous weekends look like. If you’re thinking about becoming a teacher in China, feel free to leave a comment or message me with any questions. I’d love to help!

To read about a Sunday spent in China, click here.