Basically the first thing I did when I saw my room was laughed. This picture doesn't nearly do it justice. The room which you see here is my living room/kitchen. The kitchen has faux marble counter tops and a bunch of appliances including a microwave. The rest of the room comes with a computer desk, and computer, a sofa, and a TV nicer then the one we have at home. The whole room is probably a little larger then our family room. The view is pretty amazing also. I posted some of the shots but it's hard to get a view on camera. I'm on the 14th floor facing much of the city. It's really quite a masters of the univerise type view. The whole apartment has beautiful hard wood floors and is incredibly clean. The bedroom which is a little smaller then the living room area also has an amazing view, plus these amazingly hard mattresses the Chinese seem to like. The bathroom is bigger than both are bathrooms put together and nicer. In between the bedroom and bathroom is a little room with a washer and dryer. My first thought when I saw all of this was basically I'm never coming back.
We had about 5 minutes to put our stuff down before we went to lunch at the hotel's restaurant. Despite a french name and the promise of western food it serves what seems to be pretty classic Chineese fair. A lot of oddly labeled dishes like, "meat," or "duck claw," which I tried and wasn't so bad is a little gamy. We had lunch with our Waiban Teddy and Clark a returning American teacher from Montana. He told us, and Teddy basically agreed that the amount of work he did was laughable, he said that last semester he tough 6 hours a week and only worked 2 days a week. Though he said that this was on the pretty extreme end he noted how lucky we were to be at this school. Teddy noted that we probably wouldn't start teaching for 1-3 weeks. He didn't have any more real info though. China seems to be an enormously go with the flow place. I asked Teddy if we had a meeting tomorrow or something and he laughed and said no, at which point Clark just said not to worry about it, "If they want you, they'll find you."
After lunch I explored the campus a little. The students were just coming back and it looked like a scene right from freshmen week at Madison. Everyone was carrying around there stuff any walking in small groups between the dorms. I was stunned by just how exactly it matched my image of the start of term at any school in the States. There was an enormous basketball court, more like 20 courts actually where a ton of students were engaged in all manner of games. Apparently this wasn't even the only court on campus.
The campus is huge I walked for a good hour and didn't see nearly all of it. Teddy said they're used to be a village here but they moved them all to expand the school. He pointed out from one window a nearby Tibetan high school which he said had become basically encircled by the campus and was going to be moved also to make room for more development, quite the metaphor. There are something like 13, 000 students who live in various small dorm like rooms. They have a strict 11pm curfew but foreign teacher apparently just can pretty much come or go as they please. The space where a few other foreign teacher are living doesn't have the same new feeling or view but is immense. Two CIEE teachers are living in places with 2 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms at least 1 porch and a bunch of other rooms each. That's 4 bedrooms between 2 people.
At about 6 we had some 20 cent beers with Clark which assuming they don't poison me weren't that bad. Clark said the company sometimes had trouble controlling how much alcohol was in the beers, and while most had about 3.5% some were known to have about 3 or 4 times as much. He said the school was incredibly lax and at one point last semester he and another teacher just canceled class for two weeks to go on a trip. Well I'm sure there's more but that's all I can think of now from Shangri'la. Check out the photo link as it has been hugely updated with all todays pictures.
No comments:
Post a Comment