Day 8 - Home (sort of)

Some of the people their managed to sleep, but I was not one of them. The chairs at this McDonalds seemed perfectly designed to keep me hunched over and unable to relax. Maybe they were designed that way, but if they were they severely underestimated the Chinese ability to sleep anywhere as most of the people there were happily catching their 40 winks. After what seemed like forever sitting there it was close enough to time for the train that we could go to the train station. Even though there were still some people sleeping in make shift tents, and by make shift I mean made out of bags and reams of cloth, it was much quieter than it had been at night. We made our way through the train station and onto the train. Despite all the activity earlier the station its self was mostly empty. We were their 15 minutes early but the train started making some noise as they loaded it which prompted one woman to rush ahead for her car. I don't think I would have seen that in America, since people would have more confidence that the train would only leave when it was scheduled to go.

The Chinese are actually really prompt as a whole. My students are very rarely late for class and then only be seconds. I've had students apologize when they're not actually late just because they see me standing there getting ready. Steve once told me that the school fines him if he is late to class. It was still dark when the train left but light by the time it pulled into Changzhou. I had planned to have a day off, since we were leaving for Vietnam the next day, but that didn't really materialize. It was way too late to go to be without totally messing up my sleep schedule for the next week. I also needed to get some money for Vietnam. Changing money at an airport usually means you lose three or four percent, but if you only do it once in a while it's not so bad. The problem was that the RMB is a restricted currency. It doesn't float freely so there are all sorts of rules about how much you can change into other currencies. Lynn spent a long time in Harbin trying to get them to change more of her salary into dollars. You're only allowed to change about a fourth of your monthly salary. But that's one forth of each month so it adds up. I wasn't sure if they could exchange money at the Ho Chi Minh City airport so I went with Teddy and Ken to a bank to exchange it into dollars.

First I started by taking out about $600 or 4,000 RMB form an ATM. We then waited while Teddy did the necessary paperwork. Instead of doing all the paperwork for us to exchange money he just exchanged money himself using our money. Weather this means that one day the Chinese IRS will want to have some words with him I don't know, but it was fast. It was weird just standing around holding a huge wad of 100 RMB bills, there were way too many to fit into my wallet. It was also odd to seem them all magically reduced to a few US bills. Teddy always seems to have an interesting job. He works in an office with essentially three people: his boss Peter, who besides attending meetings with the school does no work I've ever seen, himself, and Carrie a student who is his assistant. He's in charge of all the foreign teachers as well as any teacher from our school going to a foreign country. In a place where no one really seems good at problem solving or thinking outside the box, most of Teddy's job is dealing with problems as they come up. I was surprised at first when he paid for the taxi to and form the bank, after all in my mind he was just doing me a favor, but this was essentially his job.

I couldn't do much the rest of the day, while it was a bad idea to sleep I was just really tired. We had gone form cab to plane to train to bus in the last 16 hours. I spent a while packing for Vietnam. The problem was that besides four pairs of socks, t-shirts, and underwear, enough for the trip if I wore each about two to three times and washed them all once, I had to pack for very different climates. In the south, where we were flying to first, it was hot, beach weather, but in the north it was cooler, jeans and maybe a sweatshirt. In Shanghai I'd need a jacket and a hat as well if I didn't want to freeze. On top of all that I needed to bring toiletries, a swimsuit, and three books. In the end it all fit into my backpack, but only barley. I finally went to bed around 9:30 which was probably the earliest I've been to bed since Junior High School.