Waiting Around (Part Two)

I've been gone for a while off my blog while I was having trouble getting my VPN to work in my new apartment, more on that in another post. I'm pretty far behind with what happened in the beginning of the semester but I'd like to catch up with that now. I've written before about how long a process it was to get to China this time, and now I want to talk about what happened when I finally got to China. Nothing, nothing at all happened. Despite my worries about being late, it was well after the semester had started by the time I showed up, the school was in absolutely no rush to give me any classes. I basically had a month off after showing up before I taught any classes. But that wasn't nearly as much fun as it sounds. First, I often didn't have my passport because of all the steps in getting a visa, and I didn't have a real visa until after I started teaching so I couldn't go to Hong Kong, or Maco, since those are both essentially international destinations.

I also didn't really know anyone at the school, there were a couple of other teachers living where I lived but they actually had classes and stuff to do. I was basically on my own with endless free time. Having some free time is great, I'll admit one of my favorite part about working in China is how much free time I have, but total unstructured free time is different. For me at least when I have nothing at all to do it becomes easier and easier just to waste day after day. After a while it gets hard to do anything. After weeks of having nothing to do I was starting to lose my mind. I really felt like I was going crazy just sitting around day after day. I lost all sense of motivation or interest in doing anything. By the time my classes actually started I was incredibly happy just to have something to do. And despite having actual work I also suddenly was able to get other things done more. While I had nothing at all to do I couldn't muster the energy to even clean my apartment, but when I finally had work cleaning it was easy. I just know that I don't want to have that much time off again.