I slipped and fell on adventure

Ahhh China… and Tanshan… when confused… accept it. Shall we have a look around my apartment? So the loo… the loo, well its Western so WINNER! As with most places in China one is not to flush used toilet paper down the toilet, apparently the pipes are too narrow and so cant deal with items that cannot be quickly diluted (for use of a better word), please see small ‘paper bin’ next to the loo. I have every intention of purchasing a bin with a lid in the hopes of… well, you can imagine what my hopes would be of hiding used toilet paper – no need to be crass! Still on the loo, I am on the lowest level of the block of apartments which houses teachers and students alike. The piping… intriguingly, is an inside job… meaning, if you again refer to the picture, the pipe you see there is the exit for all showers and bodily functions from five flights up… Therefore, if we don’t keep the door to the bathroom closed we are welcomed after teaching to the delightful scent of human excreme...

Therese and I were dropped off at the largest train station either of us had ever seen, advised in broken English to go through that gate (pointing…) in two hours… Ahh when we spent the money to have our hand held through our first Asian TEFL experience, we didn’t expect such thoroughness and dedication… However, we were not to be deterred, “We’ve got this” we said to one another. Therese stayed with the bags while I went on the hunt for Ice Cream and Water. Unfortunately the staff member at McDonalds felt disinclined to serve me a soft serve as she had the person before me… she waved me away. Do not wave a Leake away when there is ice cream involved. I felt my blood rise and cheeks glow. I stomped back to Therese and our bags and decided that would be one of the last McDonalds experiences of my life. Therese and I got a soft serve in a strawberry flavoured cone and awaited the arrival of our train, sitting cross legged on marble floor of the station. It was only a two hou...

The night I found out where I was placed I spent time down the park doing a bit of research  in the hopes of perking myself up. Unfortunately the research added to my disappointment, I wiped the unwanted tears from my cheeks and tried to push away the months of visualisations, me teaching wee children, making use of my many finger puppets, wandering through village streets and traipsing up empty mountains… Ok, it may have been a bit idealistic, but certainly the age of my students and desire to be in a more rural location had been strictly stipulated when I made my payment to Immerqi. I knew I was indulging in self pity, but I figured I was allowed one evenings worth of wallowing, especially as I learned a few fun facts about my new hometown: Most famous for its 7.8 Richter Scale Earthquake in 1976 during which 255 000 + died. It reduced the city to rubble and there remain echoes of its impact. Population of a very small… 3.3million… so much for my vil...

The following day Immerqi took my Internship Intake to the Great Wall of China (not the whole thing… that would likely take a certain amount of time), this part of the wall is quite well known and only two hours drive from Beijing. St aring out the window it was fascinating to watch the dichotomy of the city, poverty mixed in with the elite, traditional with the modern, a Lamborghini beeping at a man on a bike hauling a cart packed to the sky with wheat-bags filled of rice, gardens shimmering through hand-held hoses and smog hovering above. It is an endless city. There are sky rises, then long flats when you think you’re coming to the  outskirts, and suddenly, more sky rises… But often, these are empty. Hauntingly empty… as if you’re seeing a city two months after the zombie apocalypse. Later, when I’d moved to Tangshan, I spoke to one of the expats who explained that the theory is that the Government will pay for these high rise apartments to be built in the hopes that peo...