One Week in China

9/06/2014 The Charmer 1 Comments

I've survived my first week in China!! Huzzah! Surprisingly, I haven't been nearly as overwhelmed as I expected I would be. I have an assistant, and she and the other students have been extremely helpful any time I need a little assistance. So far, most of my time in China has been spent eating Chinese food, riding my little motorized scooter around whilst trying to avoid hitting grandmas who are crossing the road, and being told 10 times a day by lovely Chinese people that I am "very beautiful." Of course, I’ve also done a bit of teaching and have attempted to master basic phrases in Mandarin.

I absolutely love it here! The Chinese people are amazingly friendly. They LOVE westerners, especially Americans, and even on my worst hair day they for some reason think I look like a princess. If you’ve ever wanted to know what it feels like to be a celebrity, just come here. I promise it won’t take long before there are Chinese people snapping pictures of you. My students are darling...and even though they are college students, I still feel like "darling" is the best adjective to describe them. I got an email from one of the girls in my classes today telling me that she thinks I am "beautiful and nice" and that she loves me a lot. Aaww…LOVE THEM!

The branch I am attending on Sundays has about 60 people in it with a surprising number of young single adults. In fact, in two weekends we are having a YSA conference in Shanghai that will include people from all the branches in the area! Hopefully I’ll be able to make a few friends who will be willing to run around with me and explore when I have time off.

For those of you who were fans of Ammon, the most recent (and most promising) man to pop up in my love life, you’ll be happy to know that things are still going well. We have been skyping fairly frequently and we still haven’t run out of things to talk about.

Ammon recently gained a few more brownie points on my birthday, which happened to be earlier this week. I was in my apartment, getting ready to go out to meet up with some of the students for my birthday party, when all of a sudden my doorbell rings. (No no, it wasn’t Ammon! THAT would have been wild) I unlock the door to the building and in walks a delivery boy carrying a HUGE bouquet of flowers. I stared at him in awe…who on EARTH could have sent me those? I asked him, but he either didn’t understand me or didn’t know (all he said was, “You are very beautiful!”) and I was left wracking my brain trying to figure out who might have sent me flowers. I finally found the card buried amidst the babies’ breath and lilies and it was from Ammon! Oh. My. Gosh. I started freaking out (in a good way, of course). The kid sent me flowers! In China! I still don’t really know how he managed to do that. But needless to say, I was impressed. My birthday was FULL of fantastic and fantastically wild moments, but that lovely surprise was probably my favorite part. I think it’s safe to say that I like him. A lot.

Well, that’s the news from Wuxi, China. Life is good. It is SO good, even if my brain wants to explode every time I go to my Chinese class. I know that YOUR lives are so good, too, even though sometimes it may seem like things aren’t going quite the way you want them to. Best of luck to those of you who are starting the new semester, new jobs, new relationships, or whatever other adventure is currently under way in your lives! And if you happen to be travelling my way…give me a buzz, let’s go explore the city together. You can sit on the back of my e-bike.

internationally yours,

the charmer