Looking Back: The Jet-Lagged Dream

The next morning my jet-lagged body woke me up at the beautiful hour of five am. I lit up a cigarette and sat on the little ledge in front of my window. Before you ask why I was smoking in a temporary living place I’ll precursor it with this. It’s China. You can smoke anywhere and everywhere. The “no smoking” signs are usually suggestions and almost never enforced. People will smoke in restaurants, bathrooms, houses, stores. No one cares as the air is killing you anyway. More on that in a later post though… Anywho, the sun was already up so I took my first picture. The one of the view from my room. It still felt like a dream to be there. At times now, being back in Canada, it still feels like a dream.

While I smoked, I made my calls to let people back home know I had arrived safely. With all my organs still inside my body and whatnot. At this point I had not eaten since the day before and was starting to get hungry. So I figured I would grab something to eat. Therefore I got dressed, ran downstairs and a brutal realization hit me. I couldn’t read a single thing on any of the signs. This was bound to get fun. I decided to go to a small little place in the corner that Ben had recommended the night before. Sat down and ordered using pictures on the wall. My first meal cost me 45元 which is roughly $9 Canadian. It was the dim sum I had remembered from back home.

I sat there for a few hours, leeching Wi-Fi so as to be able to use my VPN, an absolute requirement if you are going to mainland China. It allows you to bypass the “Great Firewall of China” and access western sites. After which I headed back up to the agency to meet with Karen. Karen was the lady who helped me with my visa. Seeing as Chinese people pick their own English names and will change them from time to time it really brought back into question the whole “do women named Karen get born as Karen or do they just show up one day with three kids asking to speak to your manager” thing. When I arrived at the office, I noticed it was pretty plain.

Just a few desks with computers, plants, a couch by the door, and a spiral staircase leading to the second floor. A couple of people occupied two desks in one of the corners of the small apartment office (literally it was a small apartment converted into an office.). I sat on the couch and one of the ladies told me to wait for Karen. When she arrived, we chatted for a few moments before she sat me in front of a computer to watch demonstrations that other foreigners had done for schools. So a school would hire me as an English teacher. After an hour of watching other people do it on the small screen, they had me pick from some flashcards and make up a “demo” of my own.

Half an hour passed of me picking cards and writing out my plans before Wolly came back. She told me I couldn’t use half the flashcards I had wanted to because they were overused. So, after another 10 minutes of picking my plans b and c, she had me do my demo for herself, Karen, and the other two girls. I have never in my life felt like such a complete, utter fool. Having grown women pretend to be kids, yet forgetting the fact that they shouldn’t know much, if any, English. I felt stupid. Yet I did it three or four times until they saw it fit enough for me to show it to a school. With that Wolly and I were off to my first demo, but first to get me a transit card.

The two of us walked from Carat 7 to the subway about two-thirds of a kilometre away. When we get there Wolly asks me to give her some money, which I do, then she wanders off and comes back five minutes later with a Transit Card. A little blue card that I can tap on the buses and subway stations to get on for a really good price. I only had to refill this thing three times while there with around 100元 ($20 CAD) and I used it A LOT. As we start our descent into the Beijing underground, I noted the cutely nerdish video game mosaic they had going on above the escalators on the ceiling. Everything was new, cute, fascinating, and breathtaking.

When we finally got on the subway it was absolutely PACKED. I was standing there listening to music as five Chinese men are literally breathing down my neck. Eventually we transferred two or three times before getting on a lesser-used line and I could finally sit. I can’t help to marvel at the efficiency of the Chinese Transit System. It was absolutely phenomenal. When we pull up to the Shunyi station on the purple line I found that we are on the opposite side of the city. By this time, it has already taken two and a half hours to get where we were. Yet I was glad to be getting back out into the sun.

We emerged into the golden light of the late afternoon. The first thing that came to my attention is how brutally hot it was. Sitting at 36 degrees it was hot, but a heat I’d never felt before. As I went along, I noticed I was sweating. Though unlike before, where I would have drops of sweat coming off my forehead, this time I was covered in a sheen, almost a film, of my sweat. It was a heat that for the first time in my life I absolutely loved. I’ve always preferred the cold, but I was really enjoying this.

I looked up to a gorgeous, large abstract statue towering over us as we rushed over to the bus stop. When the bus came five minutes later, we stepped up to a fairly full bus. I did my tappity tap thing again and we were off once again. Another 20 minutes to half-hour on the bus and Wolly pointed to the apartment buildings that I could be living in if I ended up getting this job. This revelation caused a wave of sadness to crash over me. I had just made friends and wanted to get to know them better.

If I moved here, I wouldn’t get the chance to. With this weighing me down, we get off the bus and walk 10 minutes down the road to the school. As we passed this very heavily gated community, we came up to a gated school with little children playing outside with their teachers. I look up to see the name of the school is “Venus International Kindergarten”. With this insight I became slightly frustrated. I had expressed implicitly to Karen that I wanted to work with kids aged 10-12 minimum. That was before I had even left Canada.  The guard released the gate to let us in and we walked up into the air-conditioned building. Once there a taller, but still fairly short, young-looking Chinese woman with a round face and the glasses to match greeted us.

That was the first time I met Jessy.