I got wheels.

August 10, 2006

Patrick met me for breakfast at 8 a.m. We sat in front of a large window overlooking the power plant. Joon, a South Korean teacher in residence and another English speaker joined us soon after. We made vague plans to travel somewhere, sometime.

Following breakfast, Patrick and I retrieved my bike from the small room where it resides and we rode to the supermarket.



Riding in traffic alongside trucks and buses and dodging Chinese felt strangely unreal. After all these months of planning and thinking about it I was actually riding a bike in China with Chinese people. Patrick offered to take me to another supermarket but I told him I was okay on supermarkets and we went to the middle school where he teaches instead. A company of camouflaged middleschoolers stood on an athletics field in marching formation. Patrick mentioned that it is becoming more difficult to discipline students and that perhaps American students might benefit from such a regimen. I asked if he had ever undergone this type of training. He said he hadn't.

I should mention that the middle school was enormous by any standards. We retired to the break room for the English dept. and I spoke with one of the teachers at length about teaching in China. The prevailing theory seems to be that I should just talk to the students about American things and that’ll be fine. Whatever that means.

I returned to the hotel and waited for lunch to be served.





Through process of elimination I have deduced that I will be fed via room service. When no lunch arrived, I visited the front desk and wrote down the time and said the Chinese word for eat (chi). The girl at the front desk said the word for meal (fan) and then she left and came back and said other things and I agreed to what she said and left feeling fairly sure that the lunch situation had been resolved.

In a previous conversation, Patrick and a hotel manager type had asked me what I like to eat. I told them that I was interested in vegetables and healthy eating. They asked me if I like beef and pork and hot and I said yes, but maybe I’d be more interested in fish. The culminating result was fried fish with hot peppers which I considered to be a minor victory.

Following lunch I tried to teach myself Chinese then crashed, still suffering from jet lag. I woke up and “brewed” the hotel insta-coffee, wondering to myself if Starbucks has reached Rong Cheng.

I was under the impression that the school was within bike riding distance from the hotel and by extension the beach and decided to ride out. They are not close at all and I made it as far as some sort of residential district in development before turning back.