A Year and Counting

I arrived in China on July 2nd of last year a little confused, a little lost, and a little scared. I clearly remember collecting my bags at the Chengdu airport and then boarding a bus with the rest of the volunteers to head into the city. The city was so large, so modern...yet, so different and new. I remember laughing to myself as I looked at all the billboards along the ultra-modern highway that cut its way into the city, because no matter how much those advertisers wanted me to buy their products, without a big picture...no Chinese writing was going to help me. After traveling through a dense urban landscape for an hour, a landscape that seemed to be repeating itself every five minutes, we started passing through the most developed part of the city. It contained thousands of bicycles and cars flying past the bus, bright signs in unintelligible Chinese, Chinese pop songs blaring from store fronts, and people everywhere, then, we stopped. We stepped off the buses in front of our hotel and stumbled around dazed and surprised. We were finally here, for better or worse.

Later that day, another volunteer and I decided to walk around a bit, to leave the safety of our cushy downtown hotel and go exploring. Matt could speak a bit of Chinese because he had studied the language in college. When we stopped our walk after five minutes because Matt wanted to haggle 1 yuan off the price of a pirated dvd, I was a amazed, scared, and nervous. After that first day, I was wondering if I had done the right thing. China was not the place I thought it was going to be, it was faster, more developed, and bigger than I ever could have imagined. But here I was.

I would start learning the language later that day by repeating the four Chinese tones over and over and over during our introductory class to the language. Later that week, we all moved out of the hotel and moved in with our host families, began language classes, and learned how to eat hot pot. I played soccer with my host brother, made Chinese food with my host families' grandparents, and always, drank too much beer at dinner with my host Dad. We bitched about our teacher training, bitched about our language training, and described our bowel movements in vivid detail. I improved my Chinese, training came to a close, and then, I learned that I would be moving to Panzhihua, my current home.

A great deal has happened in this first year, I have made a lot of friends and met my fabulous live-in sitemate/girlfriend. I have learned how to speak Chinese, but have also learned how to pretend like I can't speak Chinese to avoid having the same agonizing conversation ten times a day. I have certainly been hardened by this experience, and find myself complaining about China occasionally. I have no deep love for this country, but still find myself amused by the countless idiosyncrasies that can only be described as Chinese. In the next year, I don't know what's going to happen, yet, I am still excited for the teaching, friends, traveling, and day to day life that is mine here in China. I still have a lot left to do and explore here, and I still wake up excited for each day, and that's all I can hope for this next year.

This summer I'll be heading to Yibin, a city north of here, to teach for two weeks and then I'll be heading to Tibet for three weeks. So, I probably won't have a new post up until late August. I would just like to say thank you to everyone who has read this blog or has been in touch with me in anyway, be it through AIM, myspace, facebook, Skype, googletalk, or the occasional e-mail. It's great to know that my family and friends are still with me, even though I'm on the other side of the world.