21 Days

I've been in China now for (obviously by the headline) for 21 days. I am officially a citizen of Fuzhou. I have settled in and have now been teaching for two weeks. I originally thought that I would be teaching after about 3 or so weeks... One we to the day of arriving in Fuzhou I was in front of the class. But, for those of you who have seen me teach, I was 100% at home. It felt like I was in one of my classes back in the states. This past week, my third week, I taught 8 lessons and have four classes of students. The kids come to school 2 days a week for 60 minutes or 90 minutes. My youngest student just turned 4 (western age 3) and my oldest is 17 (western age 16). In China they start counting how old you are from inside the womb. I am realizing that I found the age of students that I love teaching at a very young age!! Kindergarten and the primary years is where my heart lies.

I do not have any pictures of the school or students, but I will share some pictures of my apartment. I have been doing quite a bit of cleaning because only boys have lived in myapartment since the school has been renting it. Some of the other teachers and teaching assistants came over to make dumplings and they said they had never seen the apartment so clean.

The pictures are:

• Making dumplings, which were more like chinese tamales. They were in celebration of the dragon boat festival.
• My tiny kitchen
• The living room
• The view outside of my apartment

Chinese Cupping

Today was an interesting day, a few of us girls had this silly idea to practice some ancient Chinese medicine... Chinese cupping. (bá guàn) Well, if you are ever in China and want to have a nice relaxing spa experience; do not do ba guan. They light a flame in the cup and then suction cup it to your back. It is supposed to release the toxins in your body. The darker the circle the more toxins apparently. Heidi, from Britian, had some really dark circles, even darker than mine and she is a vegetarian. The actual process was not painful like getting shot or stabbed in the arm, but it was pressure pain and I have had a headache all day. Plus the oh so attractive bruised circles all over my back. A girl, Lou from Minnesota, says the bruises go away in about a week with a healthy diet. In China a healthy diet is actually quite hard to come by. Everything is fried here!!

Some of these pictures are a bit gross to look at. (Sorry Mom!) But now you all know about Chinese cupping... I will let you know how the bruises turn out.

This is my friend Lou getting her back done. I was able to catch the flame quite well.

Below is picture of what mine looked like after all of them were on. I only had 15; another girl, Heidi, had a whopping 27. They told her she has a large back. The Chinese can be very blunt with you.

And now... the after shot. This is a self portrait

of the carnage about 6 hours later.

I hope all of you are doing well! I would love to know how you all are doing. My e-mail is callyhester@yahoo.com if you would like to yell at me for my stupidity or fill me in on what's going on in the states. I miss you all tremendously!

Pictures From Fuzhou

This is a picture of another teacher (Ben) and I playing pool in an underground bring your own booze pool hall. Ben is from the south end of England and has been in Fuzhou now for about 7 months.

This is one of the temples from the "University Temple". It had a GIGANTIC bronze Buddah with a bunch of small famous monks all around it. I am sure that I will be able to get more pictures of this area as the year goes on.

So, you may have been wondering if you would ever hear from that crazy blonde girl who went off to China to teach. Well, I made it, I am safe, and my suspicion that China would block my all-telling blog was correct. The government has blocked all social networking sites. Facebook, Twitter, blogs...it all. As well as google mail, so I am not able to e-mail through google either. My blogs will now be communicated via my mom through e-mail.

I have been here a week and it feels like a month has gone by. I already learned so much and yet I have so much more to learn! I have a two bedroom, one bathroom apartment with a guy, Eric, from Tuscon, Arizona. He is very nice and extremely helpful. We did some sight seeing in Fuzhou because his mother was here for a week visiting. We went to a temple park area next to one of the many sites of Fuzhou University. We call it University Temple because of its location. It was incredibly beautiful; they had many different statues and the two largest jade Buddhas in all of China. My camera died about half way through. The one picture I did get will not load into my blog.

I live right across from a gigantic tourist spot, Westlake park (chinese pronunciation: she-who). Apparently tourists from all over China come to Fuzhou to visit this spot. I haven't seen many foreign tourists though. To be truthful...I haven't been in the park yet. It is insanely warm and we are not even into summer time yet. At the time of writing this, 10:30 pm it is 80 degrees with 90% humidity. Very warm....all the time.

This blog can get very lengthy seeing as I haven't written anything yet. I will leave you for now with one story that wraps up pretty much how my year will be. On my third night in Fuzhou, I went to a Thai restaurant. We started at a four-person table and had to be quickly moved to a private room with a gigantic table in the middle. I went with only two other teachers from my own school and I was meeting a few of their friends. Going around the table....Me, a girl from Colorado. Alex grew up in NY and has been in Japan for the past two years. Sam, born in France, grew up in England. Then Sarah, a Thai-British born university teacher. Ian, the young (arrived in Fuzhou same day as me) British teacher. Norm, the older businessman turned teacher from Canada. Siska, ouir host, an Indonesian woman working for a French company. Her husband, an Indonesian little person working in the same company. Their boss and actual Frenchman (can't remember his name) but he married a Chinese woman and she was sitting next to me.

Whew...if you can follow that mess of people, where they are from and all of the different places I mentioned that sums up my experience so far her in China. Confusing, too much to remember, TONS of interesting people who are extremely nice and yet an incredible experience that I am sure I will not forget. I hope you are all doing well.

Cally

I'm having problems getting information to you through the red tape here in China. Don't give up on me.