We've been on holiday for National Day since Friday and we don't start back to work until Monday. We'd been told that September would be a pretty stressful and exhausting month as we began lesson planning/teaching/community relations/team building/etc. Although being here is an incredible experience that I wouldn't trade for the world, it definitely is stressful and exhausting. I love China- I love the people, the culture, the history, the community, the recreation, and teaching- but it's all so draining and we've been in desperate need of some R&R.
On Friday, we started off our vacation by celebrating survival of our 1st month of teaching by getting full-body massages! I spent the weekend catching up on paperwork, lesson planning, cleaning, errands, and keeping in touch with people from back home. Then on Sunday night I took an overnight train to Xi'an, where I met Lauren and Sam; the train ride there was a horrindous experience, but I made it safely. In Xi'an I got to check off another thing from my bucket list: to tour the Terracotta Army! It was incredible, but you'll have to wait for my next newsletter to get the details! Here's a couple sweet pictures from our tour, though (and you can see the rest on my Facebook):
The train ride back was such a huge difference from the ride there. Since we'd found out it was a 15-hour ride home, we'd splurged and bought tickets for beds; that train ride was the best sleep I've had in my entire life! At 3:30am we were shaken awake by the staff to switch out our tickets, and we couldn't figure out why they would choose to wake us up for that. The lady tried desperately to tell us something, but we couldn't understand her and were half asleep, so we starred vacantly until she gave up and walked away. We fell back asleep and at 4am she came back, shook me and Sam awake again, grabbed our stuff and proceeded to kick us off the train! We quickly woke Lauren up and we all were thrown off the train with no idea what was happening or where we were! As it turned out, though, we'd arrived in Taiyuan 5 hours earlier than expected! Then we were scammed by a taxi-driver, locked out of campus, and unhappily let in by the security guard we'd awaken, but we were finally home!
And now for...You know you're meant for China when: you happily call it home :-) I love that I've come to call Taiyuan home! I'd actually missed it while on vacation, even though I was only gone for 1.5 days!
PS- happy birthday dad and Tracie!! I love you both!
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