Nanshun shu kuo School

I arrived in my new apartment I will be living in for the next year this afternoon around 1pm. I finally learned that the school is grades K-7 in US terms. And I will be teaching the 6th graders! I don’t know how I feel about teaching middle school, but I am hoping I will be able to use some of the lessons I did for my primary kids in Beijing and just make it a little harder. Although those summer school kids were very advanced! So it may be perfect. My contact teacher Betty is super cute and speaks better English than me I am afraid! However, she was quite frazzled when we showed up to the apartment with a note from the previous teacher that everything was broken. No one had looked at the room since the last foreign teacher moved out in June. Betty said the last teacher was very shy and wouldn’t tell her anything unless she asked so please tell her if anything brakes. He had left a bunch of random junk that I am guessing didn’t fit in his bags. So the maintenance man met us in the apartment (5th floor by the way! I am going to get in shape whether I want to or not!) fixing the AC units, and the hot water for the shower. So we looked at the bed and there is a whole in the center of the mattress! This meant Betty and I spent the rest of the afternoon buying a new mattress, new bed set, new dishes and a mop. All the time I am wearing my teacher clothes in the heat of the day. It was really awkward picking out which one I liked best of all these things. Because I didn’t know the prices or how much her budget was and it seemed like she was paying for everything out of pocket and getting reimbursed later. And like I know anything about dishes or mattress brands in Chinese!
When we dragged everything back to the apartment and up the 5 flights of stairs there were a million people in my apartment. I am guessing they were the other teachers that live in the building but I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself bc everyone was talking in Chinese seemingly agreeing about something. I think I heard them suggested we more me to a different room and the other say he wasn’t carrying my bag any farther (that was my translation of the body language).
Oh! The apartment is really nice. I have a spare bedroom/ study, a living room with a tv (dvd player, cable, and Internet to be hooked up tomorrow) my own bedroom and kitchen all to myself. Now let’s define kitchen: it’s literally the size of a coat closet with a mini frig, a microwave and rice cooker stacked on top of each other and then the world’s smallest sink and a countertop completely covered by a hot pad with a frying pan on top of it and 2 sour rags(Amy would die, I am pretty sure they have been sitting there wet since June). Oh and the best part is the toilet/shower/washing machine combination room, floor to ceiling tile with one drain that you hope the standing water from all of the above appliances hopefully somehow makes its way into. Another issue walking around the city there is a definite lack of McDonalds or KFC. That’s the definition of remote placement! I am going to starve to death taking 5 hours to eat one piece of rice with chop sticks (she asked me about 10 times if I wanted her to get me a fork, I guess bc she was tired of waiting for me to finish eating). I definitely need to get serious about my Chinese classes, but I think I am going to like it here. Good news is classes start September 1st so I can party until then!