Thank goodness I got to sleep in today. I was told to just call my host mother when I woke up. By the time I got dressed, my host sister was back from her test. She came with a friend and she was very sweet and enthusiastic. She also spoke English
I know people keep saying you shouldn't start by speaking English with your host family, but honestly if I did that, I would have never been able to communicate anything. My host mother has good English although she doesn't think so. We have almost a tradeoff system going. I say the word in English. She says it in Chinese. It works pretty well. (Note from a later point: She'll say something in Chinese. I'll either answer or say "wo ting bu dong" which means I don't understand what you said. Then she'll explain in english breaking out the dictionary if need be.)
I was left home alone for a while after my sister left to visit her grandparents (father's parents in a village.) She helped me figure out the phone before she left because I was slightly confused. It kept making a sustained beeping noise and not really doing anything.
At 1, my host mother came home and made me lunch. It was this noodle soup thing that was just okay but had some really tasty cucumbers in it. I swear everyone is insisting I eat more and more.
We drove to the school and I met the English teacher. The English teacher brought me to the police station so I could register. I now am officially a temporary resident of Xi'an, China.
I then spent some time waiting in the English teacher office. They were getting ready for some activity with another school coming from America for just one day and interacting with their students making dumplings. Apparently there's a lot of paperwork involved.
During this time period, I had my first encounter with what one of my classmates calls a squatty potty. They aren't nearly as bad as they sound although I'm very thankful my host family has a western toilet (a pretty cool one at that. It's all fancy and has all these buttons that make it do things. I haven't really played around with it yet). The squatty potties are the only toilets my school has so it was really only a matter of time before I had to use one. I know this is some weird information, but the squatty potties are almost infamous.
My mother then followed a bus in her car to see if "bus route suitable" for me. It was an interesting experience. Honestly, I was expecting the roads here to be much worse. I mean I would be scared to drive here (not that that's really saying much I'm scared to drive in the US) but it didn't seem nearly as chaotic as I imagined. There was a lot of stopping but you seemed to drive slower to compensate for it.
We then ended up at the grandmother's house. Apparently we eat there for dinner everyday. They're nice people.
My first traditional Chinese meal (and my host Grandfather)
All the food was so good. The grandmother made beef and potatoes especially for me because she thought all Americans like beef and potatoes. Those were so perfect. The brown liquid prominent in the photo is porridge. It's made out of rice and is basically just really watery rice. The white things on the left are bao zi. Bao zi are steamed stuff bun. Bao zi is also the favorite word of my Chinese class at home. The boys in my class will go out of the way to put Bao zi into a sentence. Needless to say I ate bao zi and enjoyed it just because of my personal history. In reality, the bao zi were a little too spicy for me as they had lots of peppers in them.
So after shopping, I came home and organized my stuff for school tomorrow. We have to take a test and we have orientation. I'm not looking forward to it. I also mixed up the words for shower so I was given a large plastic tub to clean my feet in and told to wash my face. All in all not a bad first day.
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