We had Friday off and Mel and I decided to go to Hangzhou. We did some shopping, mostly at H&M (yay clothes long enough for tall people!) and ate some food! We didn't even spend the night but it was still nice to get away from Jinhua for the day. It was a little hectic though because when we got to the train station on Friday morning our train did not have a time listed with it; even when a train is late it has a time listed so we did not know what had happened! There was a train leaving on the same route a few minutes before ours was to leave and people from our waiting area started going over and arguing to try and get on that train. This man who had been sitting across from us also looked confused and so he started arguing with the lady at the gate for I'm assuming the same thing. He saw us and looked at our tickets and argued our way onto the train too. He couldn't speak ANY English but was still able to save us that morning! We got down to the platform and they wouldn't let us into any of the cars. One car sent us to another which sent us back to the first and we were going back and forth like ping pong balls; finally someone let us on though, but we hadn't really thought about the fact that we would have nowhere to sit since it wasn't actually the train we bought tickets for. After the train got moving the man motioned for us to walk to another car which turned out to be the dining car. The man proceeded to argue with the workers in this car until finally a girl who spoke English walked by and said if you buy food you can sit here. So we bought their breakfast...it was DISGUSTING, both looking AND tasting. I think it was like Mr. Noodles with egg mixed in and then this weird porridge looking soup that tasted like pork grease; but at least we didn't have to stand on the train for two hours!
On Saturday I did some work at the school in the morning; my kids have another test this week so hopefully no one cheats! Then I went into town to do more work but I got bored pretty quickly. My friend Mike and I decided we should go try and see a movie. I say try because we really didn't know how successful we'd be; neither of us speak much Chinese. He texted me how to say the street name phonetically...which I still kind of butchered. So I got into the cab and said the street name and he finally gathered what I meant but it is a VERY long street. I planned on pointing for him to turn and telling him when to stop (one word I actually know how to say). He then proceeded to call someone who "knows" how to speak English; she really couldn't say much but it seemed to help him understand a little better. THEN another girl got into the cab and she could really speak some English and explained to him that I would just tell him when to stop and much to my surprise I actually arrived at the movies! We ended up going to see GI Joe 2; it was the only English movie playing. But our friend Erin joined us later and it was still pretty entertaining to watch. Especially because Erin is better at Chinese and was saying what some of the Chinese subtitles said that really didn't match very well at all.
Erin hadn't eaten dinner so we went to KFC after for her to get some food. While we sat there Mike all of a sudden said....is that a white baby? And I looked and sure enough out the window you could see this Chinese man holding a baby and the baby appeared to not be Chinese. After more investigation (walking around to see the babies face) we decided that it was an albino Chinese baby. That's not something you see everyday!
Sadly on Sunday we had to work. It wasn't really so bad, I'm sure I'll be singing a different tune after my 8th day when I want to scream. Oh today was actually a good day, I almost forgot! A couple of our friends went to another city yesterday and brought us back food so I got to have Subway for breakfast this morning!!! I was so excited!
Oh and like the title of this post says I am 3/4 done my time here in China! CRAZY!
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