New City, New Adventure

So, after a great year of teaching in Mengzi, I felt direction from the Father to move to Qingdao and take a teaching position there. I found out that I would be teaching all Business classes, with maybe an English class thrown in there. I graduated with my degree in Music, and have never taken a business course in my life. After having a mini panic attack, I decided to buck up and accept the challenge.

Little did I know that challenges would come from all over the place! The first challenge was telling my friends I was leaving, and then telling my family that I wasn't coming back home. Both were hard, but everyone was encouraging. Then came the challenge of packing and shipping. Last year I had spent a little over $200 dollars shipping some boxes to Mengzi, and I reallllly didn't want to do that again. I've also never used the Chinese postal Service, and had no idea how reliable it would be. I had noticed that the Seniors were bringing a lot of their things over to the post office on campus and were apparently shipping them home. I thought I'd check it out and see it that would be something that I could do as well. I found out that as long as I was shipping my things within China, I would be able to send them right from there and the post office would give me the special student shipping rate because I was a teacher. Great! So I went back to my apartment to pack up two big boxes. As I was taping up the boxes of books and kitchen supplies and other heavy items, I realized that there was no way that I could carry these even one at a time across campus. It's about a 10 minute walk from my apartment to the post office. So I called my friend Sara who has a scooter, and she came to help. Normally two people can sit comfortably on a scooter with a box or other item resting on the floor between the driver's feet. However, my boxes were just a little too big to fit. They wouldn't fit on my lap either. Hmm. Now what? Sara suggested (Mom, don't read this part!) that I sit backwards on the scooter and hold one box while it balanced on the back. This was going to work! So after two trips back and forth from my apartment to the post office with me sitting backwards, my boxes were ready to ship. Except...they weren't. We found out that that in order to get the student price, I had to ship them in this big white bag that looked like a huge rice bag. No problem, I'll just get two bags and put my boxes inside of them. But the boxes were too big. So Sara and I had to unpack my beautifully and carefully put together boxes and try to put them in the bag so they would be secure. After doing the best we could, we lugged them inside to get weighed. Both of them were just at the weight limit. One was a bit over, but the weighing lady just looked at me, smiled, and with a little wave of her hand said that it was fine. It was only then that I wondered how we were going to close the bags, when the lady whips out a big needle, some really big thread, and starts sewing my bags shut! Meanwhile Sara was addressing the label trying to figure out how to translate the destination into Chinese characters. I asked another worker how much it was going to cost, and braced myself for the answer. She did a little computing, and to my delight told me that the total for my two bags was going to be 140 yuan. That's about 20 bucks. :) So after the whole 45 minute ordeal, I walked (or rode on the scooter) away wondering if those packed full, sewn shut, hopefully addressed right rice bags would ever reach Qingdao. A couple of weeks later I got word that they did indeed reach their intended destination, and as I unpacked them last week I was happy to discover that everything was there and only one of my mugs had a teeny tiny crack in it. I can handle that. :)

After that the challenges that came didn't seem quite so big. :)