As a week in was when I started my Korea blog, I figured it was as good a time as any to start the Chinese version. Also, this is the first day I’ve felt like myself since I got off the plane last Thursday afternoon. So, there’s that. But I’ll get there in a second.
The flight from Chicago to Shanghai was relatively uneventful, if you don’t count the mother who somehow got past security to our gate in order to see her daughter board the flight and then spent the next twenty minutes sobbing to the United attendant taking tickets and the line of unsuspecting passengers. As we ushered by her, she turned to the guy in front of me and asked if he was going to Shanghai as well, and if he could make sure she got there ok.
The guy in front of me: What?
Hysterical Mother: Can you just, um, make sure she gets to her seat ok?
Guy: Uh, sure.
Hysterical Mother: And then, you know, that she gets to Shanghai ok?
Guy: (already putting his headphones back on) Yeah. Ok. Right.
Knowing my mom wouldn’t have thought twice about such a request a couple of years ago, I smiled to myself, imagining this woman’s shred of reassurance that she had secured a complete stranger’s promise to escort her daughter off the plane in the scary and faraway land we were all heading to. Because, you know, he didn’t have any other plans. As we walked to our seats, he relayed the mom’s wishes to her very embarrassed daughter, who just sighed and sunk into her chair.
Close to fifteen hours later, we dropped out of the sky and into Shanghai’s sparkling airport on the outskirts of the city. Greeted by smiling representatives from the school I would be working at, I met a handful of my new (and very jetlagged) colleagues, and we were taken in a van to our hotel, around the corner from where we would be training for the next two weeks. Alone in my room, I collapsed onto my comfy-looking bed, which is about the time I learned mattresses in China have roughly the same give as a slab of concrete. Off to a great start.
The next day we were supposed to meet in the lobby at 9:00 a.m. to set up our cell phones, bank accounts, and generally get some HR paperwork out of the way. As I had been wide awake since 3:30, I spent the early morning hours emailing about potential apartments, and then decided around 5:00 to explore the hotel and see if there was a gym and possibly grab a cup of coffee. Wandering down a very long hallway where I thought someone had mentioned a potential site for breakfast, after about ten minutes I came to a dead end without having found anything. Although, as there was absolutely no English on any of the placards outside the closed doors, unless there was a treadmill and coffee pot sitting in the middle of the hallway, I probably would have missed it. Turning around, I started to walk back to the lobby and after a couple of seconds I heard footsteps start behind me. It being 5:00 in the morning, I really didn’t want to hang out with any of the teachers I just met, so I kept walking, pretending not to hear whoever it was. Until they started yelling at me. Apparently, I had wandered too far or I was out of bounds or maybe he was trying to be helpful – I have no idea – but I was now being barked at in Mandarin by an elderly security guard. All I could do was mumble “sorry” a thousand times, scurry into the lobby and pray he didn’t wake up the entire floor.
Returning to my room with a questionable looking canned “caffee latte” from the convenience store on the nearest corner, I smelled what I thought I had noticed when I woke up earlier: sewage. Not used to my room smelling like an open septic tank, at first I thought it was coming from outside, or my imagination, but after leaving and coming back I couldn’t deny it; my room smelled like a cesspool. Stepping into the shower to get ready for the day, it only got worse, but the thought of asking my new coworkers if they were having a similar problem didn’t exactly seem like the best idea. “Does anyone else’s room smell like raw sewage? No? Just me? Oh, I’m Travis, by the way.” I just held my breath and decided I needed to find an apartment soon.
After we finished with the small, introductory bit of orientation on Friday morning, we had the rest of the weekend to ourselves to explore the city. Which I did with a vengeance, until I started to get sick on Sunday afternoon. It seems my body decided to have the culture shock my brain wasn’t going through, and it was not amused. What started as a simple runny nose, quickly morphed into a fever coupled with a hacking cough. And because training started bright and early Monday morning and I couldn’t really stay in my hotel room, I managed to spread what I’m pretty sure is the bird flu to almost every person in our small group of new teachers. By the end of the session today, we were one giant coughing, sneezing, hacking mess, and one girl had to remove herself to go to a doctor. So, you know, I’m making quite an impression.
But as we have to be out of the hotel in the next two weeks, and at this point I’ve been living out of a suitcase for the better part of almost two months, and also because my room still smells like downtown Calcutta, I’ve remained determined to find an apartment. In between dying and my company’s orientation, I’ve been emailing and calling people from various agencies and housing websites, and if the place sounded interesting enough, me and my raging fever went apartment hunting.
The first place I saw was a room in an apartment with a French guy and a German girl, and while the apartment was nice enough, the neighborhood was kind of desolate and far from the school where I’d be working. And I figured I shouldn’t take the first place I stumbled into, right? Next up was a place with a Chinese guy in the center of the city. What better way to learn Mandarin than to live with a real, live Chinese person? So I headed out with visions of being completely fluent in a matter of months, knee-deep in Chinese friends and beloved by millions.
Sadly, this was the grossest apartment I have ever seen. And I’ve seen some messed up apartments in my day. There were holes in the wall and floors, it was roughly the size of a port-o-potty and smelled like the inside of a week-old egg roll. Bad. Just really, really bad. And the worst part was he had a cat that an old American roommate had told him to name Douchebag, and he apparently had never bothered to look up what that meant. So he proudly introduced me to Douchebag, showed me where Douchebag slept (to the left of the stove, in the middle of the “kitchen” counter) and assured me Douchebag wasn’t too much of a pain. Or, you know, a douchebag.
Then there was a place with on the seventh floor, no elevator. Then there was a place with a married couple who worked from home and refused to turn on the heat, answering the door in full winter coats, hats, and gloves and who explained to me very indignantly that oh no, they didn’t think it was that cold in their place. I could see their breath. After five or six more equally disappointing and slightly alarming apartment visits, I began to seriously regret passing up the French guy’s place. And then I found it.
It was the last place I dragged myself to last night, on the 25th floor of a sprawling new high-rise apartment complex, literally on top of the metro station complete with a giant mall, gym, and swimming pool. The apartment itself is nice, new and clean and shared with two German students studying Mandarin at a local university. Not a douchebag, or cat, anywhere in sight.
After I settled all the paperwork and set up my move on Friday, I instantly started to feel better. Knowing I can finally unpack – and maybe the constant supply of cough drops I’ve been popping – has made my cold abate and I’m finally starting to feel like myself again. Now if only my coworkers would stop coughing all over me.
Made in China 