this little adventure: home

This is home to me now, well, at least for a while. Wow. I am so overwhelmed with joy and with peace. And happiness. That, too. The people, the new friends, the students I will get to teach, the culture, our place to stay, buses, everything. I already know that this experience is going to change my life, in fact it already has. I feel like I am on a different planet. I can't even remember what day it is or what time it is. But it doesn't matter, because I am here to lose myself in the people.

We bought laundry soap today. It was hard. We couldn't read the labels. In fact, we couldn't even tell which was laundry soap and which was fabric softener. We stood there on the aisle not knowing what to do. Place yourself in a new city, a new country, a new continent. Try to buy something you would think would be simple and you are bound to have a humbling experience. I think we will have a lot more of these humbling experiences as we travel throughout China.

I have no idea what people are saying. A nice man talked to me on the bus today, but I had to have an interpreter. I had to rely on someone. I am a very independent person, so depending on others is harder for me. I can't buy things on my own. I can't go anywhere on my own. This is all so weird. So very foreign.

I have to carry my own toilet paper with me everywhere. I have to bag my own groceries at the grocery store. We have to learn that things are not weird here; they are different.

Madi, Jennie, and I went to the Santa Monica Pier during our nine hour layover in LA. We dragged our luggage along the pier and along the sand and got a lot of looks. We drooled over all of the in shape LA-ers and wished we were them. We had our last American meal - a big juicy burger on the pier. We laughed silently in the back of the shuttle. The traveling was actually not too bad. Jet lag has not been too bad. We may have eaten weird Korean plane meals, but they treated us like royalty and we all slept like babies, open mouth and all. We made it to Ningbo after a long bus ride with a honk-happy driver and slimy, mayo plastered, KFC sandwiches. The school is amazing. When we arrived, the people couldn't speak our language, but they smiled so big and they helped carry our heavy luggage up three flights of stairs, sweating so badly. I seriously could have cried watching them be so willing to help.

We used the buses for the first time today and they were crowded as ever. But the girls would stare at us and wave to us and I could have died. We got bus passes and we exchanged some money and we went grocery shopping. Everything was so different, but so cool.Tonight, our group had a meeting and then we played Quelf. We all laughed our butts off until we could have cried. My group is amazing. We are so close and we have only been here for two days. Insane. One of my bags may be currently missing, but I feel so blessed. I could not have done anything better than this for my life at this time.

I love China. I love the people. And the children, well, they melt my heart into smithereens.