Arrival in the Chrysanthemum City

After 30 hours of straight travel and waiting in airports, we have arrived in China! I’ve also discovered that this traveling has given me the magical capability to live for three days in 24 hours. Don’t be too awed now, guys.

The flights from San Francisco to Seoul and then from Seoul to Guangzhou were with Korean Air, whose flight attendants are an adorable, young, Asian version of classic 1950s American flight attendants. In addition to hot bulgogi, they supplied us with paper slippers, hot towels, and an array of Korean (okay, and some American) movie dramas. So, it was basically the best 12 hour over the Pacific flight that could have been hoped for. 

After arriving in the Guangzhou airport, we were hustled through a very quick and thoroughly unhorough customs at which they didn’t discover my smuggled American apples. So if China erupts with a crazy American produce bourn disease within  the next few days, you’ll know who’s at fault. 

After quite a bit of waiting for our bags to appear, we discovered that one girl’s luggage had been left behind in L.A. Considering the ILP horror stories we had heard of two weeks without luggage, that was almost the best that we could have hoped for. Hopefully they’ll keep to their word and ship it by tomorrow. 

After getting our bags at about 1:30 a.m., we were informed that the wonderful Chinese freeways are closed from 2 to 5 a.m. I don’t know if that’s a China wide thing, or a Guangzhou thing. Anyway, we were compelled to wait in the rather inhospitable Guangzhou airport for three hours before loading the bus which would take us to our apartments. 

About one hour into the bus ride, we stopped for about half an hour at a deserted rest stop area, at which we had our first encounter with the Chinese novelty of “squatters” in the bathrooms. The Chinese, and I believe Asians in general, have retained any child’s ability to squat flat footed. Try to squat flat footed; I bet most of you have never thought about it before. This ability stems from their belief that the ground is filthy-which most of the time, it is here- and therefore touching it with anything besides one’s feet is to be avoided at all costs. Due to their habit of squatting everywhere, their toilets are rather not toilets, but holes in the ground. It’s like a toilet in that it’s ceramic and it flushes, but it’s purely two dimensional. It baffles me that even with all the globalization that’s occurred and how far China had progressed economically, these squatters remain as a part of their culture.

We got to our apartment at about 6:30, after dropping off another Zhongshan group at a school across the city. As part of the initiation to the millions of stairs we will be climbing the next four months, it was necessary that we drag our 50 pound suitcases up the seven flights of stairs to our apartment. That was….endured. 

The apartment has three rooms each with two girls in each room. My roomie is Laura, one of the head teachers. She's a 21 year old from New York (not city), and incredibly sweet. Our room is the only one without bunk beds and it has a ton of storage space. We reconfigured the set up to make our own spaces, and after unpacking everything, it is quite homey. 

Even though this was all only yesterday, it seems like ages ago, compounded with the fact that we were all beyond the point of tired. I just woke up from a relatively good sleep in my first night on the Asian continent, and I’m feeling great.