Getting Ready for School!

I can't believe school will be starting in 11 days!  It's crazy how fast time has flown and how much I have to get done between now and then.  I have been getting many things done in the past few days though which is good.  I've been making seating charts recently and I am learning that it is hard to set up for elementary music when you have one class with 22 kids and one class with 7 kids.  I'll just have to organize a way to reset the classroom quickly between classes. 

I also went to the doctor to get a physical today.  I was very suprised by how efficient they were there!  It only took about 20 minutes to get an ECG, XRay, sonogram, bloodwork and other physical-type tests...it took me 4 hours at home to get all of that done!  I was also happy that I didn't pass out when I got my bloodwork done :)  (they let me lie down which I think prevented that from happening). 

My apartment is looking more and more like a home.  I recently bought a nice rug to put in my bedroom, a desk and many picture frames to put my printed pictures in (that really helped!).  Bethany (my roomate) and I bought a DVD player and attempted to set it up yesterday...we got it to work but only in black and white (it's definitely supposed to be in color though...).  We also tried to connect a wireless router to our internet.  I feel like I could do all of these things without any problems at home but the problem here is that everything is in Chinese so you have to play the guessing game as far as how to set things up.  Luckily the school has a tech guy who can come over and fix it for us.

As far as being overwhelmed by the culture it hasn't been too bad overall.  I did experience my first "cultural-stress" situation the other day though.  We had a water leak in one of our closets and the maintence guy from school was going to come fix it...he hadn't gotten there yet and there was a knock on the door.  A few people were at the door who were speaking to me in Chinese and I had no idea what they were saying.  I said "ting bu dong" (I don't understand) but they still kept talking to me expecting me to understand!  It was stressful because they sounded angry and I had no idea who they were or what they were doing.  Luckily our maintence guy showed up and saved the day.  We found out later that one of the people who seemed angry was the landlord from upstairs whose apartment was leaking water into ours.  I'm sure things like this will happen again but I'm trying not to stress about it.  The only thing I can do is try my best to learn as much Chinese as I can....but even that probably won't be enough.

Overall I can say I am having a great time so far here in Wuxi.  I love the people I've met and the school I'll be working in.  I'll try and keep posts updated as much as possible, but if it takes awhile it's because I'm going to be very busy within the next few weeks.  Miss you all!