The start of week three brought in school onsight training for me, which meant I’d be at school each day learning about my new school, learning my new curriculum and getting my new classroom ready to welcome some 55 4th graders. The week was filled with excitement and mild motivating anxiety. I finally felt like I was getting some traction under me, at least at school. I was in an environment that was starting to feel more familiar and was doing things that I felt I knew how to do. Set up a classroom, oh I’ve got that handled! Create curriculum? No problem. The tasks didn’t feel as daunting, more exciting to be able to finally work on practical things for the school year. I was given an entire week to work on curriculum and classroom set up- compared to back home this was a gift. The start of the school year back home is three days of meetings with limited classroom time, so to be able to have an entire week felt like a dream. 

The resources, and support that is given at my new school is unparalleled with anything I’ve ever experienced. My school at home does a great job with support, but can only do so much for a number of reasons. BASIS seems to have almost unlimited resources and people to support everything you’re trying to accomplish. There is a different human to go talk to for help and support, two deans of primary school plus two heads of primary school, a chair of my department, counselors and a small army of staff who work on just about every facility need you might have. Need a corkboard installed? Send a wechat message to facilities and it is taken care of. Water spills on the floor? Find a shard of glass on the floor? Classroom locked when you’re trying to get in? Need anything in your classroom moved? Need a new desk? A new chair? Need anything?? Put it in the facilities wechat group and it’s taken care of before you know it. This group is by far the busiest of all my wechat groups and it’s easy to see why, they work constantly to make sure the school is running in tip top shape for our students and staff. 

Wechat is now my go to method of communicating with just about anyone at school. Wechat is an app used here in China and I don’t think anyone can exist in China without having access to it. We use wechat to communicate, to pay for things, to find a didi, to get groceries delivered, you can get train tickets on wechat. Just about anything you might need can be facilitated by wechat. Before I came over I had compared wechat to whatsapp- little did I know how incorrect I would be. They are similar in that they both do messaging. That might be about it. We have a wechat group at school to order in Subway during the day. It’s a group that includes the staff at the local Subway, and you drop your order into the group chat, it goes directly to the subway employees, they make it and it gets delivered by the Meituan delivery drivers within the half hour. 

Speaking of Meituan. This is a delivery app for just about anything you want to get delivered. I once was getting my nails done at my home (a wonderful woman named Flower comes to your home to do spa services), when she realized she didn’t have a new nail filing kit with her. She got her phone out and within 25 minutes a new nail kit was delivered. These delivery drivers are all over the city. Dressed in yellow typically riding electric scooters and racing everywhere to get things delivered. You can recognize them not only by their telltale yellow shirts and helmets but by the little kangaroo logo they have on their shirts. And they are EVERYWHERE delivering at all times of the day. When we arrived on night one, we got to our apartment a little past midnight and our host had meituan deliver us food. These guys are non stop, rain, shine, they are roaming the city getting anything and everything delivered. Need flowers? Meituan. Need groceries? Meituan. Need food? Meituan. I learned later Meituan is connected to wechat so these apps work in a coordinated way to get shit delivered all over the metro area. 

We learned that lemonade here in China is water with lemon. We sat down at a local bar and were asked if we would like some lemonade, we shook our heads “yes” and were brought water with lemon, Rhys and I both laughed. This was not the first time we had agreed to something we thought we knew what it was only to find out it was something entirely different. We learned that beer is served with tiny shot glasses and in a lot of bars you can still smoke inside. This bar was our first experience with karaoke. It was live and only one singer for the entire bar. As we toasted one another we celebrated the ending of another week here in China and soon enough found ourselves being toasted by the surrounding tables. As we keep finding, most people understand “cheers” and a genuine toast. Rhys tends to get most of the toasts as someone will catch his eye and raise their glass to him.  We made new friends that night as people here are friendly and welcoming, they don’t let language get in the way and use the limited English they know paired with translators to talk with us. It feels like grand gestures in a place where it would be so easy to ignore foreigners. 

By the end of week three Rhys and I finally felt like we had some things figured out. We had some go to places for food, we knew how to get groceries delivered, we could competently ride the metro, call a didi driver,  and we still knew our three favorite phrases. Ni Hao, Xiaxia and ting bu dong. School was slated to start the following week. The earliest I’d started school ever in my career, but I felt ready. Rhys had signed up for a Mandarin class that would start in September, we had some routines in place and China was starting to feel more like home.