This is the second entry about the trip to our school and the adventure that ensued. To watch a video of it, click the picture at the bottom of the post. 🙂
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So after about half an hour we arrived at the bus station and that was a bit of a nightmare. Because the arrangements had been made a bit last minute, the travel details were not really clear. We kept hearing different stuff from the people we were with so it made us a bit worried. We called Steven, the person that Jacob worked with to get this arranged, and he explained all of it to us and that calmed our fears. Star got the ticket for us and we were on our way.
The ride was pretty normal. It was the typical Chinese bus experience: lots of different smells and spitting. Once we got on and everyone was seated, a bunch of different vendors came on aboard trying to sell papers, food and snacks. The ride was about 4.5 hours but because it was so cramped it was hard to fall asleep. There was a little kid on the bus that Jordan gave some candy to and the kid’s smile was adorable. It’s great how nervous the Chinese get around us but it is awesome how they react when you reach out to them.
The bus arrived in a town called Jishou and some of Steven’s friends were there to meet us, Ivy and Ashley. Both spoke pretty good English and they took us to some fish restaurant. Thankfully they ordered chicken and pork (with bone of course). The food was super spicy and everyone’s eyes were running. Haha, thankfully I wasn’t alone in thinking the food was hot. There I had my first experience with a squatter toilet. It wasn’t that bad. But I will relieve you of having to read my explanation of that. 😛
After the meal, we caught a hired car; basically a beat up Hyundai Elantra like Jordan used to drive. Boy that was quite the experience! Instead of taking the nice smooth highway, it seemed that he was taking the back roads route. At first it was relatively normal, with a couple near misses and some narrowly avoided head-on collisions. Then all of the sudden he turned off the road and on to a highway. The thing about this highway was that it wasn’t finish.
It seems as though they build massive highways here and never finish them and that was the type we were driving on. Where joints would normally be for a bridge, there was just dirt. Where there wasn’t dirt you could see all the way. All the way down that is. The ride also involved some unfinished tunnels. Jordan and I were getting tired but didn’t want to go to sleep for fear of our lives. It was literally that crazy. By the way, there were no seat belts in the back where I was sitting. Watch a video of it by clicking the image at the end of the post!
We finally made it to the school and met our English speaking liaison Stone. He showed us up seven flights of stairs to our apartment and we got our luggage in. I will talk more about the apartment in another blog entry. We went to the bedroom to find a king sized bed. Only one at this time so Jordan slept on one side and I on the other. The town was really cold and all the windows in our apartment were open so it was freezing inside too. We turned up the heater to full blast (after struggling to read the Chinese characters), put on a movie and went to sleep.
