Li's Blog: Day 8: Yi Jiang Serviced Apartments

I woke up early to check on my colleagues' flight. They arrived at 7am which is 3 hours later than they should have arrived. I packed up and said good bye to my aunt, leaving her to sleep off her cold in the hotel. She was heading back to Hong Kong that evening though it was also fairly questionable whether she would be able to go home in a timely manner. (Edit: It is 11pm and she has just emailed me that she is finally back in Hong Kong. That is also approximately 3 hours behind schedule but at least she is home safe.)

Nothing was open. I made my way to my new hotel room and started to unpack for the month, all the while listening for English in the hallways. When I heard it I knew I had finally reunited with my team. Since they were jet lagged and needed to stay awake we did little activities with lots of breaks. We went around the area and found the grocery store, stationary store, dollar store, etc. We had a little snack at one of the department store food courts.

This area of ton is ritzier and the prices more expensive than what I'm used to in Taiwan. I'm not especially pleased with that and I plan to travel a bit further to shop. For those of us who taught at the other school in past years, we were used to dirt cheap food, fruit, drinks, etc. Here...not so much. But it's about a 40 minute travel to that other area so we'll have to do some exploring.

In between mini trips around the area, people went back to their rooms to rest a bit and maybe take a damning nap from which they didn't wake up from for a while. I spent the time watching English movies on TV (which I didn't really get to do because Aunt Alice prefers Chinese TV) and unpacking my stuff and re-packing for our orientation tomorrow.

In the evening, we went to Sogo beause there is a restaurant called Ding Tai Fung that serves exceptional soup dumplings. We met up with our colleagues at the other school who have already been teaching for a week. One of my friends was celebrating her birthday too! Since it was Saturday, the other school were heading to a club or karaoke afterwards. We went back to the hotel instead because everyone (except me) was really tired and ready to conk out and also because we had orientation at our school tomorrow and had to wake up early.