Ice Breaking {Julie}

It's a Saturday afternoon and I'm sitting on the couch in our apartment looking out the window. I see a big, bright blue sky, underlined by weather-beaten roofs of nearby buildings, some are apartments, some are commercial, many are a mix of both. It's an unmistakably Chinese skyline, with the clay tiled roofs, laundry hanging from balconies, and numerous cylindrical tanks dotting the rooftops, and most obviously, the sight of 6 giant Chinese characters perched like candles atop a 20-storey cake of a building a few blocks away.

What I see is the same as it was the first time I peered out our sixth floor living room, but looking out the window is different now. No longer a strange, confusing concrete jungle, this place has become familiar. I have a place and an orientation in it. I know this window faces north, and I'm looking northwest out of it. I know there is a dark, loud, chaotic,  local market on the main floor of an apartment building 3 blocks away from here, and two blocks south is what we call the Dumpling Place (a favourite, run by a smiley, toothless old man who has dedicated his entire operation to creating his signature fried dumplings). And that building with the Chinese characters on it - although I still don't know what they mean - is the  Women and Children's Hospital. The sense of surrealism I once felt when stepping outside our apartment is gone and has been replaced with something like... Anticipation.

Now that the shock and wonder of discovering what my new "normal day" is going to look like (at least for the rest of the year) has worn off, I'm eager to immerse myself in this place and explore what it has to offer. When time permits, I like to make a point of taking a new path on each journey out so that I can expand my mental map of the city and the places I'd like to take a closer look at. Although I still get turned around sometimes (especially at night), Shaoxing is becoming more and more familiar every day as Cameron and I venture out along it's many rivers, roads, and ancient alleyways, where we have seen a lot of pretty cool stuff already. From stumbling upon a modern castle on an afternoon run to the biking through the eery abandoned train station district, we've explored a lot, but here are a few of the most interesting places we've discovered so far:

Inside a shop in the Ancient District



Ladies Dancing (and staying fit!) on Jiefang Road at night



A riverside walkway in spring time 

1. Kuaiji mountain & Shan Lu fun monastery, with it's stunning view of the greater Shaoxing area.
2. Fushan Park, with its giant lucky bell and ancient pagodas.
3. The Ancient district near Fushan park, with its cute little shops, crowded narrow streets, rice wine museum, and boisterous gambling gazebo.
4. Jiefang Road, which has everything on it, including an underground Walmart, our favourite restaurant called 70s, and an awesome movie theatre that shows American movies, serves delicious kettle corn and has couches in the back rows of each theatre. 
5. The Night Market on East Street, where you can get yummy street food while testing your bartering skills with the various vendors selling everything from pots and pans to clothes and electronics. 
6. Shaoxing University, where we found free Zumba and yoga classes and fellow English-speaking foreigner friends! (But not in that order)

View a top Shan Lu Fun Mountain

A castle of some kind

Shan Lu Fun Monastery

I have to say, after going over a month without talking to a native English speaker besides Cameron or our older American supervisor, Darlene, the most exciting discoveries for me so far on this trip have been the people we've very recently become acquainted with. For the first time in my life, I went 45 days without any casual social engagement outside of Darlene, Cameron and skype with my parents. This was something I had been told to anticipate before coming here in order to keep my expectations low, but after arriving and finding that most of the Chinese English teachers at our school are generally around my age, I couldn't help being optimistic that, as a fairly sociable person by nature, I'd soon be able to "break the ice" and make a connection with a few of them at least. This turned out to be much harder than I thought though, after six weeks and several failed attempts at having a genuine conversation with many teachers were either shyly resisted or interrupted by requests for photos, or by my removal from a group discussion thanks to a quick language switch from English to Chinese.

But last week, it all changed. While chatting with a lovely Chinese teacher named Vicky I asked about sending some postcards, and she offered to take me to the post office on one of our days off so that I could mail them, and would I like to go out for some Chinese food too? That same day, Cameron and I also set up our first Chinese lessons with Toto, another teacher from our school who we discovered is actually very chatty and friendly and we like her more and more each time we talk with her. And she lives in the same apartment complex as us!Then, as if by divine intervention , Cameron and I were walking past the big university here one day on our way to the nearby Kuaiji Mountain Park, when we happened to notice a girl with natural blonde hair and real blue eyes about to bike past us.  Cameron was first to notice and point her out, but it was me who instantly sprang forward to stop her, waving, calling out "Hello! Foreigner! Hello! We're foreigners too!" I looked a bit ridiculous but I couldn't help myself. It'd been so long! Christi is her name, and we talked for maybe two minutes because she had a class to go to, but it was long enough to see that she was young like us, friendly, and knew a lot of other foreigners who were also teaching at that campus and a few at other places in town.  We exchanged phone numbers and have been able to meet up several times since, each time being introduced to a few more foreigners from the group.

It's as if we had to fulfill a six-week waiting period to make friends here, but shortly after that ended, we suddenly found fifteen in one week. Bizarre, but nonetheless terrific. I'm looking forward to finding out what new adventures we'll be able to experience with the help of some local knowledge.

And there you have it - the weird, wonderful, and somewhat desperate ice breaking period of this foreigner's new life in China.

If you want more details, send me an email at julie.pqtt@gmail.com. Other mediums of communication we've got are skype, FaceTime (if you have an iPad or iPhone), what's app messenger, WeChat messenger, and MagicJack free phone calls!