Xingtai

So after the initial shock of living with another person wore off I decided I really hated it. It was super awkward and not at all what I expected it to be like. We are never alone. We feel like we have to stay in our room all day. When we finally decided that we couldn’t starve to death in our room braved the living room in hopes of being able to go explore the city, but he was there waiting for us. There was really no way of leaving without him so he came along too.

He took us to downtown Xingtai. We are a long way from Beijing and home. Xingtai is pretty small and they definitely don’t see many white people walking around. There are no western conveniences here. I can avoid the squatty pottys no longer. The downtown area is basically a little shopping area with a bunch of restaurants. Our roomy decided to take us to a place he liked for dinner. It was an interesting place with hot pot style food. What this means is they give you a choice of broth flavor and then you boil your own broth and just add stuff in it and eat it. It smelled pretty bad but we decided to give it a try. It was sorta neat in that all the different things you can add to your broth float around this track thing in little boats and when the boat goes by you just grab stuff off of it. However, it tasted pretty horrible so… the cool factor was a bit ruined.  I was ready to leave after one bite.

Our roommate however was not ready to leave…ever. We seriously stayed at this place for almost 3 hours. He just kept eating and eating. This guy is not a huge guy either. Not really sure where it all goes. It doesn’t help that he was already the type of guy that moves at a pretty slow pace. Anyways when we finally made it back to the apartment I went straight to my room and determined I would never leave again haha.

Unfortunately a person has got to eat so the next day we went out again. Our roommate, who I will call Bob from now on, took us to a restaurant he liked again. YEAH! This time we went to a duck place. It sold yummy whole cooked ducks. But we just ordered other things. Eric and I had gone out in the afternoon by ourselves and eaten at pizza hut so we weren’t that hungry. So we just thought we would order some of these spicy green beans and rice to snack on while we waited for Bob to eat. No surprises we stayed at this place for over two hours and watched him down more food than I thought possible. We finally headed home for the night. Bob wears the same white shirt everyday and has the same short shorts that he dons out in public. I am not judging men wearing short shorts out in public but this should give you a mental picture. He also has a little bear belly that jets out about 6 inches.

We got a pleasant surprise that night from our favorite restaurant the duck place. This surprise was the type that you really just want to be alone to wait out but no we have a roommate so he got to share in all the wonders of food poisoning with us. That’s right both Eric and I got it good. It sucks. I wish there was a better, more powerful word than "suck"ed to describe food poisoning. All our readers will know: when you get it, you are prisoner to the bathroom. You are on house arrest. You do not and you cannot venture past the walls of your own home until the naughty food has run its course...literally. But for now...we can just use "sucks."

This time I vowed to never leave the room except to go to the bathroom and that I would never eat again.

Finally, the day rolled around to meet with Fay about our schedules and to discuss with the headmaster the reasons that we need a private apartment. We got our scheduled and waited for about 30min past when the headmaster was suppose to meet us. He never showed. Fay reported that he wanted to reschedule for tomorrow so we left.

Tomorrow came and the headmaster never showed. At this point our program that we came with, China Horizons, was in contact with our school and trying to solve the problem, but things just weren’t happening. Finally we get a call from a guy with China Horizons telling us that the school is not cooperating and they would like to move us to another school. At this point I would do anything to leave Xingtai and our roommate behind. So we say we are game for the change. Now what they asked of us was no easy task. They, China Horizons, asked us to leave the city without telling anyone or without anyone finding out. Now that is no easy task when you have a roommate that basically sleeps in the living room where the front door is. You can't just be like "yeah we are all packed up because we are...not moving out or anything like that." or "yeah we just got packed up because we like to roll our baggage down that street to make sure the wheels still turn..." or we got bored and decided to head to another city for the day...with all of our luggage." It is very hard to leave! So we packed up all of our stuff in the nighttime while our roommate was busy drinking in the living room. We slept and woke early and quietly we rolled out of our room with luggage in hand and tried desperately to not wake him. We felt like we were escaping prison and we could not wake the guard dog. It was important for him not to know what or where we were going because he would tell the school. It was important for the school not to know because they would try to stop us. So we made it out o the apartment, down four flights of stairs, and out to the street where we hailed a taxi and were on our way out. Success! we didn't wake him and nobody even had known that we had left until later. This seems like a flaky thing to do, but it is common to do in China when a party is in violation with their contract which the school was.