The Toilet Story

One day I had an epiphany. The bathroom might smell so bad since we hadn't cleaned the toilet since we had gotten there. I mentioned it to Patrick. His response was something along the lines of: "Oh, you have to clean toilets? I thought that was a germaphobic American thing." I explained that it wasn't and that we should clean the toilet. Now, I must tell you that almost every toilet I have seen in China has some sort of black nastiness at the bottom of the bowl. In our toilet the bowl did not hold water. When you flushed it simply just rinsed everything down the pipes and drained all the water out of the bowl. Because of this, I thought that the black stuff at the bottom of our toilet bowl was mold or something. I grabbed the toilet brush and some toilet bowl cleaner that we had just picked up from the market across the street. I began cleaning the toilet just like anyone else would. Put in the cleaner and insert the brush. This is when I realized that this toilet had probably never been cleaned...

With the first sweep of the brush down the bowl a huge sheet of "mold" came unattached from the porcelain. I thought I would vomit. This "mold", as I originally and probably hopefully thought, was actually petrified fecal matter. After gaining my composure I flushed the sheet of feces down the toilet and started the cleaning process again. At this point Dave was walking out the door and asked what we were doing. I explained that we were cleaning the toilet. He said, "Oh, I just cleaned that a week ago." Patrick and I responded with, "No, because a huge sheet of crap just came loose." Dave's response: "Oh, well I didn't clean the INside of it, I wiped off the OUTside of it." (Gee, Dave, you're bright!) After the first wipe and flush the toilet started to look cleaner but there was still a lot of black stuff at the bottom towards the S pipe's opening. I gave up on the toilet brush since it was too big to get into the pipes. I rolled up my sleeves and directed Patrick to grab me a shoe polishing brush (which we had purchased to clean the rest of our apartment) and bleach. I grabbed this brush covered in bleach and began scrubbing the bowl of our toilet. I wasn't making much headway and asked Patrick for a toothbrush so I could get further in bowl without having to actually put my hands in the very bottom. I got a little more of the black nastiness to come out. After flushing the toilet again I asked for a pencil. It was similar to a drawing pencil in the way that it had no eraser on the end. I used the top of the pencil and started scraping the bottom of the bowl. All of a sudden flakes of what I prefer to think of as mold started flying off the porcelain. Because this pencil was quite short I was dangerously close to having this "mold" all over my hands and arms since I was now practically crawling into the toilet. At the sight of these flakes flying off I got so nauseous that I had to quit. Patrick grabbed a Flathead screwdriver and gave it a shot. He also couldn't deal with the thought of having hands shoved in the toilet and quit. After repeatedly washing my hands, bleaching them, and Purelling them I decided that I am done cleaning this apartment.

First few full days in Xuzhou

The next day I was still pretty out of it but I had to go through training and all that. Before we went to training, Pat and I went to the market across the street and got a bunch of cleaning supplies. We spent a good 6 hours cleaning our apartment and still didn't get to the bathroom. The office cabinet in my room was covered in something. It was everywhere, even in the drawers. I had to scrub it with a brush! We were so tired of cleaning that we didn't wipe the bleach off the floor so the floor is kind of weird since there is so much bleach everywhere.

Our toilet seat was cracked so that was not fun. When you sat down to go to the bathroom you had shards of plastic digging into you. All the seats here are plastic. The repair man said that we should put something under the seat for extra support. Then he said something in Chinese that I am assuming was a fat joke towards Pat and I. We can't flush toilet paper; we have to put it in the trash can so that makes the bathroom smell even worse than it originally would.

Our kitchen had a horrible smell in it that we can't figure out. We just poured a bunch of bleach in the cabinet that it is coming from hoping that would kill whatever it was. We are were going to hire a cleaning lady. They are about $2/hour so we figured we would do that once a week or two. We planned on not cooking here because we would have to buy a tank of propane for our stove and that would be a waste of money for just 1 1/2 months.

Our laundry machine was a piece of junk. There are no dryers here first off. That's not too bad but the washer was basically a tub that will spin the water around for you. The bad part was that there is no rinse or spin cycle. So we loaded the washer with clothes, soap, and water from a hose. We let that move around for a while then drained the water. We then put more water in and let it move around some more. Drain while putting more water in to rinse some. I eventually ended up hand rinsing all the clothes and putting them in the spinner. The spinner only holds 2 pairs of jeans at a time so it took about an hour to do one load of laundry and I did most of the work; the machine helped a little.

Pictures of our apartment.

Xuzhou... Finally!

Our train to Xuzhou arrived at about noon. It was now July 10 I believe. I have no idea how long we were actually traveling but it was well over 36 hours. We got out of the station and found a phone. We were to contact the training manager, Scott. I called the two numbers that were were given by Scott. Both times some stupid girls answered and told me that Scott was not there and we should call back in 30 minutes. So we waited 30 minutes in the horrible heat with hundreds of people blatantly staring at us. (Come to find out that there are only about 30 or 40 ex-pats in this town and it's rare for them to use the train.)

After the 30 minutes I called the school again. A guy answered this time who spoke very good English. I told him who I was and that I was at the train station and we needed to be picked up. He was astonished that we were in town and no one was there for us. He asked me if I could see KFC. I said no. He asked if I could see McDonalds. I said yes. He said to go to McDonalds and he would be there in 15 minutes. I said okay. I went to tell Patrick what was said. Right after I told him some girl walks up and asks if she can help us with anything. This was probably the 20th person during our trip that had asked us so we said "no, we have a friend coming to get us". She insisted on helping us do something so she pulls out her phone and calls the school. She talks to the same guy that I did. She was yelling at him! She gets off the phone and in broken English says to stay where we are and that someone will be there in 10 minutes. She walks away after we thank her and Pat gives her a hug. I think she was meeting her boyfriend at the station because a boy showed up and she points at us with a huge grin on her face. She must have been very pleased that she helped foreigners find their way.

A few minutes later Leon, the guy who had answered the phone, shows up and helps us carry our bags 2 blocks away because the taxis at the train station are too expensive. We get two cabs. One for us and one for our luggage. We get to the apartment and are greeted by Dave, our roommate. We drag the luggage up a flight of stairs to our apartment and walk in. It is a sty! I didn't expect much since it's China but this place was disgusting! It is a nice apartment but it looks like it has never been cleaned. The kitchen smells like moldy poo and rotting who-knows-what and the bathroom makes you not want to shower because you would just be dirtier afterwards.

We went to the school and met Scott and figured out when we should meet him to go through training. Later that night we went to hotpot with Dave and some of the Chinese teachers. This is where I got really sick. I wasn't really sure where I was or what I was doing at moments. I was drenched in sweat again and felt like I was going to pass out or throw up at any moment.

Hot pot is this meal that you have a stove in front of you with this huge pot of broth. You order a bunch of random stuff to put in the broth like noodles, meats, veggies, and cicadas (those are really popular right now). Oh and cow testicles. As soon as the food started coming out I just got more and more sick just looking at the raw meat. I decided I had to leave. That is a very very rude thing to do here even if you aren't feeling well. I waited as long as I could but had to give up.

I got back to the apartment and passed out on the couch. Leon had to put a curtain in my bedroom (since there is a window from my room into the living room) and give me a fan since I didn't have AC. I didn't even hear him pounding on the door I was so sleepy. He woke me up by yelling through the kitchen window. I heard him, got up, for some reason started walking towards Pat's room. He must have seen me do that so he yelled again and I sort of woke up a bit more and let him in the door. I slept while he was pounding nails into the wall to put up a sheet over the window. He woke me up to tell me that he was leaving. I slept more until Pat and Dave came back. Everything was still a blur.

The first day or so in Xuzhou.

The Beginning

In mid February, during one of my random calls to my friend Patrick, who was in Dalian with me for a few months of my last trip, I was presented with a rather "out of the blue" question. "Do you want to go to China?" We had always talked about going back to Dalian some day after we graduated college. Well, the time had come when we were both finishing up. I had just graduated and Patrick was on his last semester. He had found a blog from a girl who used to work for Future English in Dalian and thought this would be a good company to work for since we had both heard of it before and had friends who had worked for the company.

After a bit of research and some discussions with my family, we decided to apply to teach English in China. It took a while to get everything in order but we were finally given the go ahead and officially hired by Aston English (the corporate name for Future English)for summer and fall semesters. We had our hearts set on going to Dalian but all the schools in this town were filled for the summer semester. We were told that there were openings in Dalian for fall semester but would need to choose a place to go for summer. When we called the recruiter the next day, he suggested that we go to Xuzhou Aston for the summer since they really needed teachers. We didn't really care where we went for the summer as long as we would go to Dalian in the fall.

A few days later we received our contracts and contact emails for the schools we would be going to. We bought our airline tickets and a while later got our tourist visas as instructed. This is how it all started.