Before I continue, I think you should be able to put faces to names.
Dave is a teacher at Beijing Normal University and my lovely host while I visited the capital city with Rachel in December. While he totally took advantage of my lack of mahjong skills, I count him among my newly found friends and I am super happy that he'll be in China while I am living there (even though Beijing is almost as far away from Hangzhou as New York is from Florida):
Next up is Olivia, the second part of the 3 Musketeers and a proud member of the Glory of Two and the Let the Pandas Go campaign. She (was probably one of the best who) taught at Hangzhou Normal University (where I am headed soon) and has a first class Russian accent, amazing fashion sense (which I try to match on occasion), and she is the only other person I know who enjoys watching makeup tutorials as much as I do.
Lastly, is Rachel who is the one to blame for me applying and being hired at HNU. She was my GRM (similar to an RA in dorm buildings) in college and we became really good friends (I count her among my best friends). I was sad to see her go to China but knew it would be amazing and I enjoyed living vicariously through her. She taught at Hangzhou Normal University with Olivia and Dave (before he moved up to Beijing) and traveled around the country. She was the one I went to visit in China and the one who introduced me to the other two parts that made up the 3 Musketeers.
Rachel has been a wealth of information. She helped me get in contact with the school and read over my resume and cover letter and was constantly offering her advice. On top of being an excellent friend and a great help through the preliminary stages, this lady is also ridiculously creative (her decorations on our floor with themes such as Dr. Seuss, Pokemon, Harry Potter, as well as Winter Wonderland around Christmas time are the stuff of legend in Hart Hall). She kept hinting that she was working on something that would help me during my time in China. She pulled together the forces of the 3 Musketeers to come up with the greatest collection of advice I have ever seen:
The How to Survive in China guide
This might go down in history as one of the greatest things anyone has ever given me. It must have taken so much time to come up with, compile, and make up (so consider this my official online THANK YOU). I believe I might have squealed when I saw it for the first time and immediately began flipping through it. There is a Table of Contents as well as a hilarious Introduction. It touches on banking and teaching, care packages and travel, the university I'll be working at, culture shock, and even important vocabulary words and phrases.
I had gone to Rachel's house with pages of questions written down to remind myself to ask her--each and every one of them was answered in the survival guide.
I know I kept telling myself prior to all of this that I wasn't going into China completely unprepared--I had been there before and I knew that I could call on Rachel, Olivia, or Dave whenever I needed. But it was so nice to see that it wasn't just something I was telling myself to calm myself down--I really did have three people behind me who I had in my corner, cheering me on and offering me their advice.
Moving and starting a new job can be a scary thing--especially when it's in a foreign country--but knowing that you have people (not only your family but also friends both near and far, old and new) looking out for you, helping you, and having more faith in you than you might have in yourself is what I would call a saving grace. They have invested so much in me and they believe in me... I just can't let them down!
23 days and counting...
Until Next Time,
Amanda
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