Clueless

I woke up early bright eyed (but definitely not bushy tailed) this morning preparing for a long (13ish hour) day. Walking to wait for the bus with my large load (13 hours leads to needing lots of books, papers, etc.) in tow, Leslie and I both had a minor panic attack thinking we had missed our bus. Finally we saw one of our coworkers who always takes the bus with us – phew!

Turns out everyone was by the school gate because some of the local people who live around the perimeter of the school were protesting at the gate and no cars/busses could get in or out of the school! How bizarre! Thank goodness our co-worker (fellow English teacher who understands perfect English but almost never communicates with us) told us to follow her, and we busted through the crowd together. People walking in and out was not a problem, they were trying to block vehicles for some reason. First I asked DanDan, the admin at our school who works with our students and their schedules, but she shrugged her shoulders clueless. Next I asked our co-worker and she said, “Maybe it’s because of the water problem?” My first thought was, “What water problem? My water worked just fine this morning!” Leslie asked one of her students who was shaddy and would not tell her what was going on (I think she just did not know but didn’t want to seem clueless in front of her).

We caught the bus outside of the school gate since there was not way it was entering the school (even though it could have easily taken out the 25ish people standing there, haha) and some other co-workers had to go to the back of the bus and direct the bus driver on how to back the [coach] bus out of the narrow road leading up to our school – hilarious! We are backing out of a small street because the demonstrators would not let us in, and in turn we went the wrong way down a one-way road to catch the high-way (okay so that’s not too out of the normal) and caused another traffic jam on top of the on outside of the school. On a Monday morning when all you want is to be back in bed, entertainment like that is definitely much more amusing than it should be. After the bus was moving in the right direction we asked another co-worker what in the world was going on and he told us “the farmers [motioning to the shack houses surrounding the school] are upset.” That’s as much of an answer as we got.

And that is typical for China – we don’t know what’s going on half of the time, but just have to laugh it off because that is all we can do!