Gavi Catching Up With You All!

Hey all,

Sorry I haven’t written in a while. My schedule here is getting extremely busy! On a normal day I wake up at about 6:30 to be at school (a 15-25 minute walk from our dorms) by 8:00. I’m at school until 11:40 supposedly but, the teacher usually takes an extra 7 or so minutes to finish up. After school, I go back to the dorms to have lunch with the BHS students. When we are finished eating, we usually play a game of soccer until we have to go in at 1:30. At 1:30, I have classes with the BHS students taught by my dad. Depending on the day we have either Chinese Literature or Chinese History. Then, every day except for Wednesdays, I have Chinese tutoring. After that, I have more classes with the BHS students and then a cultural class. On Wednesdays however, I have the cultural class, then Chinese then, class with the BHS students. At 4:30, when I am completely done with school, I have to do Chinese homework, then about an hour and a half of keeping up with school in America and then homework for Ma lao shi (otherwise known as Mr. Mallory or my dad.) I usually am completely finished at about 8:00 pm. So as you can see my free time is limited.

Despite my packed schedule, yesterday, after school, Emily, Jonathan, Kyle, Jennifer, Jenna and I all went to Lotus (the local supermarket/ everything you could ever need store) to shop for notebooks, shoes, clothes, and Jonathan wanted a unicycle. We found everything we needed with ease except for the unicycle. First of all, it was hard to get across to the people helping us what a unicycle was. Though Jonathan knew the official word in Chinese they are very rare in China so not many people know what they are. The man in the bike section finally understood after we said “bike with one” and then mimed a spinning wheel. The man pointed in a direction and said something none of us understood and then walked away. We walked in the direction he had pointed but didn’t see anything so we asked someone else who, of course, took us back to the man in the bike section. The man then explained to us that Lotus didn’t have any unicycles and that to get one we would have to take a 15-minute taxi ride out of town to a different store. This other store apparently had two unicycles in stock that they were selling. We decided that it was too late to go then, and ate dinner instead. After we ate, we went our separate ways.

More later,
Gavi