And the Word of the Day is QUARANTINE

I made it to China safely! The flight was long and boring: I watched three movies, read some, slept some, talked some, ate three meals, the usual. But I was just thankful that we landed safely after traveling for so many hours! Because of the H1N1 scare I talked about earlier, the health inspectors did board our flight when we landed to infrared everyone's forehead and take our temperatures. It was a fairly quick process, but I'm not going to lie it was also kind of amusing because of the outfits they were wearing. They had to check some people a couple of times, but then they deemed us healthy and let us get off the plane. When we were going through the health inspection before customs, though, they took one guy from our group because he had a cough (a critical symptom). They whisked him away to a quarantine clinic in an ambulance. It was kind of scary; I definitely would have been freaking out if that had been me. The rest of us made it through customs fine and then got on a couple of buses to drive the two hours from Shanghai to our city Suzhou. We got to the dorms and brought in KFC for us because they didn't want us going out into the city in case any of us were going to come down with H1N1 also. We were pretty tired, so we went to our rooms to shower and unpack. My Chinese roommate arrived while I was unpacking so we talked for a while before bed. She is really nice and it was encouraging to be able to speak to her entirely in Chinese.

The next morning we got on a bus to head to a resort at Lake Tai. Although most of our group made it past the infrared temperature check, our leaders thought it would be best to do a self-imposed quarantine. So they were sending us to this lake in the middle of nowhere for three days. It took about an hour to get there, and it was in the middle of nowhere. The hotel was pretty nice, it was built right on the lake so that was cool. The lake was pretty dirty though, and everything was smoggy so there weren't really beautiful views or anything. As soon as we dropped our stuff in our hotel rooms we had to go take our written test. I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't an 8 page test! It got increasingly difficult every 2-3 pages, and by the end I was definitely leaving a lot blank. It was frustrating though because I knew I should know the characters but couldn't remember how to write them. I was more familiar with the grammar sections and when we just had to read and comprehend and then go from there. The test took about an hour and a half and then we had to write a 300-500 word essay. That took another 45 minutes but I was able to do it, which was encouraging. All of us were pretty exhausted after that and went to eat lunch. The food at the hotel wasn't all that great, but we could usually find a couple of things that were good.

We had free time all afternoon so we set out to explore the village. There was not much to explore. All there was was a bunch of construction and people selling fruit on the side of the street. We still haven't figured out why people come to this resort because there's nothing to do there! It is a really, really poor place though. All of these canals leading to the lake smelled pretty bad, and a lot of old boats were just floating in them filled with algae. Maybe something exciting and big used to happen in the village, who knows. So the rest of the afternoon we hung out in the parking lot playing hackey sack and frisbee. We had to take turns going in for our oral presentation. I was pretty nervous for it, but it went well also. After another not-so-delicious dinner, we all watched a Chinese movie together. It was your typical Chinese movie - lots of screaming, drama, fights, etc. I was falling asleep during it but then had a hard time sleeping again that night.

The next morning we had our in-country orientation and learned more about our schedule and classes, which was nice. Then we had lunch and went on a boat tour on the lake. We thought we were going to go tour this island, but then once we got to the island our boat driver stopped, we looked at the island, and he turned around. Apparently you had to pay extra to actually get on the island, so we didn't do it. The boat ride was fun though, the wind felt good since it had been so muggy. This is one of the other boats going past our hotel. Lake Tai actually borders four different provinces, which I thought was pretty cool.

After the boat ride several of us got together to talk about starting a Bible study. I had been praying for one Christian friend, and there were seven of us who are in the Bible study! God is so gracious! We talked for a couple of hours, sharing our testimonies and outlining a plan for how we will be able to conduct a Bible study in Chinese with all of us at different levels. It was encouraging and I'm excited to see what the Lord will teach us and also I'm excited to learn some Biblical words in Chinese! Then we went to dinner and after dinner went on a tour of the ancient village across the street. It ended up being like the boat tour: we went in, hovered a little, and walked back out. Kind of disappointing, but TIC (This is China). It was starting to rain some, so a few of us went into one hotel room and a couple of guys took turns playing the guitar and we sang some. It was relaxing. Thankfully that night I slept through the night for the first time! I was so relieved!

The next morning we checked out and got on the bus again for a tour of Suzhou. More on that later!