Back again in Hangzhou, hellooooo rain and also hello new host family. Everything with my new host family is going along fine, except for one catastrophic downfall—stairs. They live on the top floor of a six-story apartment complex with no elevator, so making it down every morning is a downhill roller coaster and conversely climbing back up every evening is like comparable to scaling Mt. Everest, just kidding. All jokes aside, my new host family is pretty awesome; they even have an adorable dog, Dudu, that looks like a bear cub. When I first walked into the apartment, Dudu barked relentlessly at the presence of a stranger, but after ten minutes he was getting all cozy in my lap and on my arm. It’s definitely taken some time, but after a week, Dudu considers me a part of the family.
Another reason why my host family is awesome is their run and gun style of transportation. Every morning, my host father starts up the van (yes I mean a van) and has a nice warm breakfast already prepacked for us before we even step into the van. After we get in, everything else is just a blur, with the way he skillfully and quickly maneuvers his way through congested morning traffic. Sometimes, I’ll find myself at school already and still a lot of food in my resealable container. But I guess that’s what you get when you live life in the fast lane.
Moving on from my family, this week has been kind of uneventful, with a few highlights here and there. Sometime during this week, the administration was nice enough to issue us senior privilege, meaning we could leave the campus during any free periods as long as we reported to the administration and were led by our translators, Emily, Yuyu, or Daniel. We didn’t take full advantage of this nice service until Thursday, when we thought it would be a good time to see more of Westlake. However, when we had gotten out there, it was raining (again) and the fog had made it nearly impossible to see. Add into the mix a nice trip to Starbucks, and that was really it for our time spent during senior privilege that day.
However, the main attraction was today, Friday night. We thought it would be cool to invite all of our host siblings, (the four from before and the four currently as well as a couple friends here and there) to go ice-skating at the mall. The rink was located on the fourth floor of this gorgeous mall complex, but sadly not as many people as you would think were there because everything was so expensive. But anyways, the rink itself was nice. There were at least a dozen little girls who were absolute bosses at ice skating, doing their 360 twirls and pulling their legs up to their heads…you know all that shenanigans. Some of us were okay at ice skating able to comfortable glide while waving our arms around wildly, others it was clearly our first time, clinging to the wall and stuttering very slowly, and then there was Crowtis, Andrew’s host sibling. Let me tell you, this guy is an absolute beast at ice-skating. Zipping around backwards, forwards, with his hands behind his back, anything you can think of (well almost) Crowtis was able to do, no problem. It was amazing seeing all this raw talent besides me, and then also seeing the romantic nature of ice-skating itself. Moral of the story, you should go ice skating sometime.
Sorry for keeping you all waiting but there was really not much else that happened since returning to our second host family. Things are going swell like always, and I hope to write about something more intriguing next time. Thanks for reading this, peace out.
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