Adventure Tim

Finally, it has warmed up. The insides of our building, being concrete, do not agree with the heat and instead make our living areas ice-cold. We head outside when we can.

But I'm not here to talk about that.

I'm here to talk about an enjoyable evening and day today (Friday and Saturday).

As the foreign teachers all enjoy each other's company (more or less), we hang out often at people's places. Last night Adam, Ann, Tatiana and I hung out at Tim's place, mostly because of two reasons: 1) he doesn't live in the apartment complex that the Americans do and thus still has heating, 2) he brought back a Wii with him, a magical white box that somehow encourages team spirit and eats away at your time as a cost.

We played some Wii, watched some movies (I finally saw Dr. Strangelove), and by the time we were all ready to head home, it was 1:30am.

Followers of this blog will remember that the Americans are locked in our gated community at 10pm like children.

However! We had the ~magical gate key~ a key that allows us to get in the gate after 10pm. There is only one. We aren't sure why, but that's what they gave us as they tried to explain. So we said goodbye to Tim, who was probably thrilled to have his room to himself again and went to the exit.

On the glass doors there was a rod, keeping people from moving the doors. On further inspection we found the rod was locked. This was not our own gate key, but rather, the doors to Tim's apartment.

Despite our hollering and knocking, the keeper of the key refused to wake up, and our options were reduced to sitting in the hall all night or Adam, Ann and I crashing in Tim's place.

So we crashed. Ann and I shared the bed while Tim and Adam took the floor cushions. We'd agreed most of us would be waking in the morning for a park excursion at 10:30, so it wasn't a problem.

At 6:30, Ann's phone alarm woke us up. Tim said goodbye as we all left and we went to his building's main door- only to find it locked. Tatiana, who had left at a reasonable time last night, managed to wake up the key-keeper, and finally we were back at our familiar gate.

Which was locked.

So happy we had the key.

We returned to our rooms, and most of us went to sleep afterward. At 10:30, Adam, Tim, Tatiana and I assembled to go park exploring with 6 of Adam's students.

This park was unlike the others I'd been to- instead of buildings and temples, there were rocks. Rocks you could climb on.

The Chinese don't bother with warning signs- in the states, you could easily picture someone falling and suing, so these rocks would never have been climbable. But these rocks were, and there were many different forms. There were also stepping stones across water where you could fall in. What's interesting, though, is that it feels much more fun than if it were in the States- someone is going to sue someone, it's unsafe, it'll be a problem- China just rolls with it. People don't get as injured as we seem to think they will. And the exploring of parks is much more fun here without pavements and perfectly adjusted steps, crawling your way up rocks in the most basic of rock climbing exercises.

On the other hand, if you are in a wheelchair, Kaifeng is not the place for you. There are few ramps, most buildings require you to actually step up and over something, and parks have statues and monuments on top of rock formations that they have built.

So today was full of adventure~!