Days 4 & 5 First Skype Church and Scavenging the Old Apartments

Sunday a girl called, Lily, who was a friend of some of the past BYU China Teachers, help us get to the Hanlin Hotel for Church.  We meet in one of the rooms of the teachers there.  Yes, we go dressed in proper Church attire!  Their rooms are nice and luxurious compared to what we have, plus someone comes in once a week to clean for them.  It was sad to think of but, we are glad that we have something this nice, it could be worse!

Church is broadcast over Skype for us.  We listen to one hour of Sacrament Meeting and since we are a “larger group” (eleven of us), and we have Priesthood, we get to have the Sacrament blessed and passed to us.  The second hour was for Relief Society and one of the Presidency had the lesson.  When we listen on Skype, most of the time we have the microphone on mute so that the sounds in the rooms don’t come through and disturb the speakers or the prayers.  During the lesson, we can unmute the computer and add to it, much as we would if we were all together in one room.  Sometimes the feed is not very clear, but we still get the gist of most of it and you can still feel the Spirit. 

After the meetings were over, we sat down in one of the other hotel rooms that BYU teachers are in and had a potluck dinner.  It was interesting that we had so much variety!  A couple of main dishes, fruit, a salad and a dessert!  The best part was spending the time together and talking over our experiences so far in China and getting to know each other better.  Then it was back on the bus and a ½ hour ride and then a 25 minute walk to the apartment. 

Monday was kind of a wait around day.  We were expecting that we would be going to the police station to get our resident permits, but that didn’t happen.  We decided along with the Stan and Nancy Pace, the BYU teachers that we live closest to, that we needed to go back to the other apartment that they were supposed to be in and get more of the stuff that was supposed to be saved for us from last year’s BYU teachers.  Our angel, Eva, came for us about 2:45 (they had set up a time of 2:30 to meet there with the manager) and we got what we felt was needed.  Don’t know what will happen to the few odds and ends that we did leave there.  Guess I can’t worry about it now.  David also picked up the bike that we had bought so he could use it to get to classes and back and rode it to our place.  Eva was scared for him and we watched for him all along the route, but he made it safely back, through all that crazy traffic before we did. 

Eva took me to the office and I picked up my teaching materials and then she showed me where my classes will be held.  I also found out that I have one class that are Sophomores and the other 6 classes are freshmen.  The freshmen are at military training right now and won’t be back until the first week of October.  So for a month I will be teaching only 2 hours a week and then I will have a full schedule of 14 hours.  I have 4 hours on Tuesday, 6 hours on Wednesday and 4 hours on Friday.  Sounds great to me, but I know it will be work and I have time to prepare for it.