Our first day at TU!

The night before our first real day at Taizhou University, my roommate Kayla and I decided we would take showers. Unfortunately, something was wrong with our drain, and we ended up flooding the shower, and the bathroom floor. 

As you can see, there was only like a 2 inch barrier between the shower and the bathroom. Even more unfortunately, this flooding would become a part of our nightly routine. Also, I would like everyone reading to know that the water in the toilet was stained that color! I promise we flushed! :)

As our first day began, our co-students met us in the lobby of the hotel to take us to the "canteen" (school cafeteria) for breakfast. For my first breakfast at Taizhou, I had noodles, a potato-pancake type thing, and some rice porridge. This was also my first meal where I was forced to use chopsticks.  I had been around chopsticks only time or two prior to this trip, and all of the Chinese students complimented my abilities. Needless to say, they had very low expectations for our chopstick skills! But, regardless, I was excited they thought I used them well.

 Now back to the food... All of my breakfast choices were very good! Even the surprise ingredient in the porridge tasted good. (I originally thought the orange things were peaches- I would later find out this was pumpkin.) This breakfast definitely set the bar for the rest of the food we were to eat, at least on campus. 

After breakfast, our co-students took us on a mini-tour of Taizhou's campus. Unfortunately, it was raining, and I had no umbrella. Thankfully, my partnered student, Lynn, shared hers with me. On this tour, my personal highlight was their campus library. I have a weak spot for books and I thought it was incredible to see some of the older books they had. Lynn was also very excited because she had never been to several floors of the library where they took us. Apparently we were given special permission to visit the "restricted section" of the library. (It wasn't actually called the restricted section- I'm just a Harry Potter freak.)

 After the library tour, the students took us to the outdoor recreation area. Here, we fooled around and pathetically shot basketball, bumped volleyballs, and interrupted a Tai Chi class.

After that, Zane and I finally bought umbrellas and our co-students took us back to the hotel for the evening. However, Dr. Reed and Dr. Garrett didn't join us at the tea shop the night before so we decided to go back for dinner. I was feeling brave, so I walked over to another table and pointed at someone else's food to order some noodles I thought looked appetizing. Definitely a good choice on my part. Those noodles were delicious.

Group shot! I asked a girl at another table to take our picture and unfortunately Lea was cut out

 :(

After dinner, we decided to go on our own (without our Chinese students) to "tour" Linhai City. Thankfully, we happened to run into one of our co-students, Cherry at the bus stop. She took us to what would become our favorite place to hang out- KTV. KTV is a karaoke bar we went to. I'm going to discuss KTV in my next post, so check it out!

After KTV, we ate street vendor food, and went to "English Corner" where all of the English majors at TU go and discuss things and they aren't allowed to use Chinese. We got there a little late, so we just talked to everyone and took a few pictures. 

After English Corner, we finally ended our first official day at TU.