seekingmygreaterperhaps

This morning I went to a Chinese hospital. No Mom and Dad, I didn’t break anything and I’m not sick, but I did have to get blood drawn for a Hep B test. Yes I tried to do this in the states… 3 times, but they never tested the right thing, so lo and behold, I had to do it in China.

Our professor told us to fast last night after the feast, and I’m gonna be honest. I did. Until I got hungry at 6 am and decided to eat peanut butter crackers. Sorry not sorry, that won’t change the fact of my Hep B results… hopefully. I have to get this blood panel done so I can eat in the cafeteria and use the reusable chopsticks.

There were 6 of us that had to go to the hospital this morning, so it was an adventure. We get there and our guide rushes up to the window; no waiting in lines for him. We wait for a while and he tells us to fill out a form. He takes the form and leaves us… coming back probably 15 minutes later with a stamped form. It’s serious business when you have a stamp. We then get ushered to a take-out window… but for blood. It seriously looks like a drive- thru, except instead of chicken nuggets someone shoves a needle in your arm.

As we approach, myself and some other classmates are hoping that they at least use fresh needles. The nurse is wearing basically a Halloween outfit- she’s even got the cute hat on. Not having any idea what’s going on, we all willingly trust this stranger as she takes our blood- except for one of my classmates.

This classmate has extremely thin veins and the nurse couldn’t find her vein. They decided to wait a few minutes, and as this girl comes back, her eyes go dead. All of a sudden she is sitting and looks pretty close to passing out. We’ve got a few moms in our program, thank goodness because I’m just staring at her using my mind-willing powers to get her to not die on me, because I’m hungry. (I know- really empathetic.) We are feeding her water and someone had some pretzels in their bag, and our guide runs away. Later he comes back bringing bread, so that’s where he went, but it was a little sketch. She comes to and all is well, but it was an exciting start to the day.

 

 

OOOH yeah.

When we get back we scarf down some food before going on a tour of the Beijing Royal School. It’s a beautiful and well-technologied campus. The tour didn’t consist of much, and even walking to our presenting classroom today I see it was’t a very full tour. BUT, we did get to see an awesome classroom where students can learn long-distance with a camera and virtual teacher.

Me trying to play it cool amongst my classmates.

We went to get some lunch, which was very overwhelming, because I had no idea what was going on amongst the chaos of students trying to eat. Imagine a high school cafeteria. Now imagine everything is in Chinese. Yep, that’s about accurate, as that’s exactly where we were, and I’m in China.

In the evening, the group I’m apart of gave the first part of our counseling seminar to the teachers at Beijing Royal School. They took a little while to warm up to us, but they were a great group and were very engaged. Yay! I taught about nonverbal body language and minimal encouragers, and I got to be a little goofy and they acutally laughed at my jokes, so I consider this a win.

It was a beautiful seminar space; it was an oval shape with students all around. There were monitors above where the slide show was so everyone could easily see. Counseling stuff is cool.

Afterwards the excitement of the night was going to a convenience store and buying some Chinese candy and a Chinese ice cream bar. The ice cream was yummy, so far the candy is 1 for 3. Always more to try, and you know I love the sugar.

As always, thanks for clicking on this to hear about my adventures! As a bonus, here is me with a giant statue of Confuscius they have at BRS.