At "Home" in Xi'an

We intended to start this blog nearly a month ago when we arrived in China on August 25 having flown from Salt Lake to Los Angeles to Seoul, Korea, and finally to Xi'an but a lot has happened since then and our intent has been delayed and delayed yet again. Not because we didn't want to keep in touch with everyone, but everything takes longer in China. Elise Britton, our branch president's wife, reminds us that whatever you thought you could accomplish in Utah takes at least ten times longer to do here. Ten times at least, we are finding. But goodness, what an adventure. Over the weeks and months ahead we will try to give you a few glimpses into our experiences if we can manage to keep our Internet connection, get past the Chinese firewall, and figure out yet another new electronic process--blogging. But at least we have begun.

Friends and family have emailed to ask our first impressions of Xi'an and of China. Now a month into our experience here we are still trying to put it into words. It may be a bit like the proverbial elephant and have to be described in bite-sized pieces so with that we'll start with our arrival.

We were greeted at the airport by John's director of foreign studies at Jiaotong University's graduate school, Feng Guangyi. He and John had had months of friendly email correspondence and it was delightful to meet him in person. He and a student got us and all our luggage in the van and drove us to our new "home" where we were met by another long-time email correspondent, Chen Libin, who it turns out is our angel caretaker for sure. Between the two of them they have watched out for all our needs right down to arranging--within the same hour we arrived--to hire someone to clean our very dirty, if spacious (by Chinese standards), apartment. Because our Chinese is limited to our saying ni hao (hello), du ba qi (excuse me) bu yao (don't want) tai guilia (too expensive), and xie xie (thank you), you can imagine the amount of help we require to get water delivered, provide addresses in Chinese characters to taxi drivers, to answering every kind of question regarding our responsibilities at our school, and so on and so on. Furthermore both of them have done all this and more with consummate grace and a ready smile. We feel very blessed to know them and are grateful to be under their watch care. My dean (of the English Department) has been equally friendly and willing to help, though less hands on.