Journey to the train station

I got up in the morning and had a wash, grabbing an apple while I stuffed my things back into backpack again. It was now time to go to the family I would be living with  for the next year.

I didn't get to see much of Shanghai, and what I did was just concrete mostly. The train station looked enormous and inside was overwhelming. I had to go through a series of metal detectors and X-rays to get in, and after 10 minutes of being there I'd had 500 yuan stolen from my pocket. 

My contact bought my ticket for me, which I needed to show my passport for, for some reason, and EVENTUALLY got onto the right train, which was clean and quiet. 

After just over an hour I arrived at a deserted platform, somehow I managed to shift my enormous bags out of the train before the doors slammed shut and made my way to the doors, where I saw my new family waiting. A pretty young wife, a well dressed father and the kid I was to be looking after, who was extremely cute. I crouched down and shook his hand. 

"Hello", he said.

:)

 

my second day

Second day in shanghai and due to some messed up arrangements I was to be staying a second night with my Contact and travel to my new city the next day. He left me napping in the afternoon and came back with a late breakfast of tofu soup and some delicious little flatbread things with a savoury paste in them. Yummy. It was then a case of killing time until lunch

I sent my mum and friends more emails on my phone while my host made endless calls to au pairs and families trying to make arrangements. I overheard plenty that was a bit worrying, a boy had had an epileptic fit, a condition he hadn’t disclosed and was now stuck with no money for a ticket home and a family that refused to have him. Eesh. 

Shanghai was busy and very hot, we walked to a local café and I got some noodles and some soup. 

The soup was just what I needed. I read ‘The Bell Jar’ that day until dinner, when Contact made us a simple dinner and went to bed. Apparently no hotel would take me and I didn’t have the energy to think about how much I didn’t want to share a room with a strange man (who had spent the entire day telling me that my hair was 'too dry' even though I am simply mixed race, and then bitching about his colleagues and the other au pairs)
. About an hour after I fell asleep I woke to the sound of screaming  in the room. I rolled over and realized it was coming from my contact, a man in his 30s. He was screaming, crying and shaking a few feet away from me. He yelled a lot of stuff that seemed like begging and for the first time since arranging this I was glad I didn’t speak Chinese….

After the screaming subsided into tired whimpering I rolled over and tried to sleep, and as I was drifting off I was treated to what Id been warned about in China because of my …distaste for expulsions of bodily fluids, especially vomiting or spitting. I heard a man all the way from the street hock up a massive loogie and heard the messy splat of it hitting the dusty pavement outside.

I rolled over and gagged into my pillow

I want to go home.