Beijing Books Building adventure

I'm reading "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" and "Are You There God? It's Me Margaret" with my two middle school tutor students and I had been "borrowing" the text for both online so far. My school owner sent my TA to Beijing today to actually buy the books, so I decided to tag along for adventure.

I discovered today that traveling with her is almost like traveling with another foreigner. People always want to scam me because I'm foreign. People always want to scam her because she is so very, very naive and it's very obvious. She has never lived on her own or really traveled on her own and she prefers to ask people questions to figure things out rather than look around for signage and instructions. She always impressed when I can figure out where we need to go and then I point out the English on a sign somewhere.

I had to tutor tonight at 5pm, so we had to get up pretty early and catch the 8:30am train to Beijing. We got to the train station right around 8am and heard that our train was sold out. Naturally we get up to the ticket counter though and, seeing a foreigner, first class tickets are suddenly available.

So we get to Beijing and our school owner tells us he'll meet us at the book store instead of picking us up; no biggie, we take the subway there. It. Was. Insanity. On the subway; so many people, in such a small space, an agoraphobic's absolute hell. We get to the bookstore and it's this monstrous building that is also absolutely packed with people. Being a big reader, I could have spent a week in there; my TA on the other hand, not so much with the reading.

"Beijing Books Building"

We find the books, school owner doesn't show, so we call and he says he'll pick us up when we're done and take us to lunch, but asks me to pick SAT study books for my tutoring students as well as Oral Business English textbooks and Comprehensive Business English textbooks for a government class I'm teaching beginning next weekend. Never in my life have I picked out a textbook. The girl I'm tutoring that's studying for the SAT is 12. I've never met the people in the government class so who knows what level they are or what their needs are. Eek. To top it off, the book store isn't organized very well (or at all) and there are rows upon rows of textbooks, which naturally have only Chinese on the spines. Now that was a project and a half. I'm pretty happy with my choices though, and he was too so, yay me.

We finished with that and then he tells us to get a cab and meet him at the restaurant. We went to The Peking Duck for lunch, which I'd actually heard of before and was pretty good. Then we headed home. Or tried to. The 3:30pm train from Beijing to Tanggu was sold out when we got to the train station, so we opted to take the 3:30pm train to Tianjin and cab back to Tanggu in order to catch my tutoring student on time. The line for cabs when we got to Tianjin was over an hour wait (which would have put me around 45 minutes late for tutoring), so we decided to take a bus. Which we then had to take a taxi back to our apartment from. And took forever. I think we finally got back at 7pm, only two hours late. I was supposed to tutor until 9pm so she stayed until 10pm.

Then I had a full night of lesson planning ahead of me. I tutor the labor union guy tomorrow morning for an hour and a half and he's a very quick learner and goes through material like nobody's business. Then I have the middle school girl from 5pm to 9pm. I also wanted to get a jump on my lesson planning for the week because I have my first visitor coming out on Tuesday! I only work 5pm to 8:30pm Tuesday through Thursday, so a Chinese friend from Songyuan is coming and we're going to go on adventures around Tianjin, I'm very excited. As much as I love my TA, it'll be nice to have another non-student here, and it'll give her a chance to catch up on work (she's very excited about this part as well, ha).