As I come up to the one month anniversary of not making my flight to China due to the coronavirus, I’ve been wondering what my life would be like if I had been able to make my flight.
If I were in China, I’d have finished all the paperwork and doctor’s visits and would just be waiting to get my residence permit. Granted, I don’t like visiting the doctor or the police, (I mean, who does?) but sometimes you have to do what you don’t like to get what you need.
I would be settling into my new apartment and new job. Hopefully, I’d have finished getting any supplies I’d need for the apartment and maybe finished cooking my first (few) meals in China. I’d have found a grocery store, figured out what all the labels mean, or at least enough to know which one to buy.
I’d have taught English classes for a few weeks. I’d like to think that I would be getting comfortable planning and teaching the lessons, that the students would be enjoying my classes, and they’d be learning lots of English, but I know that it wouldn’t have worked out that perfectly. I’d have some lessons that went well and some that just fell on their face, students that are good and students that are troublemakers. But, hopefully, I’d have figured my way around that school and stopped getting lost on my way to work, because I, like many other people, including a good friend and travel buddy, have managed to get lost many times with GPS!
But, since I am still not in China and have no idea when, or if, I’ll get to go, as I’ve been told not to buy another plane ticket “until further notice”, I went skiing. Here’s a wonderful selfie I took:
And, two days later, I realized that I caught a cold! I’d almost forgotten how miserable it can be to be sick. But I still had to teach my online classes. They tend not to appreciate when you cancel classes at the last minute (and my company penalizes any cancelled classes). So, I got to teach classes for 3 days with a sore throat and the occasional sneeze or runny nose. It’s hard to find an appropriate time in class to blow you nose, especially if you, like me, want to walk out of camera range before you blow. Luckily, my nose didn’t really start running until after I finished my scheduled classes.
Now that I’m recovered from my cold and the coronavirus is looking like it’s about to be declared a global pandemic, I’m sitting here wondering if I should keep waiting for China, which doesn’t have that many new cases, or go somewhere else. The rest of Asia is out as half of it is sick and on the No Fly List. Europe doesn’t look much more promising with part of Italy infected.
It’s looking like Africa, which I don’t want to go to, or South America. But, at the rate things are going in the US, I may wind up not being allowed to leave the country without a 14-day quarantine soon…
My TEFL Adventure 