Day Two: Unexplained medical testing and Ikea

Day two started extremely early as Kristen was wide awake by 4:30. Stupid jet lag! By 7:00 the entire crew of new teachers was piling into a tiny bus/van and weaving its way towards Dalian for “Medical Testing.”

Driving in China is like juggling knives while blindfolded and slightly tipsy from drinking corn whiskey while chewing tobacco. In other words it’s enough to make you dizzy and scare the hell out of you. Drivers cross lanes with no regard for whether there is another car currently in the lane next to them. Cars drive four abreast on a three lane road, the wrong way on one way streets and honk constantly- probably to assist the drivers through echolocation. It’s bedlam.

We made it to Dalian after an hour of harrowing rush hour traffic, and jumped out in front of a hotel that also happened to be a medical testing facility. Weird.

As part of our visa clearance, we have to be inspected for communicable diseases. This included an ecg, a chest x-ray, blood sampling, urine sampling, blood pressure checks, 7 seconds of abdominal ultrasounds, stethescoping and sight testing. It was like a medical scavenger hunt, and you went around from one station to the next collecting stamps of approval from poorly trained and uninformative staff members.  Also, can I just ask the question- Why on earth do you need to know if someone is able to read an eye chart in order to clear them of communicable diseases? What diseases are you looking for???

After this... experience.... we drove to Metro (giant Chinese Walmart- owned by Walmart and a Chinese company) and Ikea. Of course, we didn’t have enough space on the van to buy enough stuff to properly furnish our apartments and get everyone back onto a seat. So we were limited as to what we could buy, and some people ended up having to take the train home anyways.  In the end, we managed to get enough stuff to make it through the next couple of days fairly comfortably.