Getting Acclimated

I am sitting in a large, five story bookstore full of books I can hardly comprehend and drinking a coffee I can hardly bare to sip. Where the hell am I? If you guessed Hangzhou, China you are correct. So far it has been almost one week since arriving in this southeastern Chinese city, well known for encapsulating mountains flushed green with pine trees as well as the iconic West Lake (西湖) lying at the feet of these mountains. The mountains and the West Lake together provide the backdrop for a-most beautiful scenery that has been the muse for many ancient Chinese poems and landscape paintings over the past two thousand years or so. But only an out-of-townie such as myself would begin to describe the city of Hangzhou with an idyllic description of the West Lake, as Hangzhou’s renowned attractions for travelers only present a narrow scope of what life in Hangzhou is really like.
So far I have lived in Hangzhou for a grand total of six days and have been to the West Lake twice. By the way I am already sick of the West Lake no matter how beautiful its stinking green mountains are. Within another six days I will begin teaching English to college and postgraduate students at Zhejiang University of Technology (ZJUT), and must write three teaching plans and a syllabus in which I only have the slightest notion of how to write. Maybe I should have paid greater attention to those stapled packets of paper I received at the beginning of each semester back at university. Whatever though, the English department is a bureaucratic mess just like the rest of China, so I guess I’ll just wing-it. I have already signed the teachers’ contract so if I really bomb this teaching job the university, for better or worse, is stuck with me.
Besides work, play has been non-existent as I have yet to break into the Hangzhou nightlife. My western co-workers are planning to take me out tomorrow night to join the community of ex-pats residing in Hangzhou, which I hear is small compared to other well-traveled cities in China. Meeting fellow westerners in China can seem like a joyous reunion of strangers due to the suffocating dominance of the Han Chinese ethnicity. But being the minority for once can be greatly refreshing because social anxiety is almost not existent. This last statement seems contradictory, but with such lack of diversity in China it is near impossible to blend in with the rest of society. Therefore why try? This makes the role of being the pink elephant in the room more natural and easy going. Hangzhou seems different though from what I have experienced in all other Chinese cities thus far traveled. First of all most toddlers come strapped with diapers and their trousers are sown shut from front to back. Also speeding cars and buses tend to stop at a much greater frequency for pedestrians standing aside waiting for a chance to cross the street. Hangzhou surely is a more friendly of a city for reasons more numerous than those just mentioned, and I look forward to finding my groove in such a place for the next ten months.