This morning, I got up at 8:00 and drove to the hospital.

Perhaps I should elaborate. I’m fine; everyone I work with was driven to the hospital today for the mandatory medical inspections that come with our residency visas. I went with three other people in the morning because I had to teach this afternoon.

After filling out some forms in the lobby, we walked upstairs and saw a doctor, who checked our blood pressure and then covered our forms with stamps. He was also willing to check your heart, if you wanted, but it wasn’t mandatory. In the next room, some nurses and a woman with an IV rack were sitting on wooden benches watching Olympic swimming.

After that, we walked downstairs and outside. The Chinese staff member who was with us helpfully pointed out that the building next to the hospital (with an open gate that we were walking towards) was a prison. We turned before the prison gate and went down some dingy stairs into a darkish basement with two regular wooden doors, one of which had the symbol for radiation on it. This was because we needed chest x-rays, apparently. The machine was clearly quite old, and they didn’t use any kind of shielding for any other part of my body, so I assume that I now either have cancer or am sterile. Or both! (Not really). The X-ray guy stamped our forms and we climbed back out of the gloom.

Then it was off to another room in the main building, upstairs. Another doctor was there, and he asked us how tall we were, and how much we weighed. Being the only American (and thus the only one in the room who wasn’t intimately familiar with his own measurements in metric), I couldn’t really answer these questions (”Six feet?”), so they made up numbers. Then he put some more stamps on the forms and we went back downstairs.

The last stop was a room with several nurses on the ground floor. I knew they needed to draw blood and so was nervous (I hate the fingerprick thing), but it turned out this was the badass kind of drawing blood, the kind where they tie off your arm, put a needle in it, and watch as the pressure rockets several gallons of your blood into a glass container. Seriously, they took so much blood. What the hell do they need all that blood for? My arm hurts. Anyway, they stamped our forms some more, and that was it. Having collected the requisite number of form stamps, we exited. Theoretically, someday, we’ll get visas.

Also, I had my first taste of real 地三鲜 today and it was amazing. For those who don’t know what that is, imagine this: Jesus makes an amazing dish of potatoes, green peppers, and a magic heavenly sauce. Then, someone tells him to put in eggplant and he says, “You know what, fine. This is so frickin’ good that even eggplant couldn’t screw it up.” Then you eat around the eggplant and it is delicious. (Pro tip: order it salty 咸 as opposed to sweet 甜 if given the option). It cost me 10 RMB, which is about double what a giant plate of noodles costs at the same place, but I think I’ll have to indulge every now and then anyway.