In Custody

Don and Rob are going to laugh at me for blogging about this but I thought this was hilarious. Let me try to paint a picture for you.

The three of us have been going to the other campus to practice English with students there. This campus is "out in the country" and is about an hour's drive away from here. All there seems to be out there is space, clean air and other newer campuses of other universities. There is little in the way of pedestrian traffic since only students and teachers seem to live out that way. And at the front gates of every university here, there are security guards. This is important for later.

Across the front gates of our campus, there is a nice lake. Since we had a bit of time after our English Corner the other day before we took the school bus back to this campus, we decided to check out the lake. We walked past the security guards on the way out. Remember that Don and Rob stand out here, a lot. Now we have a nice walk around the lake. Met a group of boys who asked to have their photo taken with Don and Rob, normal every day stuff. Then we made our way back to the campus so we could take the bus home.

As we walked towards the front gate, the security guards motioned us to stop. They approached me and of course said something I couldn't fathom. I am madly shaking my hand to tell them I don't understand while speaking to them in English. They continue to talk at me. Surely, they must have seen us leave for our walk. Now, we don't have any id's to show them that we work for the university. So we are standing there trying to figure out how to get back in. I understood enough to know they wanted us to go inside their guardhouse to wait. Wait for what? We weren't sure. Our friend, the Chinese teacher, who coordinates our visits was unreachable. So we called the only other person we knew on campus there, Trista, who is a friend of Rob's. Thankfully she answered her cellphone and quickly (really really quickly, she ran from her dormitory) came to our aid. She broke us out of "jail" and we had a great laugh.

You have to imagine the three of us standing there in the guardhouse thinking how in the heck do we convey to these guards that we could be trusted to enter. We are trying not to laugh too much in case it did not convey enough seriousness. We weren't really sure if we were in trouble. For my part, I am laughing because they're looking at me with a puzzled look on their faces. I am NOT a lot of help here :) Who would have thought that going for a walk was going to be such an adventure!