Summer days
This was going to be titled Spring days, but the two weeks of spring are over.
Also, this is less of a coherent story and more of a selection of random experiences from the past few weeks.
Last week my classmate Tom brought in a bilingual Dr. Seuss book (The Sneeches?) that he had picked up at a local bookstore. We managed to get our reading class teacher to read the entire story to us in Chinese, while holding it up and showing the pictures, even though it had nothing to do with what we were learning. But our hearts were definitely warmed. And we hate the textbook for that class anyway.
I have learned the following phrases in Chinese: "A great master of caligraphy" "Pour out a stream of invective upon someone's head" "The curve of her eyebrow is attractive" "Bully the weak and fear the strong" "Suffer from insomnia" "Lure the tiger out of the mountains" the words for different ping pong strokes (i.e. slice, slam, hit it in a way that puts topspin on it) and many other gems. However, we have not yet learned in class how to say "It's nice to meet you."
I love Chinese hacky-sack, aka jianzi/jianr. It's made of little disks of metal/plastic with some feathers coming out of the top. I'd show a picture but my camera died a few weeks ago for no apparent reason.
Anyway, jianzi is easier than regular hacky-sack, and Chinese people play it all the time in the spring/summer. You can just start somewhere outside and people will come up and join you. There are some old ladies on the sidewalks who are jianzi masters- and the whole time, they're so chill. They do these amazing kicks behind their backs or jumping in the air behind their leg, and they've usually got this bored look on their face. Right now we're trying to form a foreigner jianzi team to challenge other groups of people to jianzi-offs. I don't know if there even is such a thing as jianzi-offs, but there's going to be. And they're going to be awesome.
There's a rock wall in this sort of mall-place here. The guys there asked me if I wanted to do it, said it was 10 yuan (about $1.30), but then told me I could do it for free, and they really wouldn't take my money when I tried to pay them. They were really good at it- one of them had a hurt foot, so he just went up hopping with the one foot and using his hands, and he went faster and higher than I could.
Chinese people love America! I never expected it, but so many people have said to me (in Chinese) "You're an American? America is so good! Why did you come to China? America is much better!" My Chinese knowledge limits me to saying, "America is good. But China is also good. I like China and America." But it does the trick. Unfortunately, most Chinese don't have such a good impression of American food, our most prevalent culinary ambassadors being Maidanlao (Mcdonalds) and Kenduji (KFC). I just want to convince one person someday that our diet does not solely consist of deep-fried and over-processed food in brightly-colored wrappers.
A few days ago my listening teacher used our new phrase "I did not expect" in an example sentence. She said, "I did not expect Zhou Ming (that's my chinese name) to be from America. Because Americans are all very big."
Also two weeks ago someone told me (in English) that I was not dynamic. But I think she meant it as sort of a compliment.
posted by Mike @ 5:55 PM
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