Ni Hao!
It's funny how different life in China is from when I got here. At the beginning I wore more clothes than I have worn at one time in my entire life. And I was starting to think that I was never going to sweat again. Boy, was I wrong about that one. I think I've sweat more than enough to make up for the two months of never sweating in the past two weeks. I wear lots of dresses and skirts now because they're much cooler than shorts. Another weird phenomenon that has showed up recently that I just don't know how to handle is humidity. I like living in a dry state and having to put on lotion fifty times a day instead of never. I constantly feel sticky and wet and just all around gross. At the beginning I was showering twice a week. Now I shower twice a day. In the morning when I actually shower and in the evening when I'm just using the cold water to cool me down for bed. Oh, that's another plus I forgot to mention. Last week I realized that I've been kind of dumb. My water heater has worked this entire time I just didn't figure it out. It plugs in in two places and one of them wasn't plugged in tight. So, now that I want freezing cold showers I have hot water! Lucky me. Another new thing is the mosquitoes. Did you know that they are actually nocturnal and are forcing me to be the same. They come and buzz in my ear all night. When they're not doing that they're drinking my blood which judging by how many bites I have must be absolutely delicious. Really, I look completely diseased, like I have the chicken pox again. It's great. I've started jumping from bed to bed at night wielding my Chinese Mandarin phrasebook and destroying every mosquito stupid enough to come anywhere near me. That phrasebook has served me better as a mosquito killer than for actually learning Chinese. Before I left for China my mom bought some anti itch cream to bring to China. I thought it was a good thought but I didn't really think I'd ever use it. Boy was I wrong. I'm hoping it out lives the mosquitos! One of the pluses about things getting warmer is people have traded their nose muffs for Darth Vader masks. Alright, so they don't actually breath funny but I still think it looks like loads of Darth Vaders on the loose. They wear these masks on their electric bikes to shield themselves from flying bugs. It's a really smart idea but I don't think I'll be jumping on that band wagon as easily as I did the nose muff.
Classes last week were really good. I split them into two teams and assigned each student a number. I'd then write the beginning of a sentence on the board and call a number. Those two students would then have to come to the front of the room and finish the sentence. It was a lot of fun seeing what they would come up with. I always started with 'The Chinese are...' and it was amazing how much they struggled with that one. I mean really, they are Chinese you think they'd be able to think of something to say about their own culture! They did much better with 'Americans should' ironically. One of my classes wrote 'Americans should lose weight'. I stood at the front and pretended to be offended. I asked the student if he really thought I was fat but all he did was giggle which didn't help my self esteem much. After class I was out on campus and my favorite student from that class came up to me and said "Teacher, I don't think you are fat. I think you are sexy!" Unfortunately I had just taken a sip of water when he said this and having a student from class tell me I was sexy did not help the water on the way down. I started coughing and laughing and told him thank you but he probably shouldn't use that word in that way. But I really did appreciate the gesture, he's a hilarious kid. One of the sentences I used was 'I think dogs should wear trousers because...' and that one was a lot of fun. I got quite a few 'because they get cold in the winter too' and 'because they would look lovely'. My favorite was one boy who wrote 'because then they could attract a male/female dog.' In a couple classes I did 'A fork and knife are used for...' and they apparently think we are barbaric because we use a fork and knife to kill people. I tried telling them that I have never killed anyone with a fork and knife and asked them how they possibly thought anyone could use a fork as a deadly weapon. They actually had answers and some of them acted out stabbing people with forks. Yeah... that's one of those things that I just let go.
Before I had them complete the sentence I tried to get them warmed up with using lots of descriptive words and such. To do this I showed them a couple pictures and had them describe things about the picture. One of the pictures I showed was me hugging one of my younger sisters at my uncle's wedding last year. One of the girls in the class stood up and said "It is a picture of you hugging your mom." I started laughing and exclaimed "That's my little sister!" The girl started blushing and hid her face in her hands. The whole class started laughing and were completely blown away when I told them my sister was only 17. After, one girl asked how old I was and I had the class guess. Most of them guessed 20 but one boy shouted out 25! I made fun of him for the rest of class and I don't think he'll be making that mistake again!
This past weekend our friends from Zhenjiang, Katie, Aaron and Alicyn, came on Saturday to visit. It was a lot of fun to see them and show them around Yangzhong. I picked them up at the bus station and showed them my school and dormitory before heading to meet Alyssa and Josh to get lunch and then go to a park for a picnic. This was tricky for two reasons. The Chinese don't really understand the concept of food to go because they don't do that here so it takes a couple minutes to convince the waitress that you do in fact want to take the food out of the restaurant. The other tricky thing is people here don't understand what a picnic is. They don't really sit on the ground here and even though we had a blanket it stressed some passerbys to see us sitting on the ground in such an undignified manner. One lady got really upset and told us that there were park benches over there. We were just spreading out the blanket and opening the food up when this Chinese man on a bike pulled over, parked his bike and came to squat next to us (I should mention that when I say squat I mean literally just squat not take a dump or anything. All the Chinese do it when they don't have a seat. I haven't been able to get that one down because I can't keep both feet flat on the floor). Alicyn speaks pretty good Chinese but she couldn't understand what this guy was saying to her. We offered him some food but he refused and just sat to the side while we had our picnic. He stayed for the whole time just staring at us. After we finished he got up and rode off on his bike without a word. I yelled good bye (In Chinese I just don't know how to spell it) and he waved and that's the last we saw of him. It was really weird. After our little picnic we wandered around the park and then headed off to the cheap market. We wandered around there for a while and then the Zhenjiangers told us they understand why we watch so much TV because we were all fairly bored and none of the Yangzhongians knew what else to do because there just isn't anything else to do. Rick and Sarah met up with us and I'm sure that made us the biggest group of white people many people in Yangzhong had ever seen. The nine of us sat outside the cheap market on stools, a nice lady brought us, for a while and it was funny to watch everyone double take as they went past. Yangzhong isn't a tourist spot at all so there really are not white people here and it makes us a bit more of a novelty. After sitting outside the cheap market for a little bit the 9 of us went to dinner where we overwhelmed the poor people working there. We go to that restaurant a lot so they know us pretty well but they were having another large group of people so I don't think they knew what to do with us at first. They pushed together two tables and being forced to sit at a corner I realized why square tables are stupid and that round tables are a much better idea. It was not easy to reach the middle to get food without knocking over something that belonged to Katie or Aaron who had the misfortune to sit next to me in my pathetic corner. One of the little workers there picked up a spinner to put on our table. She picked it up over her head and we all felt that deserved a round of applause. The last bus to Zhenjiang leaves Yangzhong at 6:50 and by the time it came around no one felt like our time was cut short or we had so much more to do. We all had a good time talking with each other and good byes were sad and such but no one felt cheated in the slightest.
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