Thanksgiving in China

To start the day well, I had the day off work. They forgot to tell me, but I'm getting used to that. So far I'm not having many problems with being the last person to know what my schedule is. Graeme is awesome, and I'll miss him, but I can't wait till he leaves and I get to have a more consistent schedule.

My mom sent me a package a while ago. It arrived last week, but since nobody was at the apartment at the time of arrival, it was taken back to a post office. After a couple days of asking the Chinese teachers, I finally managed to get a general location of a post office near the apartment. The trip out on Wednesday was unsuccessful at finding it, but I spotted it on a bus ride home later that night.

Yesterday morning I made my way over there and was able to get the words "home" and "afternoon" out of them. So I went home and watched some TV and movies with Saffron. By about eight, I figured that the package wasn't going to get here, but it was only a minor thing and didn't throw off the night.

Since the two main people I hang out with here are from England and Australia, I've been explaining how Thanksgiving works a lot. A lot. Our family usually has dinner much earlier than normal. Usually at about one or two in the afternoon. My mom spends most of the morning in the kitchen, and my brother and I help out just enough to make us feel a little less guilty. (Though my brother is usually there for the entire pie baking phase.)

Our dinner usually consists of Turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, mixed vegetables, (lots of) stuffing, a cylindrical red cranberry sauce, and occasionally some other foods depending on what is available at the time. For desert is always apple pie, and pumpkin pie. Occasionally some other kind as well.

For thanksgiving at the apartment, I made spaghetti.

Dane, Saffron, and I watched a movie (the usual night) and ate spaghetti on Thanksgiving. It makes me kind of depressed if I linger on that thought, but we had a great night, and it contained everything that was actually important about thanksgiving. Being with friends and family and being thankful for what we have. Sure it was lacking a Bird, but It was still a great Thanksgiving.

I can't wait till Christmas.

My First (Real) Chinese Lesson

I figured this needed it's own post.

I went out and had my first real Chinese lesson yersterday. Somewhere along the line I got confused about where the lesson would be and ended up back at the bookstore from earlier. I tried to find the book that Saffron has, but it was to no avail. I swear I saw it in there jsut the other day too. After a quick call to Nancy, we located each other and the lesson began.

Pinyin. Whoever invented pinyin should be beaten on the head with a large stick. Even though it uses basically the same alphabet as the English a large persentage of the letters don't make the same sound as any of the other languages that use it. How does a "c" make a "ts" noise? I'm sure it will get easier once I use it more. But for now I find it strange and... weird.

Tones. The tones are going to take some getting used to. I have to really concentrate to get the tones right when I speak them, and they are very hard to hear.

There are a lot of things I could probably complain about the Chinese language, but as a native English speaker, anything I caomplain abouit with the language probably has an equivilkent and then some for English.

Grammar. I've only made a couple simple sentances, but so far the grammar seems to be very easy. I don't think I'll have much trouble mixing around words once I get some vocabulary down.

The characters. I love the asthetic appeal of the Chinese characters. I know it will be hard, but they'rte much less daunting now that I see them on a regular basis. I can already recognize some of the ones I see on the bus signs.

The class was a lot of fun, and I think I learned a good bit. I don't really remember much of it at the moment, but I'll be practicing for the next class, and I'll do better then.

Sunday Nights, and Drunken English

I think that it will be a running thing that I get very little sleep on Sunday Nights. I'm lucky, however, in that I function better on four hours of sleep than on six or seven. For me, very little is better than just not enough.

When the original plan of "coming over to my apartment and having some drinks while we watch a movie" fell through, we all went out to an Indian restaurant for food. I'm no connoisseur, so I can't really describe how great the chicken here was. It was obvious from the beginning that this wouldn't be our first stop. We ate at the restaurant for a while and headed over to the hostel we were at last Sunday.  On the way we called Nate and Daphney, and had them meet us there. We had a couple drinks and played a bit of pool. I don't know if I was lucky or what, but I did much better than I've ever done before. 

Once again, I limited myself to two drinks, and no beer. (I needed to be sober for work the next day, and I hate beer.) After we had all had a game of pool, we all piled into two taxis and went to 1 + 1, a dance club on the south (I think) side of the city. This club was packed with a lot more people than Salsa had. The dance floor was so crowded that you really had to squeeze to get onto it. I liked the music at Salsa better, but the lights and smoke at 1 + 1 were much better. Also, with so many people crammed onto the floor, people are less likely to notice if you're dancing badly. Usually, I don't care where we go, and I'll just travel along with the group, but I definitely plan on coming back here again.

Apparently Daphney hadn't been to a club for almost a year, so by the end of the night it was very noticeable that she had had to much to drink. What's funny though, is that her English was actually better than her Chinese at this point. And she used it. Normally she's fairly quite, but once she had that much in her, she couldn't stay quite. She even went so far as to swear (in English) at a security guard who told Saffron not to take pictures in the club.

When we left the club, Daphney was in no state to get a taxi, and make it home on her own. So after a brief deliberation with the other guys, it was decided that she would come home with me and Saffron. She put up a small argument, but it consisted primarily of talking about how much of a bitch her boss was, so we decided to ignore it.

The taxi ride back to the apartment consisted of Saffron doing a great job of telling the driver where to go, and me doing a great job of preventing Daphney from sticking her feet out the window and kicking the back of the drivers seat. Daphney continued to cheerily swear away about how hard it was for a girl to be raised in the conservative Chinese lifestyle. All the while, she never once spoke a word that wasn't English.

Somehow Graeme and Dane made it back to Gao Ke before us, and helped us to get Daphney to the apartment. Somehow she noticed and pointed out that there were actually stars in the sky.  And there were. After four weeks, this is the first time I've seen the stars here.

We practically carried Daphney up the stairs to the apartment and got some water in her. I don't know what her schedule today is, but I doubt she'll be going anywhere with the hangover she'll have. I think it's a miracle that she wasn't spilling her stomach all over the cab. I fell asleep last night to the sound of her giggling a room over. I hope Saffron didn't have any problems sleeping.

Overall, Sunday nights will probably end with me getting very little sleep. 1+1 is a cool club that I'd liek to go back too.  I get the feeling that the apartment will become a starndard place for our Chinese friends to crash if they're too drunk to make it home.

I'm on my break right now, still about 3 and a half hours before I start teaching my next class. I've got the internet and a cup of hot chocolate that I brought with me. My day is looking good. Maybe I can take a quick nap before I have to teach again today.