I came across this book when I was home in New Jersey cleaning out my old room. (Yeah, my mom said something about how I haven’t lived there in ten years and she’d really like a guest room and that piles of paperbacks are not her ideal way to decorate that guest room.) It’s a [...]
Every time I go to Chinese school, I take the elevator to my classroom, just to use my elevator Chinese phrases. I can’t figure out if I do it to keep up my elementary Chinese, or just to watch the looks of shock when the white teacher talks the talk.
When I first went to Yantai, I imagined I’d come home and slip effortlessly into fluent Mandarin to quote ancient Chinese wisdom. Fortunately for people who have to put up with me, that didn’t happen.
A few characters have somehow made it into my notetaking, which is completely mindblowing to me. I tried to train myself [...]
I’ve been meaning to get a photo of this crazy fruit since we first saw it, but here’s one from Tomato Egg Noodles:
Tomato Egg Noodles also has this to say:
The mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana) ??? is a small, round purplish fruit native to Malaysia. To eat it, one must remove the thick outer skin to reveal [...]
I just had a whole telephone conversation in Chinese!!!
(If a new bottle of water gets delivered to our house today, I must have done it right.)
Edit: Stick realized that I would want photo evidence of me talking the talk, so he snapped this while I was talking.
Note the intense concentration.
Stick and I went back to our possible hutong home, mostly to see if we could find it on our own. We were successful, and I fell even more in love with the neighborhood. The area is Brick Factory Road, where the workers who built the bricks for the drum tower lived, but the inside [...]
“Stick! Look! That sign says ‘Cow Cow Steak Restaurant’!!! Check me out, I read the whole thing!”
“Hooked on radicals worked for Meg,”
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I took this yesterday in Beihai Park. If that square is the character for “round”, I officially give up on learning Chinese.
Yesterday, we decided to catch the bus into central Beijing and do a little exploring. It was touch-and-go whether we’d get out at the right bus stop, it seems that in Beijing, all the streets in the neighborhood are variations on the same name. We found ourselves at what seems to be the intersection [...]
