Stick and I decided to go to Inner Mongolia for a few days for the National Day holidays. Stick, being the wonderful boyfriend that he is, responded to “Wanna visit Mongolia?” much the way he responded to “Wanna move to China?” (“Ok… Can I bring my computer?”)
Posting may be sporadic because I’m not sure how much ‘net access I’ll have and how much time we’ll want to spend uploading photos during our trip.
I asked my TA a Chinese-language question this morning, and she managed to suppress her laughter long enough to answer me. My Chinese is pretty bad, the tones trip me up, and also I learned to speak in Yantai, and Yantai-hua is annoyingly different from standard Mandarin.
Great, I know just a few words, and when I say them, I sound like a hick.
“Sometimes, in the rural areas, the Chinese is not very good,” my TA said. “It’s…” she paused to think of the word. “Substandard.”
I would have gone with “nonstandard,” but substandard works. Yes, that’s exactly how one would describe my Chinese.
The cocktails menu at the Beijing Outback Steakhouse and me.
We went out for a wonderful payday dinner of Western food, but after dinner, Christina began to feel ill, so we decided to grab an immediate cab home. Unfortunately, we came out of the Outback Steakhouse in the ritzy Sun Dong’An shopping area, and the cabbies were quoting really outrageous figures to take us back. One of them suggested 100 RMB to go home, and when I said that was too expensive, he asked me to say a price.
“60 kwai,” I said.
“10,” he responded.
“No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. You say the higher numbers, I say the lower numbers,”
I don’t think he understood my English but my confused look must have conveyed my message, because he amended his statement.
“10 Euro.”
“Honey! He thinks we’re European!” I told Stick. We’re usually mistaken for Brits* when we’re traveling… I like to think it’s the good manners, but it’s probably the bad teeth.
“If I had 10 Euro,” Stick said, “I’d buy that taxi and drive you home myself.”
We decided to take the subway back.
*Stick finds this statement misleading and so I would like to state that neither of us thinks that the UK has given up the pound and adopted the Euro.
It’s sort of an expat joke that the only information determined at a Chinese meeting is the time and place of the next meeting. I think I even saw that on of those “You know you live in China, when…” lists. I was just in an hour-long meeting at which the only thing determined was that we are meeting again at the same time and same place next week to discuss… something.
It was actually a charicature of a Chinese meeting. I got to school at 9:38 for a 9:40 meeting, and I was the only person in the assigned room. My mindset was more Hurray! I can drink cold water without being reminded that it’s bad for my health! than Where is everybody? Then the level 1 TAs and Christina, the other American teacher, showed up, and then surprise! so did the director of the English department, and then the foreign-teacher liason.
Our first order of business was making sure everyone knew that we were meeting today. Yes, really. We were all intensely questioned on when and where and from who we found out about the top secret resistance organization first grade teachers’ planning meeting.
Christina’s TA doesn’t quite speak English, which put poor Christina in a weird position when the TA insisted that she’d told Christina about the meeting far in advance and Christina, shocked and unprepared, tried to explain that this was dropped on her at 9:39 this morning.
Our second order of business was making sure that everyone had their lesson plans to discuss. Another drastic failure, because Christina hadn’t written a week’s worth of lessons in 60 seconds, and the Chinese teachers weren’t told they were meant to bring suggested lesson plans for our classes. (My TAs and I all thought that we’d be chatting about the keeping all the first grade classes on the same level)
Fortunately, the detailed questioning took so long that we ran out of time before anyone could see that my lesson plans were sort of in draft form.
They weren’t kidding when they said this dish was spicy.
Another English teacher’s Chinese lesson on the staffroom blackboard.My coworker Christina asked me yesterday why I would walk past the supermarket to get fruit at a street stand. I think I said something about it being more Chinese, but I didn’t really have an answer.
Yes, the fruit carts are a little less expensive, and the prices becomes cheaper and cheaper as the laowai prices come down, but I don’t know if that’s the reason to walk the extra block. The fruit is a little fresher… again, it’s not really a big difference.
Ihe main reason is that my Chinese is terrible. The guy who’s sitting outside all day with his bikecart full of grapes has a lot more time to deal with my bad pronunciation than the hourly supermarket cashier. (Sometimes they like to use this free time to bargain, which is kind of like a test of how fast I can count backwards in Chinese.) The cashier doesn’t care if she makes the sale or not. But the bikecart guy, or popcorn girl, or any other street vendor, has an interest in selling the product, so they really will go out of their way to try to understand the disjointed phrases that I call Chinese.
