Today in Chinese class Jason turned to me and said: "Do you think it's weird when I say 'I'm going to go wash my face in the toilet'?"

I laughed out loud, eliciting a frown from our teacher, we should have been paying attention. But it's easy to get lost and distracted towards the end of a 3 hour class. Jason teaches English and is also English (as in British) so he knows the American way to say things as well as the English way since he has to teach the American way to his students. I told him that yes I thought it sounded very funny but since he said it using his accent I knew what he meant . Our Chinese text book had a whole string of English words that translate to bathroom (In the American sense of the word bathroom). Jason also pointed to a slang term, The John and asked if we really used that term. I said yeah sometimes but it's kind of an old term now.

Of course when Jason and I have these conversations they are usually very short, we are normally quickly reprimanded for speaking English. We were also asked to translate what we had been talking about. Most things we say in English are difficult for us to translate, usually because our Chinese is limited, but sometimes just because it's about something weird and obscure in our language, which is why we say them in English to begin with.

Today was a good class, but at the same time I wasn't as hungry as I usually am afterwards. Our third hour teacher brought the newspaper in today to show us the latest local news and explain it to us in Chinese. The news today was particularly gruesome. In China some guy chopped off his mother's head with a cleaver and cooked her and ate her. If you think that's gruesome you should see the pictures, the paper she always brings in is complete with realistic artistic depictions of news events, usually the ones you don't want to see. Also in Taipei a woman was released from prison after serving an eleven year sentence, the artist drew up a story board of her crime: she and her friend both liked the same guy, who didn't like either one of them, so she hit her friend in the head, dragged her unconscious body somewhere which banged up her head even more (all head bangs being depicted in the pictures) then poured a bucket of acid on her friend's chest. They also showed a photograph of her friend's acid eaten clothes. This time, unlike usually, they didn't show a photo of the actual corpse. The third crime that this newspaper felt needed to be played out on a colorful storyboard was a mother with a really bad case of post-have-a-baby depression (I can't remember the term for that), I'm not even going to describe the illustrations there, I'm already sick to my stomach again.

The rest of the class was much more upbeat, after we had forced the horror stories from the newspaper out of our minds, we started a new page of vocabulary: Toilet words. Or you might say: Things you would find in a bathroom. Our teacher is very animated, I really enjoy her classes, she doesn't hold back, she'll make sure you understand any of the words, even if she has to pantomime and make sound effects. Needless to say we were partially horrified and laughing hysterically like little kids much of the time. And we were laughing at what little kids all like to laugh at too. Our teacher even drew us a few pictures on the white board.

I won't go into to too much detail but I did think it was interesting that the Chinese, and apparently the Japanese as well, have numbered their bodily functions just like we do in English. There's number one, and number two. They also say the big number, and the small number. At first I thought I understood instantly what was meant by this new word, but I thought too soon. Jason and I had to clarify with the teacher which number was which, it turns out that they are reversed in Chinese. Number one is the less frequent bodily function of the two. Which makes sense either way I guess.

So now we'll be able to ask anyone who excuses themselves from class which number it is. When you are learning a foreign language you often hear people say "I've reached a new plateau!" which is exciting, it means a huge chunk of what they've been learning for the last few months or weeks has finally clicked into place and become very useful. I think our class is on the verge of one of those plateaus now. Although I'll probalby forget to ask next time I see someone excuse themselves from class, at least until they're half way down the hall. I might just open the door and yell after them in that case. If you don't use your Chinese you lose your Chinese.