Today was my first day of school. It was a success, I arrived on time, I didn't cry in front of the other students or teachers, I had all my books, and a pencil, and a pen just in case, and none of the other kids made fun of me, and I did make fun of them either, at least not on purpose. There are 4 of us in the class, 2 Korean girls, 1 Japanese girl, and 1 American (me). The class is taught in English, with a tiny bit of Japanese and Korean, making it easier for me in comparison. There are 3 teachers, one for each hour, with a tiny gap in between each teacher, the teachers move from room to room, kinda of reverse from High School. There are maybe 10-20 other class rooms on the 3rd floor, and as far as I know, one other floor in use. The class was half easy/boring and half hard. Today we just repeated sounds all day, some sounds are exactly the same as English, and some are exactly not the same and hard to say or differentiate for my tiny American ears. And the other students had different problems with different sounds since they speak different languages. So maybe by the end of the week the Chinese that I do know will sound better to the brothers and sisters in my congregation here. I'm pretty lucky as far as the students go, like my room-mate and others have said, because I get to practice the Chinese that I learn at school a lot with my brothers and sisters a lot more that the other students probably do. The brotherhood is like having dozens of instant friends and family. They've taken good care of me.
So with all that said, I'm going to close this "blog entry" and go outside to see if I can figure out how to buy some food for myself, since it's much cheaper to do that that buy groceries here, buying food here for me is a lot of pointing and saying "Wo Yao" or "I want" Then when they ask me a question that I don't understand (which is all questions so far) I just say "yao" which (I hope) means "want" which is proper Chinese for "Yes I want that", and hope that whatever it was that that they asked is going to be OK, usually it's some sort of hot sauce or extra add-on, maybe a bag or something. If there is no food in sight to point to and merely Chinese character menus then buying food is much more difficult, usually the menu is in front of the shop-keeper and facing away from him so he can't see what you are pointing too, and in case you didn't know Chinese is not phonetic so you can't just sound it out. But don't worry there is, I would say, a plethora of food shops/stands, so I can always figure something out to eat thats good. (edit 277) Permalink