Not a whole lot has happened in a month, actually. I started studying Chinese characters and stopped again. I'm sure you're surprised. I worked, coached, worked some more, ate and slept a lot. I haven't had a single work-free weekend since October holiday!
Last weekend we met up with the Aleonards (Dan's parents' friends from Carriers) and their friends for dinner. It was fun. I spoke French till my head was about to explode and then had trouble switching back to Chinese. It's sort of reminiscent of my sophomore year of college when I had trouble keeping Russian, Spanish and French in their proper places. I have also noticed my Spanish waning, but there isn't a whole lot I can do about it at the moment.
This past Wednesday I bussed my butt out to Changping to visit Dan and our village people. It was not an average visit with them! As a matter of fact, I think I got more of a cultural education in two hours than I've had in the past six months. I'm well aware that there is so much about Chinese culture and people that I don't understand, but this was pretty jaw dropping.
To start the night off right, it was just Song Bo and I chatting. For some reason I asked her if she didn't have much time to rest because of her job. Her response was to tell me she was pregnant. Uh, congratulations? I wasn't quite sure it was a good thing since she spent the whole last year telling me how she didn't want kids. But then, maybe that's just what Chinese people say. So she told me exactly how many days pregnant she was, which took me an absurdly long time to figure out. I think I was expecting her to talk about months, but she was telling me 45 days. Since the word for days and money sounds pretty much the same, I was a little confused. She talked about how she felt fine and had lots of energy and that she was planning to work until she was seven or eight months pregnant. I said I thought that was a good thing... at which point Dan arrived.
Thinking our previous conversation was something to be excited about, I blurted it out first thing. "She's pregnant!" Dan turned to her and asked in Chinese and she got all weird and said, "No, no, no..." And I was wondering if I really missed something in our conversation during the last half hour. So, I asked, "You're not?" "Bu hao yi se (It's embarassing)," she said.
Ooops. Apparently, only women can talk to women about that kind of thing and men to men. Yeah. HUGE faux pas. So, in an effort to down play my aweful social skills Dan CONTINUED to talk about it, until I told him to shut up, he didn't know anything. And he told Song Bo that he didn't know anything, but I think it was lost in the cultural translation.
Later in the evening, when Luo Mo Cong came back, we were just sitting around chatting and the news was on. It was something about protests in Taiwan. The conversation that ensued was long, so I'll get to the salient points. Basically, both of them thought China should just go to war with Taiwan. They insisted that it is Chinese and that it cannot exist appart from China. Luo Mo Cong seemed to think the best course of action would be to just bom the crap out of the country. Dan made the point that if you kill all the people and flatten the country, there won't be any Taiwan. "Mei wen ti (No problem)," was his response. It was at about that point in the conversation that our jaws dropped, and we didn't think they would go any lower, but they did.
This led to a conversation about rulers and who were great rulers. His list consisted of Deng Xiao Ping, Napolean, and... HITLER! I don't think I've ever seen Dan look so stupified. See the dramatic recreation below.
Luo Mo Cong talked about those three people for about half an hour. Deng Xiao Ping was great, according to him, because he was a good leader. When Tibet wanted independence he went in and killed them all (this proud nationalistic outpouring was accompanied by gestures in case we weren't sure what he meant by killing). Napolean was great because he killed people and presumably Hitler as well, though to be completely honest both Dan and I were in a fuzzy state of shock. Dan's jaw reached its lowest point when Luo Mo Cong said, "Wo hen xi huan Hi te le (I really like Hitler)." At that point we decided it was probably appropriate to tell him he shouldn't say that to foreigners. He explained that Chinese people didn't care if a few thousand people were killed and we felt he had missed the point. "Yeah, but, you can't say you like Hitler." He still didn't get it. "It's like if we said we really liked the Japanese, they're really great people." "Oh, bu, bu, bu... (no, no, no)." Chinese people dislike the Japanese, to put it lightly, so he understood.
After all of that, I was starving. Dan and I went to a restaurant and I ate a pound and a half of dumplings! What's weird is that I didn't even feel full after that. The next morning I had a stomach ache, but details.
The rest of the week has been far less interesting. I made truffles last night, gave end of semester exams at school and visited my first dentist outside of Bath, convinced I had cavities. I was wrong, according to the dentist, but that doesn't change the fact that my teeth are sensitive. Her advice... don't eat sour, hot, or cold... and pray tell, what shall I eat? Melted ice cream ought to do it... or perhaps room temperature lettuce... mmmm! Anyway, I'm glad there's nothing to be fixed. It had been four years since I'd been to have a cleaning, but she said she couldn't tell. God bless whoever invented those spinning toothbrushes!
Signing out from an absurdly long post, but before I do I'd like to let you in on a little bit of news you might not get in your part of the world. There's a crisis in Thailand. There aren't enough pink polo shirts! Seriously, this made CNN news here. The Thai government actually produced 40,000 pink polo shirts to avoid a price increase. Why pink? Because the king wore a pink vest when he left the hospital a week ago. Wow. I mean, they have good food, but wow.
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