Three Birthdays Later

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I'm back sitting on my couch in my apartment with my cat sitting to my right listening to my ex-boyfriend Jake play guitar and sing (sometimes horribly sometimes well) through AIM - yes you can even talk to each other through AIM. It's a wonderful cheap way to talk to him, or in this case hear him play. He's a really great guitar player and really loves it. He's the only one who has played a lot of guitar around me in the past couple of years and I really love it.

Thinking back to today I had a very strange incident at the bank. There were three lines of bank tellers and they were ushering all of the foreigners into one of them as that one could speak English. So I'm ushered into a line behind a man. He shows them he has 2 $100 American bills. They tell him in almost perfect English that he can't change them today but has to come back at a certain time tomorrow. They tell him about three or four times before I lean over and tell him (to speed up the process). "Tomorrow." He looks at me and says something unintelligible. "Manana. Tomorrow." He says something in his language that sounds like "manana" but he's not speaking Spanish or Portugese. I get into one of the other lines that doesn't have any people in it. "I can't speak to him." I tell the tellers in Chinese. They look relieved that I speak Chinese. "He doesn't speak English." They are puzzled and chatter back and forth about him not speaking English. "Write it down for him." So they do and he still doesn't understand. After a little while he leaves and stands outside staring at me while I and the bank tellers laugh at the strange situation of a man walking in and not being able to speak any of our languages. He's staring at me because he thinks I should have been able to say something to him. He didn't speak Hindi, that was for sure. I think he was Russian. I'm clueless. There was nothing I could have done to help. I put my money in my account and walk out of the bank. Puzzled by this strange event. How can someone come to China by themselves and not know Chinese or English? He didn't even look to have a translation book or anything. It was extremely strange to me.

I taught the meeting yesterday - taught my colleagues. It was my first time ever teaching colleagues English and I have to admit it was a bit strange. I suppose it was no different from any other class. But they're my colleagues so it felt a little strange. In the afternoon I taught my K3 class and then I had decided to give my K6 class a big surprise. I taught K6 as normal - we had a lot of review. I taught them a clapping rhyme we knew when we were a kid "Miss Mary had a steamboat. The steamboat had a ... Hello Operator, please give me number nine ..." They enjoyed it a lot and all pretty much had fun with it except two of my boys. It's a class of all girls and 3 boys - 11 of them total. Then I had decided to buy them a cake for my birthday. They were extatic. It was absolutely awesome. I got a bunch of pictures of us all.

Over the past couple of days I've had three different birthdays. One my original birthday on the 7th, the one that Camillo gave me on the 8th and the one my friends gave me yesterday at our friend Wang's restaurant. I set up most of the people coming yesterday. There were a ton of them. They all came in and out and gave me different presents. Tony came and gave me a really awesome picture that's hung like a dreamcatcher (but is definitely not a dreamcatcher) from Yunan. Allen gave me a Chinese red decoration that one would hang from a rearview mirror in the states of Bei Bei (one of the 5 Olympic mascots for 2008). Sunny and Liuxiu gave me a toilet paper holder of Hello Kitty. Cat gave me a book of Chinese to study. Julia and Helen gave me some chocolate. Kelvin gave me some tea. Russell and Shina gave me a notebook. It was a pretty big party - lots of food. Craig got me a cake and said he'd take me Mah Jong shopping. I've wanted to get one for a while now. In the end most people had to go home but Julia, Will, Cat, Craig, Kelvin and I were still left and we decided to play Mah Jong for about three games and then go over to meet Camillo at V5 (a bar over at Friendship Square). He had had a couple of drinks but we sat and had some more and then we all danced together. It was really awesome to dance with everyone and Camillo was actually a bit clingy. It's funny because he's never like that but yesterday he definitely was and we got to dance a lot.

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