Communication

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I've had two experiences crossing the English-Chinese language barrier so far that I'm proud of. The other night a group of us went out to dinner at a kind of food court, and everyone ended up going to a hibachi place. I didn't want to eat anything there, so I sat with everyone while they were eating, and at the end I went to a different stand and tried to order tofu kebabs to go. In the end I ended up with some kind of tofu soup, but that was besides the point. Anyway, I didn't have a clue how to say "to go," so I told the cashier in Chinese that "I want to go home." And she understood what I meant! She immediately began putting my food in a plastic bag. That was awesome.
Yesterday morning Jeanette (my roommate) and I were realizing that we were in desperate need of doing laundry. The washing machine instructions were entirely in Chinese characters of course, and there was a lot going on, a lot of different options and we didn't have a clue what we were doing. I wasn't ready to ruin all of my clothes already, so I got out my Chinese dictionary and looked up every character on the washing machine, one by one, so that we could select the correct cycle. It took at least half an hour. But now we know for next time.

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