Embarrassing Moments and Cultural Experiences

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This week involves a shopping and western food intervention. No shopping all week. The only western food allowed is Subway on Friday afternoon.

September 12

Clare, Audrey and I went to Chunxi Lu with Snow White and her friend Bo Bo. We ate dinner at a big, cafeteria-like restaurant that serves only Chengdu specialties. We each ordered the sampling meal, which cost 25块。Expensive! But we got a lot of food. Dumplings, soups, baozi, chicken feet, noodles, corn and edamame, pastries, etc. Most of it was delicious and I will definitely go back for it one day when I am really hungry. Or maybe I will do the buffet upstairs, which costs twice as much but has even more options.

September 13

The teacher did not show up to calligraphy class today. He was supposed to bring a friend to sell us our supplies, but after thirty minutes of waiting we left.

I went to taiji and felt like a robot trying to mimic all of the teacher's fluid movements.

We went to "the potato restaurant" for dinner. It has a potato dish that is a lot like funions with peppers in it. We also had pumpkin and chicken with nuts. It was all really good. A group went to the Shamrock to watch the Packers vs. some other team football game. The Packers won, I guess.

September 14

Listening class was very difficult today. We listened to a recording and tried to answer questions about the recording in our workbooks. When the teacher asked if we understood, I said no, and she proceeded to attempt to explain the whole thing to me. But I still didn't understand, and couldn't read her handwriting on the board either. I started to feel warm and embarrassed, but eventually she left me alone and went on with the lesson and I started to catch on.

She wants me, and a couple of other girls, to stay late next week for extra help.

Went out for Thai tonight. The menu was hilarious! It had all sorts of bad English on it. The tea was sweet and delicious. The food was pretty good too. No vegetarians, so all of the meat was gone first. We have a lot of vegetarians in our group, and it is sometimes difficult to find dishes to suit them.

We had fried chicken, beef with lemongrass, chicken curry, mixed veggies, fried rice, chicken pad thai... too much. Very full. Pretty expensive.

September 15

Today I decided to circumnavigate campus on my bike. People stare at all of us foreigners walking down the street, but they stare even more when we ride our bikes! It is hilarious. The things that Chinese people can do while they are riding their bikes! Texting. Talking on the phone. Smoking. Audrey said she saw someone reading. I saw a girl on the back of a boy's motorbike holding his cellphone to his ear for him.

Well, it was fairly frightening riding on the street. The bike lanes are great, but the cars don't know what is a bike lane and what isn't, so they don't give a damn about passing in the bike lanes or parking in them. At one point I almost ran into the front of a bus taking a wide turn. But I didn't. I got lost for a while, but I turned around and eventually found myself next to Trustmart, so I knew where to go from there.

Maria, Clare, Ben, Scott and I all went to Relish for lunch, of course. We sat at one of the outdoor tables on plastic stools and ordered. Got our food and ate it. I noticed that my stool was cracking, and Ben offered to trade, but I declined. Most of the stools at Relish are cracking. Maria turned around to pull out her camera, so I decided to do the same. This is when my chair broke. It shattered into twenty or so pieces, and all of a sudden I was sitting in the dirt. My legs were bleeding. Everyone was looking at me.

Ben offered me his chair, and I sat down. One of the waitresses brought Ben another chair. Then one of the old lady waitresses brought another stool over and motioned for me to stand up. She stacked a second stool on top of the one that I was currently sitting on. We all started laughing hysterically.

She brought another stool over, and we were laughing even harder. Then we realized that this one was to stack on top of Scott's stool, which was also starting to crack. Not to stack on top of mine. The head waitress came over and started apologizing. I said 没关系。我太胖了！No problem. I am too fat! Americans are so big that Chinese chairs cannot hold us.

For dinner a group of nine of us went to get dumplings. There is a row of restaurants in an alley next to the gym that looks like a space ship. They all serve dumplings. The waitresses stand outside and try to convince people who walk past to come into their restaurant.

We picked the third one in the row and the sat us in a separate room with a big round table. And plastic stools. That put me off a little bit, but I checked mine for cracks and their weren't any.

We went around the table and each ordered a type of dumpling to share with the table. I picked potato and pork. Nick chose egg and tomato... etc. We mixed our sauces with garlic, peppers, vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, salt, etc. They brought the first platter of dumplings and we dug in. Then they brought the second platter. By the fourth or fifth we were filling up. When we got to the eighth we were cracking up. We hadn't realized that we had ordered quite that many dumplings. We took home at least six boxes full of take home dumplings, and there were still some left. The waitress was laughing at us. It was great. It only cost 8块 each. A little more than a dollar.

On the way out the waitress at another restaurant told us to go to hers next time.

At 7 we had a Western Tibet lecture. It covered Chinese aid to the earthquake victims in Tibet, and polyandry and polygyny (legal polygamy) in Tibet.

September 16

Street food for lunch. Crepe/burrito thing with egg, chives, spicy stuff and crispy bing. I also bought what I thought was going to be frozen yogurt with berries on the way back. It looked like that in the picture. But it was actually milk tea with red beans and jelly floating in it.

Class, class, class in the afternoon/evening. Writing class was fun. We just sat and wrote about an unforgettable experience with a friend in Chinese characters. Culture and Society was about Chinese names and how they are chosen. I had a short break before US-China relations and cooked ramen noodles in a pan with peanut butter for dinner. (Clare and Audrey's idea). They were quite tasty. US-China relations focused on Obama's visit to China during the first year of his administration. Somehow it kept turning to North Korea. Kids in my group are obsessed with the North Korea conflict. I feel like I know a lot less about politics and current events than most of the people here.

September 17

Today!

After class today I worked out in the ping pong room: squats, push ups, lunges, crunches... That type of thing. But I couldn't do nearly as much as I usually can. The humidity here and the pollution are draining. They make it difficult to breath.

I was so excited and hungry when I went to Subway with Clare, Audrey and Maria, I ordered a foot long turkey sandwich with all of the veggies, two cookies, and a bottle of orange juice. And I ate all of it. It was soo good. The cookies tasted like actual cookies, which impresses me. We haven't really found the kind of desserts we are used to. There is generally something a little bit off.

After we ate we went to have our hair done at a salon that Maria went to the first week she was here. There are a ton of stylists and hair washers working there, and they all have short, fashionable hair styles, dyed various colors. One guy even had his hair the same color as mine, which looked pretty funny.

They took us into the back room to have our hair washed. Rather than sitting in a chair and leaning over a sink, customers lie on a table/bed and hang their head off of the end. It is a lot more comfortable. They wash your hair and give you a really nice massage at the same time.

I was the first one done, and communicating with them was really difficult. Maria has an electronic dictionary that is really useful, but she was on the other side of the salon. One stylist who speaks a tiny bit of English told me to pick a picture out of a book. He showed me one that was basically the same as the style I already had, so I agreed to that. The stylist trimmed my bangs and blew out the rest of my hair, then put product on it and tried to sell me some. But I didn't fall for that. It was gray and sticky. Maria bought some.

I tried to ask him what the color of my hair is called in Chinese (a.k.a blonde), but he didn't understand and I think they thought that I wanted to have my hair dyed. Luckily, that didn't happen. I paid and sat with Maria and Audrey while we waited for Clare's really long curly hair to be straightened. We chatted with the stylists who were fighting to sit in the chairs closest to us. They liked our eyes. Maria asked them the best bar to go to. It was so much fun and a great way to practice Chinese. They were all our age and excited to chat with us. I will definitely do that again.

Tonight is English corner, which I don't want to go to. I am really tired and need to rest before we go out with Snow White and her friends tonight. I'm sure the rest of the group will want to drink and dance. Hopefully someone will be willing to just sit and chat with me.

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Photos

nutrition!!!
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people
Kate, Amber, Clare, Maria

Comments

[DeeDee]

You have "jing" hair
Sorry, can't type in Chinese on this computer, but you have "jing" tou fa. Jing, 1st tone. Same character as gold, or shiny. It's all the same to them also, they don't have blonde, sandy blonde, dirty blonde, etc. I'm enjoying your posts, you are great writer, Laura. I know exactly the kind of plastic stools you have been sitting on!

[lauralisonash]

Thanks!
My electronic translator said "huang tou fa." Yellow hair. You should see the crazy colors the hairdressers have at this salon. One has bright red, one blue, one has a mohawk the color of my hair. And they change frequently because they work on eachother's hair when they don't have customers.