A Day in the Life

Dorm Room
It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m preparing to go play tennis with my roommate around 7 pm. We haven’t been able to play much because the courts are always crowded plus you have to pay to play on them, a couple of dollars per hour. This week has consisted mostly of waking up around 7 am in order to be at school at 8. We have comprehensive class for the first two hours where we practice speaking, writing and listening, then a 20 minute break from 950 to 1010. The next two hours is either speaking class or listening class. I have two female teachers and one male teacher. All three seem to be diligent in their preparation and serious about teaching class. The ages of the students in my class ranges from a woman who looks to be in her late 30s to early 40s with two kids to several recent high school graduates, one of which I believe is 17.

After class most people go out to eat for lunch. Recently I went to a small fruit market that had a tiny café in the back with four tables and four chairs at each table. After waiting about 10 minutes for one of the tables to open, we sat down and ordered dumplings, or 饺子 (jiaozi). They’re a fairly authentic Chinese dish and they’re usually stuffed with meat or vegetables. I think some of ours had lamb and then some had vegetables. A small bowl is used to put spices and some kind of sauce (vinegar or soy sauce) in which you dump the dumplings. It all tasted really good and I think I ended up paying less than 2 US dollars for the whole meal. We’ve since been back several times.

I’ve been able to interact with the Chinese (besides my teachers) fairly often but not as much as I’d like, but it’s obviously very difficult at this point. In addition to waiters and waitresses, I was able to speak with a woman from the dormitory who came to inspect our room the other day. She was checking to make sure we had everything in our room that the list said we should have and we alternated between saying the items in Chinese and English, then answering in the affirmative (“yo”, “yo”, 有，有, or “we have”, “we have”) or the negative (“mei yo”, 没有，”we don’t have”). I noticed that she had brought a pen and let my roommate borrow it, then picked up my pen to sign the document. I was afraid she had mistaken my pen to be hers so I told her (in Chinese) that that was my pen! She thought this was very funny and said she just wanted to borrow it, to which I agreed, then told me that I was very strange.