We were told to get to class early this morning, because it
is very disrespectful to arrive after the teacher. We snapped a few”1st day of
school” pictures then piled into our classroom.
We were scheduled to start our the classroom portion of our Cultural
Exchange through the Pinyin System. The
Pinyin System is Chinese Phonetics. We
spent the next two hours trying to match the teachers Chinese sounds by
contorting our mouths, tongues, and teeth in ways they have never before
moved. Some letters sounded completely
identical in sound to our English ears.
Chinese has 4 tones, so that makes it even more difficult. There are 23 consonants, 24 vowels, and 16
other units (I don’t know what group they fall into, because I was distracted
by the firecrackers being shot off by a business in the city for good
luck). After I was only called on once
to painfully mispronounce a phrase, our class was over and we went to lunch.
Two cafeterias, with dozens of food stations serve the
students meals. Each stall has different
offerings.to choose from. I ended up
with a fried egg and dumplings filled with spinach and meat for about 30 cents. It was good too.
This afternoon we gathered for English Corner. Four girls gathered around me. One started out the conversation by saying,
“Frankly, I think you are gorgeous.” I
liked English Corner from the start. We
spent the next 2 hours talking about China, America, food, families, and
more. All of them said they would like
to be business women, but their parents prefer that they take the more stable
and suitable jobs for women as teachers.
The end of English Corner came and the girls asked me to
join them for dinner. They took me to a
restaurant connected to the dining hall for “hot pot”. Two burners in the center of the table heated
pots filled with broth and meat. The
food was delicious. One of the girls held
up a piece of meat and said, “Annie, will you eat this?” I asked what it was and found out it was the
flappy thing from the head of the chicken.
I agreed to try it and was surprised to find it chewy yet
flavorful. After I finished a bite of it
the girls admitted that only one of them had ever tried that part of the
chicken. The meal and conversation with
the girls was so enjoyable I felt like I was back in college hanging out with
friends.
This evening Spano, Candice, Morgan, and I went for a
walk. We were headed down an alley to a
tea store when 2 different groups of over 15 guys jumped out of cars and into
taxis. My heart started to pound when I
saw they all wore 1 white glove and carried knives with blades over 6 inches
long. At first I thought the 2 groups
were colliding, but I guess they were headed somewhere together.
I turned on my TV just now to find 1 English station of
news. Anytime scrolling captions appear
on footage from another program the captions are blurred out and the commentary
is dubbed over. A little censorship
brought to the people of China by the government.
