Classes continue to be interesting. I’m starting to get to know some of my classmates, most of whom I like quite a bit. I made friends with a Korean guy today, and we’re going to play ping pong during break tomorrow. Yay! That’s something that was really high on my list for China—play tons of ping pong—but so far I haven’t really done any. But today I bought a paddle (that was something in itself: I knew ping pang was a big deal here—this is the character: 乒乓。 Get it?—but the minute I asked my host dad and one of his students where I could buy a paddle, they both jumped up off the couch with excitement and spent maybe ten minutes walking me through how awesome the sport was (I assume) and giving me detailed instructions on every part of the paddle purchase. It was awesome, and really helpful), and tomorrow we’re going to play. And maybe I’ll do the same with some Chinese people at some point.. Plus I’m sort of counting it as a legitimate travel interaction, as opposed to coping out and hanging out with other foreigners, because even though this guy isn’t Chinese he doesn’t speak English much. I’m learning some, though not as much as I would like—hopefully I’ll do better next week, when I’m taking private lessons—and having a pretty good time. Except for Ting Li, listening class, which is really really boring—it consists of us listening to a tape recording of people saying “a”, “o”, “e”, “i”, “u”, “ü”, “ba”, “bo”…… for two hours straight (well, there’s a ten-minute break in the middle, thank goodness). The other classes are all big on interaction between students, or between students and teachers—a pretty good call, I think—but this one has zero. AND the teacher doesn’t even tell us what the words we’re hearing mean, even though about half of them are new. AND despite what I just said, she speaks English more than any of our other teachers. I don’t want to take too much out on her, because she is nice and she does have a more difficult set of material to make interesting, so it’s hard to tell if she’s actually worse than everybody else, but it strikes me that if you ever want a job where you get to feel impressive and accomplished without having done much, you should be a listening teacher for your native language. You just have to read a bunch of really simple words (“moth-er”, “fath-er”, “sis-ter”, “broth-er”) in a teacher accent, then watch and critique as your students screw up this most simple, babyish thing. Anyway.
I haven’t gotten to do that much exploring this week because with two hours of class in the mornings and afternoons and meals at 12.30 and 6 there haven’t been many big chunks of time in which to walk around. I did go back to Green Lake Park yesterday to take pictures, and got some okay ones, which I’ll post in just a sec. Also on that trip I got to witness rush hour here, which was crazy. I figured this is a pretty small city, but it also has fairly small streets, and they were blocked up for a long ways:
I had to wait about five minutes for a break long enough to cross a one-lane road exiting the park. And the rush hour is on foot and bicycle as well as car, so being on the sidewalk doesn’t get you out of it:
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