FAQ: Michelle, how is your Chinese?

We've been in China now about 10 months, and I've been studying Mandarin for about 7 of those. Here's a check-in


Remember this sign? It's for the foot massage place that is a 30 second elevator ride from our front door. Here was my assessment last March after about a month of study:

"Let me translate the top row of characters of the sign for you - "something, ren, lin, zhong, something something something zu something". Another step, again, character by character - "something, people, forest, middle(i think), something something something foot something"

Now, in November, starting with the dark green sign on the top, character by character:

still don't know, ren, lin, zhong, yi, know it but forgot it, jian, zu, liao
something, people, forest, chinese, medicine, still haven't remembered it, health, foot, therapy/cure

And finally in full-on English, we're starting to get somewhere:
Something, people, forest - My live-in Chinese translator says this is a name, so it will never make sense.
Continuing on: Chinese medicine health foot treatment


Bottom green sign: (Oh feeling pretty good about this one.)
1st line: Zhong, yi, jian, fei, bu,forgot, don't know mian, fei, ti, yan, yi (easy), ci
Chinese, medicine, lose, fat, not, don't know, don't know exempt, cost, experience for oneself, one, time

You can probably guess the English (I'm guessing a little bit myself here and looked up a word):
Chinese medicine weight loss does not come back. Try it free once.

2nd line: er, shi, si, xiao, shi, nei, jian, don't know wu, don't know, tui, haven't learned it yet
2, 10, 4 (24), xiao shi is hour, within, see, don't know No, give back
And finally, the translated English: Within 24 hours, see results. No results, money back.

And to the right of the door:
mei (duh - it's part of my name, and the word for America), jia
beautiful, add (although translator has clarified that this is actually an abbreviation for fingernails).
So we have "Beautiful Nails 25"

So my translation isn't quite right (or the sign is wrong) because I think it says try the weight loss treatment once for free and if it doesn't work within 24 hours, get your money back. But that doesn't make sense and I have too much pride to ask my personal translator for clarification right now so I'll just have to keep studying.

In the end - It's a little rough but essentially we not only have a foot massage place next door, but they guarantee their miracle weight loss treatment. And I can get my nails done for under $4. The things one learns when one learns to read.

Snow Aftermath

In preparation for this week's upcoming artificially induced snow event (scheduled for Tuesday), thought I'd post a couple pics of the aftermath from last week (also artificially induced):

November 1

Judging by the green leaves still on the trees, someone forgot to tell Winter that Fall isn't finished yet...

Morning Exercise

Tennis guy, daily, 7:40 a.m. sharp

Only in China

Maybe you're distracted by the glimpse of a (rare) blue sky in Beijing, and you can't see the orange specks dangling off the side of the 20-story building:


By individual ropes:




The rope, from my close-up observation:


That seems slightly frayed:



Bi-annual window washing.

月饼 Yuebing

It's Mid-Autumn Festival time - (zhong qiu jie - 中秋节) - the harvest festival. The moon is supposed to be at its fullest this time of year, and thanks to Chinese weather modification for the recent PRC 60th Anniversary, the sky is clear and blue, which means we might actually be able to see the moon (it doesn't happen often).

中秋节 is one of only a few major holidays in China and most of the country has a week off from school and work. 200 million people are expected to be traveling over the next week to vacation and visit family and to eat mooncakes.


We don't expect to receive many mooncakes this year.


If anything, we should be giving the things to other people because that's what you do in this season - give piles and piles of mooncakes to bosses and teachers and people you want to impress. The more expensive, the better.

But we're foreigners, so we're exempt from some of these traditional guanxi building activities. And besides - we're way too late in the season to get our hands on any of those Haagen Daz ice cream mooncakes, as one must get one's order in months ahead of time.


Mooncakes are kind of pretty.


And they are traditionally filled with red bean paste, or lotus paste, or some other paste-y substance, sometimes with a salted duck egg in the middle. Because you know - it looks like the full moon.


The thing is - apart from the giving and the sharing and the general good feeling mooncakes impart, I have yet to meet a Chinese person who likes to eat them.

Except, of course, for the Haagen Daz ones. Which are basically overpriced ice cream sandwiches and my high school language partner argues that they aren't really mooncakes in the first place. She doesn't like mooncakes either.

Running attack

More in the odd Beijing adventures department -

Long story short - a few months ago Andrew, Peng, et al. entered a running competition at our gym on a whim. As in run on a treadmill, those with the best times in all of China get a trip to Singapore to compete in the all-Asia competition.

With a little sweat and a lot of luck, they made it to the China finals.

Peng, Andrew, and team at the finals on Sunday, 8 a.m. :



Teams of runners came from all over China to compete in Beijing. The bad news: no trip to Singapore. The good news: they didn't come in last.

Guanxi. 关系.

Andrew has dived back into Beijing a little quicker than I over the past week. We arrived, after a total travel time of about 23 hours (Indiana to San Francisco, San Francisco to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Beijing) on a Tuesday. With jetlag. And zero intention of re-entering our chinese life until the weekend. The plan, basically, was to collapse. And unpack later.

But on Thursday, around 8 p.m., Andrew got a phone call. From the Director. About being in the Talent Show. At the Academy. On Friday. At 8 a.m.

Let's face it. He didn't want to go. Jetlag can be brutal and after a month of living out of a suitcase, sometimes it's nice to just curl up in your apartment and let the world move on without you for a little while. Skipping that to be in a talent show? Like someone doing cartwheels and singing God Bless America while twirling a baton? At work? Seriously?

Well. There's a little something important to know about living, working, operating in China - 关系。Guanxi. Relationships. It's a good thing to have. Being able to speak the language is helpful and all. But you're not going anywhere if you can speak the language and can't get the guanxi going.

Andrew has a pretty good handle on the language part. And quite frankly, a fair bit of the guanxi part. But it's just not a thing that you collect and move on. Guanxi is high maintenance. Especially when you're a Ph.D. student and visiting researcher whose data collection involves interviewing and sitting in on meetings and tagging along on projects and generally a lot of good will and generosity of busy working professional planners.

So when the Director who is hosting your research fellowship in his International Urban Planning Research Studio at the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design calls you at 8 p.m. at night and wants you to come in early the next morning in order to play back-up for your co-workers who, in your absence, have been practicing for weeks their live performance of Claptons' "Tears in Heaven" - well - for the sake of guanxi - you say yes.

In celebration of the upcoming 60th Anniversary of the PRC and also the 55th Anniversary of the Academy, each department and then some at the Academy had an act. An entire day devoted to 26 acts ranging from Flamenco dancing to choir singing to Bollywood lipsynching to patriotic military marching. And one particularly moving rendition of "Tears in Heaven" with one jet-lagged foreigner strumming along in the background.

Back to business

We're back. Back in China. Back at school. Back at work. Back on-line (at least for now). More to come.

Blue skies

There's no shortage of these types of pictures from China, but here's our view, looking toward the subway, both taken in the afternoon.

No, it's not fog. And it's not raining. You know. It's just the air.


But it does clear up from time to time:

In case you were wondering

What things look like on this end:


It's surprising, really, how often the servers here seem to unexpectedly drop connections for some websites.

After maneuvers:

Beijing Summer

I know - It's been a while, there's some catching up to do, all in good time. China is carrying on, as it does. Know that it's in the 100 degree range (upper 30's and even 40 for anyone following the world dominant Celsius scale) for most of this week and next week here in Beijing. This is officially the first time in my life that I've considered turning on the A/C. That's mostly because, living in China, it's actually the first time I've lived in a place with A/C available:



Yeah, well, our parents tortured us growing up, and then promptly bought an air conditioner the year after I moved out. And there was this attempt by roommates to air condition that giant somewhat dubiously (il)legal loft in Chicago, but let's face it - a wooden floor that you can sometimes see through to the business below combined with giant, leaky, south facing windows makes the idea of "cooling" more of a placebo effect. We had A/C to make us think it seemed cooler. But really. It wasn't.

So - I'm thinking about it. But check out the only way to turn the thing on, the remote:



We've run into another washing machine moment.

Would you believe I've been studying Chinese since February and I still only know 3 words on this remote: 开（on), 关(off), and 睡眠(sleeping). There is progress though - there are actually a couple more characters here and there that I know, and I am now a virtual professional at looking up characters (on my cell phone...). But even with all of that, it doesn't make sense. So, I will likely be reduced to haphazardly pushing buttons until something happens. Stay tuned - it's a scorcher this week in Beijing...

Annoying, more than anything

In case you haven't heard, these are sensitive days for insecure regimes. Blogspot is blocked in China, so am testing some alternatives. Some work, some don't. Stay tuned.

April

Life is rolling on here in China. April has come and gone in a flash. It seems that at the beginning of the month we were preparing for a visit from Anne, she came, she went, and *poof*. It's May. I'll start with the present and work backwards:

It's officially Spring/moving into Summer.  It's hard to tell the difference really.  But lots of flowers everywhere, the weather is mostly warm, and we've had a bit of rain.  

Andrew and I have recently determined that I have a bona fide addiction to spicy food, somewhat perplexing given my Midwestern background of meat and potatoes (and I mean, like, once in a while we would eat chicken or a pork chop for variety. or spaghetti with meat sauce.) And believe me, it's not that I've lost my love for mashed potatoes.  But I dreamed of Mapo Doufu last night.  (Homemade version below.)
 

It's not MSG that does it I think, since I don't cook with it at home (and we ask to have it left out at restaurants, but who really knows). I think it's Sichuan peppercorns, which are not so much outright spicy as numbing.   and addicting.
       
Continuing back in time - I'm on the mend from a cold I had this week. Despite that fact that I probably chop about 8 cloves of garlic for every meal we make here at home, can't remember the last time I cooked without ginger, drink green and ginger tea like it's water, take a Vitamin C pill just for placebo piece of mind, and wash hands like a crazy woman, I still got sick.  Ug.  I will note that dearest Andrew did not catch aforementioned cold.  

So I missed a few classes this week, but luckily made it on Thursday, which was learn more about the menu day. That means I'm finally starting to decipher a little more on the average chinese menu, beyond 水(water) and 米饭(rice).  I can, at this juncture, successfully catch the attention of a server (no small task in China), ask for a menu and for the bill.  I'm soon hoping to move beyond just pointing at said menu and saying 这个 (this) (picture menus, by the way, are ubiquitous here. and genius.)

Before the cold, Anne was here. Anne as in we've-known-each-other-for-something-like-25-years Anne. We've spent thousands of hours on the phone (most of which a. were probably 4th through 8th grade and b. drove our respective parents crazy), and to this day

I can hum the tune that her home phone number makes when I dial it (well - her parents' number now I guess). With all of those days spent randomly wandering the mall in Fort Wayne, who knew someday we'd do the same at the Forbidden City? Or the Great Wall?

Anne came, we saw, she conquered. I had been saving up the Beijing tourist circuit for when she arrived. Save for the Beijing Tap Water Museum (which is at the very top of my list of must-do soon), we saw it all. I actually had an exam right after she came, so Anne ventured off on her own while I was in class, brave soul.  All in all, I got to practice a bit of Chinese and she got to become the Valparaiso Public Library System Expert on China (Anne is a librarian by trade, and manages one of the branches.)  There were a few adventures involving long subway rides, a curling iron, bargaining for various souvenirs, foot massage, and climbing lots and lots of stairs. Fun was had by all.

Before Anne's visit is really digging deep.  And likely uneventful.  Just a couple pics from the visit:

(maybe you can't see the sign - "Look out Knock head"

Visitor Explained

That unexpected visitor was our landlord. This is the first we've seen of her. She's in town for a few days on a business trip and wanted to check in - she works for one of the big national banks and is based in western China. Mainly she wanted to chat about her son, who will soon graduate from college and wants to go study in America or England. So we chatted all about U.S. colleges and majors and the application process. This is the sort of conversation I have had many, many times because so many Chinese parents are trying to figure out how to get their son or daughter into graduate school overseas or, more generally, to arrange his or her life after college.

Anyway, it looks like our landlord is now eager to be friends with us. We are being taken out to dinner tomorrow night and we have an invitation to visit the beautiful province of Ningxia.

A visitor

We have a visitor tonight. Someone knocked on our door - a couple of times - and since I don't generally answer the door in this country, I left it up to Andrew. He answered, they talked for a minute, and then he invited her in and offered her some water. And they've been talking ever since. I thought my Chinese was coming along pretty well until now, where for the last 45 minutes, I've been listening to a conversation and I have no idea what's going on. And I still don't know who she is, but I trust Andrew on this one.

My version of their conversation goes something like this - she likes something, Andrew says America is something, she says something about China and America in the same sentence, there's talk of school, and they both think things, and then some of those things are not bad and ok - wo xihuan, Mei guo, Zhong guo, xuexiao, wo juede, renhou, bucuo, ke yi - "I like, America, China, school, I think, and then, not bad, ok" - with a few pronouns thrown in for good measure.

Spy photos:

Something Foot Something

So I have learned that one of the most maddening things about learning Chinese characters is the subsequent forgetting of Chinese characters. 

For class everyday I am memorizing (or trying to) 20 or so new characters. If you do the math, so far that comes out to lots. Which of course is a relative term – lots compared to what I came with, but nothing compared to the number of characters required to, say, read a newspaper.

But no matter the method of study, I have learned the inevitable is this:  everyday I am confronted with a sign, an advertisement, a magazine, anything really - that has at least one (usually more) character that I recognize, that I know I’ve learned, but also then realize, I know that I have forgotten. It’s one thing not to know the characters in the first place, but to learn the things and then forget?  It's enough to drive a person bonkers.

On the brighter side, when I can remember, the world is starting to (slowly) reveal itself to me.  Here's a picture of a little shop right next to our building:

Let me translate the top row of characters of the sign for you - "something, ren, lin, zhong, something something something zu something".  Another step, again, character by character - "something, people, forest, middle(i think), something something something foot something".  I have no idea what it all means, even though it is helpfully translated into Korean at the bottom.  And yes, I can read the English on the door.  But somehow I think there's more to the sign than the English gets across here, don't you think?    

 

Signs of Spring

Every morning at 7:30 a.m. sharp, the tennis guy is out practicing his swing:

Large organized groups of young'uns practicing parkour moves (for hours on end):

Blossoms:

A couple of notes -

A brief hiatus, but am back.  A quick evening round-up, more to come:

1.  My brackets are suffering.  For something like 10 years now, dad and I fill out the NCAA brackets and compare.  Winner gets a steak dinner.  Easy, simple, and let's be honest - I generally win.  But the first round Purdue win and the recent Duke loss - well - let's just say that Dad will have to come to China to get his steak.  And by steak in China, I probably mean something more like pork dumplings.      

2.  Andrew and I had a double date tonight with our local foot massage place and foot masseuses.  And by "local" I mean approximately a 45 second walk from our apartment, depending on how long the elevator takes.  And by foot masseuses, I mean two young guys in their mid-20's that found places on my feet I didn't know I had.   60 minutes includes shoulder and feet.  Just over $10 total.  For both of us.   

3.  It's a good thing we're living in China because I'm now craving Chinese food for every meal.  As in spicy Chinese food, which quite the change from the meat and potatoes of my youth.  I haven't done the research (yet), but Sichuan peppercorns have to be some sort of illegal-ish drug.  After learning in class last weekend, I made some mad hot Mapo Doufu at home this week and can't stop thinking about it...

Field Trip

I spent most of last week out of town in a small city (pop. 120,000) southeast of Beijing. I was with a team of urban planners working on a new detailed plan for the city government, and we spent a couple days walking all around the city checking out existing land uses. Among the interesting things I saw was a government compound with these characters painted on the wall on either side of the entrance. The compound houses the offices of the city's Salt Administration. The salt administration must have been one of the many government offices that was quite active once upon a time in the era of the planned economy. Nowadays, I don't think all that much happens inside these walls -- and yet, it still exists and it still employs a staff. For my class on reform-era China last year I read a book about how some of these old government bureaus are transforming themselves into private sector businesses -- housing departments becoming real estate developers, etc. I'm not sure if any of the salt admin. people are now getting into the salt-for-profit business.

Oh, I almost forgot. The characters say, "Strengthen Salt Administration Supervision. Provide Up-to-Standard Iodine Salt."  I suppose I could think of a more elegant translation, but I think these government slogans are more powerful in the original Chinese.

Notes on some basics.

(First a quick note that's now way out of date but in case you were wondering, we successfully picked up the package from what is apparently the one post office in our district that receives international packages -- that's a lot better than having just one such post office in all of Beijing, but this district is still pretty big.)

Last time I checked, energy consumption per capita in China was about one sixth that of the U.S. In spite of all the new, highly-visible consumption in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, Chinese people are still used to living without certain comforts that I think westerners take for granted. Although Michelle and I pay for electricity and heat in our little apartment, all of the common spaces in the building are cold, dark, and pretty much undecorated -- I think that until you get used to that as the norm for city apartment buildings, the general indoor atmosphere can make you feel a bit depressed.

I think Chinese urban residents are more much accustomed than we are to the lack of heat in indoor spaces. Many university classroom buildings are unheated, and students just keep their coats on. The office building where I work has a cafeteria in the basement that is unheated, so in the winter the staff just bundle up when it's time for lunch. Same thing with the restaurant down the street where we go as an alternative to the cafeteria.

Gas and electricity in our apartment is on a pre-pay system. Our apartment came with two cards--an electricity card and a gas card. When we first arrived, we took the electricity card to the nearest State Electricity Grid office and handed card and cash to an employee sitting behind a glass screen as in a bank. She credited a certain number of kilowatt hours to our card according to the amount we paid, and we transfered those kwh's by inserting the card into the meter on our hallway. The gas card works in a similar way. We took it to a nearby bank, inserted it into an ATM-like machine along with cash, and our card gets credited for a certain number of cubic meters of gas. Does the pre-pay system make us conserve more energy?

(Btw, we are once again thankful to my friend Peng who helped us find the State Electricity Grid office and the bank for purchasing gas -- without his help it would have surely taken us much longer to figure out where to go.)

Last week we had a knock on the door and a lady calling, "Cha shui biao! - Water meter inspection!" The friendly meter inspector explained that our water meter is checked once very two months, water is currently 3.7 yuan (about 54 cents) per ton. We don't know how much water we used yet because we ended up picking up a bit of the tab for whoever lived here in January before we arrived. In any case, I handed cash to the lady who gave me change out of her purse and then made out a hand-written receipt. The whole system seemed a bit informal and unofficial, but but at least she finished the hand-written receipt with the official red seal of the Beijing Tap Water Co., Ltd. In China, you always need the official seal.

Lì

My grandma search continues.  There are lots around.  Generally pretty small, and a little hunched over, they almost always walk in groups of two or three and are either carrying a bag of veggies or have their hands clasped behind their backs.  In the picture, there are two in the foreground, and a whole other group walking in the distance.      

Andrew says to be patient.  So in the meantime - I have found a vegetable friend.  It’s the lady in the basement.

In one example of the mixed use that you can have in China but not in the U.S., or perhaps just a successful example of a live/work unit, is the existence of a tiny vegetable market in the basement of our building. It’s right next to the extensive bike storage area, and what could be better than rolling into the vegetable market in your pajamas for a little morning ginger run?  

The lady who runs the market doesn’t know it yet, but we are becoming friends. She’s teaching me about money, for example. As in, I hand her my cabbage and celery, and she says “er dian si” and I stare at her blankly for a couple of seconds while I count on my fingers until I recognize the numbers she just said to me. And then generally I just hand her a few kuai (a few bucks if you will) because it’s taking me too long to figure out what she said, and then she gives me the change. It’s magic really.  Friendship blossoming.  

In news of my language blossoming though - well, this week I think I actually understood my first sentence.  Wait. Let me clarify. I think I understood my first sentence that was a) not spoken by my language teacher and b) not taught to me by Andrew or Peng (our good friend and date for Valentine’s Day). It was nothing dramatic. Yi ge mi fan. From the waitress (fuwuyuan) at the campus eatery. Do you want rice? Dui, I said. Yes. 

!!!!!

Now – that may not seem like much. And it’s not. And I’ve probably actually heard it approximately 1.3 trillion times since getting here. But this time I know what I heard!  And I responded as if I could actually speak Chinese.  Of course Andrew reminded me, as I was recounting my breakthrough to him later, that if I was really good, I would have ordered rice with my meal and she wouldn't have had to ask.    

Nonetheless - this week I had my first exam - so now I can read, write, and almost say exactly 50 characters (which doesn't, by the way, count my own name.  But I still don't really recognize that and I can't write it either).  My tones are rough at best and a whole sentence such as "I like to drink tea" is slo-o-o-w going.  But I have learned such important words as 力 and 立 which are, respectively, "lì" (lee, strength) and "lì" (lee, stand).  Same tone (4th - down). See how easy that is?  Two different characters, exact same word and sound, two completely different meanings.  Great.  I looked in my dictionary, and there are no less than 42 more.  As in same pronunciation, same tone, different characters.  My brain hurts just thinking about it.

But to end on a happy note - I am taken with the poetic logic of characters and their meaning.  My favorite today is 日(sun) and 月(moon), when combined 明 mean "bright".  Of course.   

Package this.

It's been twelve years since I first came to Beijing, and, yes yes, this place has changed a lot, but certain aspects of the city retain their sense of mystery. For example, the mail.

China Post lost a big envelope of documents I sent express from California late last year, but the good news is that we received our first package at our new Beijing apartment and it's nice to know all postal systems are up and running smoothly.

If only.

On Saturday, a guy knocked on our door to tell we had a package arrive for us from the U.S. I thought, "Great." He then proceeded to have me sign a slip of paper and write down my passport number. Now, I'm generally used to signing for something, but the guy at the door had only the paperwork. He told me we had to go pick up the package at the post office. Well, that's no problem, seeing as how there's a post office right in our little housing complex. But, actually, the guy said, we had to go to the bigger post office farther down the street.

When we arrived at the bigger post office farther down the street, a uniformed staff at the information counter took us to the "Get Bag" counter. But the staff behind the "Get Bag" counter said they don't handle international packages and we had to go to a different post office on North Third Ring Road and didn't I see the Chinese characters in stamped red ink on the back of the slip that said I had to go to the Beitaipingzhuang office? I hadn't even thought to look at those characters because the guy who came to our door said we had to go the post office down the street and I thought that was good enough. By this point it was becoming less clear whether that guy worked for the post office, the building management company, or neither, because he wasn't in any kind of uniform, but either way, he apparently had me sign a slip of paper that says I have received a package that is currently being held at some post office 15 minutes away by taxi, depending on the traffic. At this point, we were quite satisfied with package-retrieval work for the day, and so we decided to postpone our trip to Beitaipingzhuang for later in the week.

Thanks, Avril for the Whoppers, Red Vines, etc. Maybe we'll see them soon. In the meantime, think about this: in a megalopolis of 14 million people, is there really just one post office that distributes all international packages? Mystery indeed.

It takes a village

Or at least a small army of people - to clear snow in Beijing.  Not that it snowed all that much.  Or that in reality Beijing has received approximately zero centimeters of natural precipitation since late October (cloud seeding is a frequently used art here).  But there was no fewer than 15 people clearing snow in the little open space area in our complex.  And another new thing that one sees everywhere when walking to school -  clearing snow with a broom.

Our Spicy Valentine's Day

Our date

Our dinner

Step 1: Season the Wok

I haven’t managed to get myself adopted by a Chinese grandma (yet). So I signed up for a cooking class instead. Last Thursday was my first day. And until last Thursday, I thought I had a pretty good handle on what it meant to “stir-fry” something. Right.

First off, I got a little lost. It was my first real trip out sans translator/husband. And that’s fine. I’m a strong independent woman and all that. But it turns out that I can’t really read street signs yet. Luckily my phone works now and we bought a little compass in Hong Kong, so between heading in the general right direction and calling my cooking teacher a few times, I made it (although a little late).

Cooking class was great.

We started with a market tour to buy our ingredients for the day. I learned about cabbages and lotus root and which green beans are in season now, how to pick good Sichuan peppercorns and the difference between the in-house tofu and where to get a softer kind. Duck eggs versus chicken eggs versus quail eggs and finally what all those grannies are looking for when they pick up a handful of rice at the supermarket and inspect it while letting it run through their fingers.

Then, back at the hutong, wok and cleaver class. Have you seen the cleavers? They're huge and used for everything from peeling ginger to dicing cabbage. I have yet to get my own, but soon enough – I know now what to look for in a good one. I’ve also learned round-bottom woks are the best, and are nearly impossible to find in the average department store nowadays (at least in Beijing).

It was a class of three people on my first day, and we learned and cooked and ate as we went. Thursday was Dry Fry day - dry-fry green beans, dry-fry chicken, steamed pork ribs, and blanched vegetable.

Day Two was Seasoning Class and more cooking and eating. Vinegars and soy sauces and rice wines. I never knew how much I didn’t know. It was also braising day, so I got to add four more dishes to my repertoire.

Day Three – Dumpling and Noodle class. Now- I learned to fold dumplings over the New Year’s festival, but what I wanted was the dough and filling part. Which I got. Great.

I’ve been testing everything at home on Andrew of course. Noodles and dry-fried greens beans and jiachang doufu – he eats it all, but then again, the boy rarely refuses food. So who can say how it's turning out - the real test will be cooking for our chinese friends. I think I need more practice first though.

At any rate – I’ll be taking a few more cooking classes, but not until March. In the meantime - language classes start on Wednesday (finally).

On the Andrew front – he started his post at the China Academy of Urban Planning & Design. So far, so good.  He commutes by bus in Beijing rush hour traffic and is still searching for the best route (i.e. less than 1.5 hrs and greater than 1.5 sq. cm of personal space).           

白美秋

I got named yesterday.  In some cultures, naming involves ceremonies, celebrations, at the very least usually a parent might peruse a baby name book or try out grandpa's middle name or something. 

We were at school registration.  The form asked for my name, and then for my Chinese name.  Which of course I didn't have yet because how do you just pick a name for yourself in a language you don't know?  And Andrew has been insisting (rightly I think), that my Chinese name should come from a Chinese person.

So the registration guy (about our age, and Chinese), asks what my name is, asks Andrew what his Chinese name is, looks at me for a second, and then just fills out the form.

Bai Mei Qiu

The whole process was a little unromantic I suppose.  But he was a very helpful registration guy (another post topic sometime: how many passport photos and different stamped papers does one really need to be admitted to language school?)

It means Beautiful Autumn.  And it's fitting, no?  Beautiful Autumn?  Autumn is harvest time - arguably my favorite time of year.  Of course, he mostly just chose it because it sort of sounds like my real name.  But that's fine.  It's pronounced "Buy May Chyo" (um - second, third, first if you know your tones).

Wait - small correction.  It's actually (literally), "White Beautiful Autumn"  White (Bai) is the surname, and also happens to be Andrew's last name in Chinese.  Amusing, no?  That I go to China and now I take his name?