Second Week of Language School

• Making Vanderbilt Proud With My Performance
• So far on every exam (we have a 10-minute oral and 30-minute written exam every Friday) I have scored above a 95
• On the first one I actually had so much time left over that I drew a picture of a pirate ship

• • The grading is pretty relaxed though
  • So Mandarin Chinese has 4 tones to distinguish words from each other whereas in English we would just add a syllable with random consonants or something
  • The problem is that for some reason my throat muscles subconsciously turn my second tone into a fourth tone which is a big problem 
  • And then another strange problem I have is that for some reason I think that the falling tone (4th tone) which goes from a high to low tone is only pronounced right when yelling
  • So I’ll just be casually saying a sentence and then if the last syllable has a fourth tone I’ll say something like “wo YAO xihongSHI!)
  • This is especially a problem because the difference in pronunciation between 学习 (to study) (xue2xi2)and 血洗 (to flood a place with blood with the inhabitants of a city) (xue4xi3) is only tones 
  • Luckily this stuff doesn’t happen often for me and Teach for China picked some awesome Chinese teachers to teach us this language so I feel very fortunate to get into this program 
• I have my first ever stalker
• I’m used to Chinese people staring at me because I’ve been here for a month and I’ve learned how to deal with them
• You’ve got to give them the eyes that say, “I will eat your children like the imperialist American I am”
• But now I have the first ever girl who’s doing some pretty strange things
• Like most new Chinese female friends I make I just casually started talking to her while I was studying Chinese (she says she’s 18 but she looks like she’s in middle school)
• She works at the hostel and so we’d see each other just about every day and she’s friends with most of the BLAST fellows too but it’s what she did to me while I was asleep that made me think twice about talking with her again
• One day I came back from work and I was extremely tired so I took a nap
• Well my bed is right near the door and someone left the door open so this girl came in and took a photo of me while I was asleep
• The only reason I found out about it was that she showed me the picture while I was in the hostel restaurant  later that night
• I told her it was very bad and that she shouldn’t do that but she’s backed off a lot since then because I think she found hotter foreigners to stalk
• Experiments in Chinese Music
• So one of the nicest things about being in China is that you can legally download music for free here
• Apparently the record companies must have basically just given up and they’ve given websites the green light to let people download music
• This is so true that even if you go to the Chinese iTunes store you can’t even buy music, you can only buy apps because even iTunes has given up
• So the stalker girl happened to give me a lot of recommendations for Chinese music and they’re not that bad
• Of course it’s music that a 14-year old girl would listen to and after a while it gets kind of old but songs like “Superstar” and “中国话” by S.H.E are actually really good
• The problem is that most Chinese music is so sappy
• The top 100 of Chinese music is filled with so many songs about love, feelings, emotions, and all of that other communist drool
• I think I’m too hooked on American music where something violent or awesome happens
• Droughts suck
• So Kunming (the city I’m in for Teach for China’s language school) is in a severe drought that’s been going on for about a year now and so now the Chinese government has decided to shut down the water supply to the city
• Right now our hotel has no running water except for one spigot that must be shared by 7 floors worth of people for bathing and cleaning needs
• It’s not that bad though, I’m currently on day two of loofah bathing with cold water and it’s definitely do-able 
• Chinese Medicine>Western Medicine
• So I got my first experience of sickness from food in China after eating at a western-style restaurant where I ordered a quesadilla and the bean and chili dip
• So note to anyone out there to avoid eating Mexican food in China
• Plus I think it’s ironic that after all of the street food I’ve eaten in China over the mast month and a half I’ve been fine but when I try to eat the Chinese attempt at Mexican food, that’s the food that makes me sick
• I know it was the Mexican food too because the four people who had the Mexican food at this place (which I won’t name for legal reasons) all got sick
• I packed a lot of peptol-bismol and other medicines but after two days none of them were effective
• So I decided I had nothing left to lose (and I was sick of buying so much toilet paper) so I went to a Chinese pharmacy, told the lady “我拉肚子” and she gave me this tea mixture for me to drink twice a day
• I took one pack of that stuff, put it in hot water, drank it, and in two hours I was significantly better and by the end of the day I was completely fine