Complaining

I realize that I'm in China, and I'm very grateful for everything, but there are just a couple things that I have to get off my chest.

First of all there is this insufferable girl that I am sitting next to during all my classes right now (oh cruel fate!) She is sort of a hippie with an identity crisis. For example, yesterday at Chinese Table, she said that she didn't eat meat and ordered all manner of disgusting Chinese vegetables for the rest of us. Then when the food came she ate most of the one beef dish that I had managed to lobby for. The other day, she somehow managed to steer a class conversation about ping pong into an outrageous argument about abortion. Debating this issue in English is hard enough, but in Chinese it becomes sort of surreal. However, what basically emerged from the discussion-- that some of my classmates liked babies and some liked freedom--was eerily similar to the euphemisms spewed from the mouths of many Americans.

Then today, we were talking about schools in America, and my teacher asked me if I thought poor students and rich students had the same opportunities in America. I said definitely not, that poor students often have to have a job during high school, and have a hard time with school. The girl chimed in and said that it didn't matter, as long as your grades were good you could go to any school you wanted...The American Dream. I then invited her, in Chinese, to spend some time in Compton, which seemed to shut her up.

Another thing was that today my teacher had a horrific accent. I could definitely tell that her mangled pronounciations were not orthodox, but I tried to not make a big deal out of it. We got caught up though when she kept correcting my obviously correct pronounciations refusing to budge until i mimicked her. This would be like a Bostonian scolding their student for refusing to "pahk the cah" After a while, the other students were growing restless so I caved in. This marked my second run-in with a teacher in as many days, because yesterday I was genuinely struggling with this one word, and after saying it incorrectly about 50 times I told the teacher "Enough! I will practice on my own". We ended that individual session a little early.

I think I was getting a little impatient, because I was pretty tired. But this afternoon things started looking up, when I found a miracle elixir: Japanese Coffee. Chinese coffee is a pitiful little drink, more water than grounds, and stimulates at best a 15 minute buzz. Japanese coffee on the other hand comes with a little pot of honey, and a lot of love. I'm still riding high on the tsunami of energy that it has awakened in me. I feel like a new man!

Maybe I'm just excited that during Chinese table today I wore my "Singapore is a Fine City" shirt and the entire table spent a good 15 minutes discussing and laughing at its many charms. This, for me, was a dream come true.