Week 3: C

CENSORSHIP and CAMERA (broken): A shattered camera and blocked websites delayed my start on this blog, but now that I've found a proxy server to circumvent the firewalls and I purchased a new camera (at a huge subterranean Walmart, no less), I should be catching up soon.

CHINA: Happy birthday, China! October 1 was its 60th birthday.

CHINESE: Did no one warn me that they speak Chinese in China? What an impossible language! It is very humbling not only not being able to say anything but also not being able to read or write anything. It takes all of our resources just to do the simplest things. For example, to catch a bus for our day trip the other day, we had to have someone text us the Chinese characters so that we could show a taxi driver where we needed to go. I wasn't sure what the text said, so I had to forward it to a friend who had to call me with the translation. The taxi driver, after much grumbling and pulling out his reading glasses to read our text message, delivered us to the right general area, but we couldn't quite locate the bus. I called our contact but her English wasn't good enough to tell us where to go (and our Chinese is pathetic), so we had to hand the phone over to a man standing near us and he told her where we were. She came and retrieved us like lost lambs. And tonight for dinner we tried to order on our own, but eventually had to call one of our colleagues and have him order for us. First, we had to ask him what the waitress thought we had ordered, then we had to have him clear up our mess. The three of us at dinner hold a total of eight degrees. Did I mention that Chinese was humbling?

CHOPSTICKS: The Chinese teachers in my office were laughing the other day because they said that only the foreign teachers use chopsticks. I looked up from my intense study of rice falling between the chopsticks to see that one of them was using a fork and two were using spoons--slackers. One good thing to know: Never stick chopsticks straight down into food. It looks like incense at a funeral and represents death.

CHEAP: Some things, especially the food, are really, really cheap here. My roommate bought enough CLAMS for five people and it cost under a dollar. Our full meal at a pretty fancy restaurant tonight cost 65 Yuan, that's about $3 a person. If only I were capable of ordering my own food, I would definitely eat out more often.

CARNIVAL RIDES at Xian Park.