China Moments and Communication

As of the time I am writing this, I have been in my apartment now for a week (by the time this is posted, it will have been over a week). With no job yet to do and with many of the people I know here not currently in Beijing, it's been a rather quiet and sometimes lonely week. I've bought some things for the apartment, wandered around the area, slept a lot, finished the book I was reading as well as the season of west wing i was watching, and worked on learning Chinese vocab for two hours everyday. The one thing I have not done a lot of has been talking to people. (This is not inherently a bad thing, just an observation). I've talked briefly to any number of service people at restaurants and stores and had two longer conversations with workers at two of those restaurants. (at one, a young guy who was making the 串儿, or meat sticks, tried to sell me one made of some animal's kidney. thankfully, even though i didnt know how to say kidney - its 腰 in case you ever need to know - I didn't take him up on the offer). I've also texted and im-ed pretty often, and two nights ago, I had a rather long phone conversation with Camille (a high school friend currently in Southern China).

Otherwise, the one major exception to my week of "silence" was last Saturday when I met up with Jason (friend from college in Beijing for the week for job training). We picked a random restaurant near the drum tower and ordered what we knew to be way too much food, but we were both really hungry. Last year during my study abroad program, a bunch of us noted the alarming frequency with which things in China turned out drastically different than we expected. The end result could be good or bad and was obviously due to the language and cultural barrier, but we termed these instances "China moments." (I may have not remembered our exact phrase for them but close enough). My number of "china moments" seems to, so far, be drastically fewer this time around, but Jason and I definitely had one at dinner, possibly as a throwback to last year. One of the dishes we ordered was 饺子or dumplings, and they didn't arrive until much later than the rest of the food, so we thought they had been forgotten, which we were quite ok with considering the quantity of food we had ordered. But when they did arrive, they arrived in such large quantities that we almost fell over in our seats.

Jason: I'm sorry, we only ordered "yi liang" (the term usually given for a set of dumplings)Server: Oh, we don't count in "liang" we count in 斤 (term for 500g).
Jason/Jen: Oh!

We had ordered half a kilogram of dumplings! This would have been great, especially since the dumplings were so good, if we hadn't ordered 3 other dishes as well. Thankfully, we were able to unload much of our 500 g on three French guys who showed up at the restaurant shortly afterwards in need of translation help.

Thankfully, today I met one of the other teachers and my next door neighbor who had moved in the day before. In him, I get to see an exaggerated version of what I must have felt/looked like when I landed in Beijing for the first time a year a half ago (thankfully I had such a good support system then in the form of the program administrators and friends who spoke much better Chinese than I did). He's taken a year of Chinese but it was a conversational class, so he recognizes very few characters. I had forgotten what it felt like to look at a Chinese menu w/o pictures for the first time. Even with pictures, it is quite a daunting task, especially with the server standing at your table waiting for you to order. So I now have someone else to talk to, and I helped him order lunch and buy a cell phone. The other teachers should be arriving soon, and classes start on Monday, so things should pick up.