Yesterday was a wonderful day. We took breakfast out to Haidian Park, and ate on a rock next to little wetland, and listened to some frogs, and wandered around and saw an amusement park with the most bizarre things ever. {photos} My sister called me on my cell phone and I got to talk to her for a little. We went to the Summer Palace {photos} in the afternoon and rented a pedal boat and pedaled around the lake, and ate chili spiced dried mangoes (from Trader Joe’s in the US, alas, no more of those for a while!) and got steamed buns and an ice cream bar and enjoyed a sunny clear afternoon. In the evening I met with one of my language partners, and learned to say ‘I think China has many strange flavors of yogurt,’ and went over The Tale of Custard the Dragon with her, and she promised to prepare and tell me something about Chinese history next time, and then we went to open mike night at Lush, a bar most popular amongst foreign students studying in Beijing and listened to various covers of the Fugees, Oasis, and Bob Dylan. Not only that, but the night-time vendors were out in force on the sidewalks, with t-shirts of all sorts of messages (my favorite: emblazoned in the largest letters possible to cover the whole front of the shirt, “I AM SO WORTH IT”), and even the puppy-sellers. That’s right, a couple of guys with cardboard boxes full of fuzzy little puppies, which they will hand to you to pet and cuddle, and hopefully purchase. There is no way we can have a dog — couldn’t keep one in the US, couldn’t bring one to the US from here, couldn’t keep one in the hotel room — but damn, they were cute!
Today, though, I am sick. And I am tired. Because I do not understand anything that anyone says, and it is getting old.
I decided I would be proactive, and go out to find lunch on my own, on not street food, because I didn’t want to walk quite as far as the nearest street-with-food that I know of. There are several mall/shopping centers right near where we live. I wandered around, saw one fast food-ish place labeled ‘Kung Fu’ with a big picture of Bruce Lee, but finally settled on a place called ‘le Jazz,’ which had some curries, and a numbered set of meal combos, so I could say “I want 4.” Simple enough.
I took my tray, found a seat, and was shortly approached by a girl, who said something to me. I gave her the genuine clueless white girl face, and she went away. Then came a more authoritative woman who also addressed me, and made an X with her hands, pointing to a sign above.
The only thing I recognized on the sign was a character for ‘section,’ and as far as I can read, it might have said ‘this section for patrons of eatery x,’ or it might have said ‘all martians report to the green sector daily at 2 o’clock,’ but I figure it must have been something along the lines of the former. I moved to sit closer to the origin of my meal.
Next I went to the supermarket, and browsed through the books, which are inside the electronics department. I know that for electronic items, you have to pay for them on the way out, so I took the children’s book I selected to the counter. They pointed me to a different counter. At that counter, the girl told me several times before I realized she didn’t want to ring up my book, it was a cheap commodity and didn’t fall under the same rules as electronics. Guess I could have figured that out, but I assume there are more rules and regulations here than would be logical.
I chose my groceries, and went to the checkout line. I handed the girl my reusable tote bag, she put things into it, I took out a large jug of juice, intending to carry it separately, as it is heavy. After I did that, she put everything else into a pair of plastic bags. And one for the juice. And I have no idea how to say, ‘Please, put everything into this bag.’
So I took my groceries home, and got to the room just as the housekeepers were leaving. They smiled in a friendly way, and said they were just finishing. Or maybe they said, ‘Welcome, Western imperialist, to your room.’ Perhaps they quoted Shakespeare in translation, or said, ‘hey, you’re the girl that broke the light!’ I wouldn’t know. I smiled back in a friendly way, closed the door behind them, put away the groceries, lay down on the bed, and cried for a while, out of sheer frustration.
It’s not that I’m not learning, because I am, it’s just that I haven’t learned enough yet. Hence the book I got — I flipped through the children’s books until I hit on the level when they are written with pinyin above the characters — whether to help the kids learn pinyin or learn characters, I don’t know. But hopefully it will be helpful for me to learn the words and the characters. The book is helpfully labeled in latin letters on the front cover ‘BBZXHDYZMY.’ Inside, it has 150 verses, three or four lines long. I’m not sure if they are actually poems — some of them follow the rhyming pattern aaba, some aaaa, some abcb, some seem to have no rhyme at all. Each one has an illustration — a chef chopping onions and crying, a puffed up bullfrong on a lilypad, a caveman roasting a hock of ham on a fire, an elephant listening to a boombox with headphones, a grandmother reading a story to two children — and promises interesting vocabulary.
Oh yes, also on the frustrating side — blogspot seems to have joined livejournal on the list of inaccessible domain names through the Great Firewall of China. But to put up posts, I actually navigate through blogger.com, which still loads. I’m sure this has little to nothing to do with my blog in particular, and everything to do with the general governmental frown on too much free sharing of information, which blogs do quite a bit to promote.
