wow! i speak chinese?!

so.  chinese classes.  pretty much worthless.  tuesday was the first day and they pretty much spent the whole 4 hours learning pronunciations and reading the 拼音, so about 3/4 of the way through i decided it would be ok if i stopped pretending to pay attention.  so nick, who spent 2 years in beijing and speaks and reads chinese really well, and i started watching meet the robinsons on my computer.  I gave him my headphones so it wasn't as rude on my part and looked up every now and then to see what was going on, but i still felt a little bit dastardly.  

the history and culture lesson in the afternoon was really boring, as before.  we started watching this really ridiculous movie; it's called the last emperor and is a movie with all chinese people, but made by americans, i think, and everyone is speaking accented english.  i don't even know how to explain it, it's just ridiculous.  so at one point, the boy emperor is like 8 and still has a wet nurse and there's just this scene where he's nursing and his brother is sitting nearby eating normal food...  like i said, ridiculous movie.

so wednesday i spoke to the chinese teacher in chinese because we were doing names and stuff and she wanted to know how to write mine.  so she realized that i spoke chinese and the lessons were really worthless.  so she said it was absolutely fine if we just watched movies in the back.  so after finishing meet the robinsons, we started watching this chinese TV show my mom had copied onto my computer a few years ago, 奋斗. at one point the teacher was walking around and she recognized the show!
side note: thank goodness this thing saves like every 5 seconds automatically.
so anyway, later in class they were learning about introducing themselves and each other to other people, so the teacher calls out to me in chinese, "yueyang, are you watching the first episode of 奋斗?  can you show the part to the class where they're introducing each other?"  so then i turned my laptop around and everyone watched a little bit of the show.  a little bit awkward since i had one headphone in and i didn't know if she had been saying my name multiple times and i hadn't heard her or not.


so for lunch we went to five guys, which i'd never been to before but had been told it was good.  the burger was pretty good, but incredibly greasy.  i think the best part was that you can add whatever toppings you want and they're all free.


and then the history lesson.  so for the first hour or two we finished the movie from tuesday.  then they gave us this ginormous packet to read about forming the republic of china or whatever.  incredibly boring and dry.  they expected us to read all of it in like an hour and then come back and discuss it.  i was definitely drifting in and out of sleep during the whole thing and even the parts that i did read, i didn't absorb any of it.  i'm pretty sure i didn't get anything out of reading that thing.  we ended up spending maybe 1.5-2 hours on it and getting only like 80% through.  so we had to save the discussion for today.


so a group of us went to dinner at noodles and co. definitely better than my first experience, but still not that good.  we sat there and talked for about an hour or so afterwards and then met up with some other people in the program and headed to a bar.  we got some nasty beer and sat in the really loud bar for a couple hours just talking, mostly just listening on my part; some people just like to hear themselves talk...


so this morning in chinese i was being a good student and not watching movies.  i tried helping people with their pronunciations and their exercises, which was introducing themselves, saying where they're from, what they study, any hobbies, etc.  and i did the exercise too and after i said everything, there was just silence and people looking at me, like, 'way to show us all up.'  and then later the teacher had me and nick go to the front and give an example of how to introduce other people and what not.  and the class made me do the head bobbing thing with the different tones and speak really slowly and loudly. ha that was fun...


oh, and at one point during the lesson, they're were all following along with the teacher and she was trying to call on one student, but most of them don't really know their chinese names, so all of the students just kept following along.  haha.


oh! and i downloaded ppstream which is amazing and lets you watch like everything.  so during one of the breaks, some of the kids came over and we started watching kung fu hustle; which is a great movie if you haven't seen it.  and if you watch the scenes on youtube, they even have english subtitles, but i don't know if the whole movie is on there.  then nick and i continued watching it through the rest of chinese class and even later into the history lesson.  but without headphones so as to be unobtrusive, so we had to read the characters super fast and there was this one part where i couldn't stop laughing so i'm just sitting in my chair trying not to make any noises and just shaking with laughter.  but i don't think the teacher noticed, so it's all good.


history and culture lesson was boring as usual.  did a really worthless discussion about the chapter we 'read,' and talked about socialism and communism.  listened to the lady continue reading from her notes in a boring voice. then we watched/slept through this american world war ii propaganda video about china and how it's an underdeveloped country full of peasants who need help to fight the japanese, etc.  then they sent us off to make propaganda posters and i wrote some really crappy chinese on our's.  yeah, it was really bad; i'm a little bit ashamed.  but basically at the top it says, 晚饭吃什么？, and then there's two pictures with, 闲暇有吃的，劳动只有空盘子。   so it says in huge block letters in english WHAT'S FOR DINNER, and then there's a picture with this intelligentsia guy reading a book and with a plate of steaming green dumplings and his caption reads, 'leisure has food to eat,'  and then the next panel is this peasant farmer kneeling on barren ground with an empty plate looking up at the mean-looking sun, and it says, 'labor only has empty plates.'  i didn't come up with the saying. yeah. definitely not that creative.


then we came back and played a couple rounds of pool.  wow, i suck at pool.


mmk.  i think that's enough about nothing for today.  bye kids