OK, A Piece of Cake!!

Two weeks have gone by and I've climbed the Great Wall, walked through a GuanYin temple and moved in with a Chinese family last Friday! We rode a high-speed train from Qingdao to Beijing last week, and the four days there were some of the most amazing ones I've spent in China. Such a cool place. I would write several posts just about my Beijing stay, but my shijian bu gou- there just isn't enough time. Instead, the self-explanatory pictures below should suffice for the time being:

What I really want to talk about is my new Chinese family. The parents, Guan Shushu (Uncle Guan) and Liu Ayi (Aunt Liu) have a sixteen-year-old daughter named Guan Xin, which means dawn. A happy family picture:

Guan Xin is sixteen and incredibly smart. She goes to the best high school in Shandong province, Qingdao Er Zhong, and she's in the process of studying for her TOEFL exam- the Test of English as a Foreign Language examination that will allow her to attend college in the United States. Who knows, we might have another Ole Miss Rebel in the making with this one.

At first, my family liked speaking in English a little too much, even though the parents' English was pretty terrible and I couldn't even understand everything they tried to get across.  But, gradually they've switched to Chinese as they've discovered that I can, in fact, communicate in their native tongue.  Mr. Guan still likes to drop some of his favorite English phrases into everyday conversation. At the end of every sentence I say, English or Chinese, he always responds with an over-enthusiastic "OK!!" And my personal favorite is his use of the phrase "a piece of cake." Some poor English teacher at some point in Mr. Guan's life must have told him that "a piece of cake" means "no problem" or "correct," not "something is easy to do."

Sample conversation:
(in Chinese, English in italics)

Guan: "Xiaxin, will you study English with my daughter, OK?"
Me: "Sure, just a bit. Would 30 minutes a day be alright?"
Guan: "OK, OK! A piece of cake!"


Mr. Guan works for Qingdao University's office of development, and he has traveled to America a few times- specifically, San Jose, California. Why there? To use his English explanation, "Ok ok ok. A piece of cake!"


So a typical breakfast-table conversation might go like this:

(in Chinese, English words in italics)

Me (pointing at a plate of chunky, red-colored meat that came out of a can): "Guan Shushu, what kind of meat is that?"
Guan: "OK! Ok. Hmm, how would you say it?"
Me: "Is it beef?"
Guan: "OK! No, no, not beef."
Me: "Pork then? Or some kind of bird?"
Guan: "Ok, no, not pork, not a bird. It's like a horse."
Me: "HORSEMEAT?! You eat horses here in Qingdao?"
Guan: "OK!! No, of course we don't eat horse. It's like a horse, but smaller."
Me: "Oh... is it gray?"
Guan: "OK!!"
Me: "Oh. So that would be donkey."
Guan: "Donkey, ok. A piece of cake!"

In addition to canned donkey, I've also been fed silk worm eggs mixed with vinegar and mustard, shark meat covered in watery ketchup, and "liang ban" jellyfish.  Jellyfish prepared this way has the consistency of crunchy rubber that has been left in the sun to rot and die. I'm going to lose twenty pounds living on this kind of food. Thank goodness for (in my dorm room) power bars, Oreos and white rice!

I'll try to be better about keeping y'all posted on my doings in the Middle Kingdom, though I don't have internet access at my home stay. Be prepared for many more posts once I move back into the dorm Saturday afternoon. OK!