Did the blog title capture your attention? Hopefully. We have had a good week of teaching classes and some hilarious things have been said. We thought we would give you a quick recap of some of the comical moments:
-Yesterday, in Kealy's class, one of Kealy's students was describing her family and what her parents do. She said, ever so proudly, that her "father is a fish". Kealy managed to finally stifle the classes laughter and the girl took it well when Kealy explained to her that the correct sentence is "my father is a fisherman!" a little bit of a difference.
-Today, when I was in class, we were talking about: "How do you feel? I feel..." and coming up with different emotions we feel. Some ideas were; I feel happy, sad, excited, terrible, nervous, in love, jealous, hungry, fantastic and the person suggesting the emotion had to act out what that emotion looked like so that everyone understood what they meant. One gentleman in my class stood up, threw back his head and gave a sneaky look and said, "I feel sexy!" We laughed pretty hard at that one too.
-Another comical situation has been the different ways that people have asked to use the restroom in English. In Chinese, I think they allude to something else because it is rude to simply ask, "Can I use the bathroom?" So here are some funny english versions of asking to use the bathroom:
-"I need to answer nature's calling."
-"I need to ease myself."
-"Can I have 30 seconds to myself?"
hard not to laugh at those, right?
Another hilarious thing about China is that some of the shirts that have English on them, simply have English on them. They don't have a rhyme or a reason, its just the fact that it has English on it that makes it stylish. The shirt above said:He play mahjong for long time, I never see him win except one, his name is zhu lian jin. I asked Chris if there was a secret meaning behind that statement, he said no. We saw a shirt that said "Abercrombif and Titch"...think about it. We saw a shirt that said, "Surfing championships" and had a picture of a cartoon character with a snow coat on and two bunnies hopping around.
So when we are feeling homesick, we try to recall this hilarious moments and curious things about the new culture we are adjusting to. When we are on the bus, which is very often, we sing songs, poke each other, copy each other, make funny faces...we figure the Chinese are already staring, we might as well put on a show! We also watch on the bus for what kinds of curious animals are brought on the bus with their human friends. We've seen roosters, ducks and chickens in potato sacks and boxes (I think their doom is sealed) and we've seen turtles and frogs in water bottles (not sure of their fate). We also saw a kid drop a mouse at the school down the stairs and slowly picked it up and poked it to see if it was still alive and we think we saw a rat in the shadows last night, maybe a small raccoon, who knows...we don't want to.
-We had dinner at KFC tonight, more high class dining. We had a great meal and listened and reminisced while the Backstreet Boys CD played over the speakers. They love the Backstreet Boys...and Titanic.
Hope these silly stories cheered you up. We miss you and we'll talk to you soon.
Sincerely,
Ryan and Kealy Thorson
No comments:
Post a Comment