"Are You Two Dating?"

I've decided to do things a bit differently from now on. No one wants to hear about how I wake up at 5:35 every morning and drag myself through freezing conditions to school. I will admit, that gets old after a while. Instead, I am going to write about my day, the interesting bits anyway. When I have them. I may be living in China, but there are not always stories I can tell that will be funny to others. So, here goes nothing. Cross your fingers!

We have a new Chinese teacher now. She has been at SYA for a while, but at every semester, the classes change. This year, Classes 7, 6, and 5 switched a lot (as in the students change classes), so the teachers for those classes didn't switch. However, only one student in my class moved up, and one student moved into my class, so we got a new teacher, so we could be exposed to new teaching methods. Which is good I guess. We had a really good teacher last semester, so it is hard to have anything else. I am working really hard with the new teacher though, which is nice. I like working hard, while complaining about it. It's just something all teenagers do.

We had Chinese tables (中文桌子）which means we all have to go to the cafeteria, sit with a teacher, and speak Chinese for all of lunch. I was originally sitting with Chris, and trying to get a teacher and one more person to sit with us. Ding Lao Shi (one of Chris's teachers) sat down with us, and started talking. Not more than 2 minutes into the conversation, she looks at us and goes "I have a question, can I ask it?" to us, but in Chinese. We told her of course, and she, all timid like, goes "Are you two dating?" We both burst out laughing, and neither of us could answer. She kept up with these questions, wanting to know, trying to get information, until we finally told her. All the teachers are surprisingly intune with who is dating who, and they think it is an absolute riot. I swear, they are more like kids than us teenagers are.

During lunch, there was another funny story. My favorite new word has become "bugger", which everyone here thinks is hysterical, and they make fun of me all the time. So today, I am at the lunch line, getting my food, and for some reason, something happened that caused me to say bugger. Both Zhang Lao Shi, and Li Lao Shi (male Li Lao Shi) were across the table from me. Li Lao Shi can speak English, and he looked at me and goes "Bugger" like he is trying to sound it out. And then he said "You always say this. What does it mean?" except in Chinese. I told him it was like a nice form of damn. Then that started a conversation on how I speak with an Australian accent instead of American (or Australian word usage, basically would be translation. Word habit? Something like that.) It didn't occur to me until later that I should probably not be teaching my teachers the word bugger. Hm. Oops.

Mr. Bissell has started showing us pictures of the places we are going to visit on our upcoming trip to Yunnan, whetting our appetite, so to speak. It looks like it is going to be amazing. Tough, physically, but amazing. We will be doing a lot of walking, through terraced rice fields and such, which look beautiful. I am so excited. I just want to skip the next couple of school weeks and just get to the vacation. Who wants to do Calculus when you have this fantastic vacation looming ahead?