The Giggle Loop

Trivia for the day: If anyone can tell me what TV show the title if from, I will do absolutely anything you want. You will be my hero. And no checking on the internet. From the heart now, people!

And now, for my day. I woke up at 5:30, and I had already gotten the blankets halfway off before I realized that it wasn't actually 6:30, and that I was just being hysterical. It was surprisingly easy to go back to sleep. But when I did wake (for real this time) I got a hot shower. Two days in a row. I think that I must have done something karmically good, and the universe is finally smiling on me. Or maybe I have just been in China too long, and it is starting to affect my brain waves. That might be more likely.

Class was actually really interesting today, because, guess what? We have started reading literature. Finally. Well, I don't suppose you can actually call it literature. Well, what I mean is, my text book had a story from one of China's greatest writers, Lu Xun. So, it is proper literature, but it was in our textbook, so I don't really count it. But it was interesting. He wrote stories to try to wake the Chinese population up in the early 1900's. So most of his stories (actually, all of them) are very depressing. But it is proper literature. This is what I started learning Chinese for. And I feel extremely proud of myself. Granted, I had a word bank, but still. I did it. :)

Tuesday means Chinese tables. Lunch. I was so starving by lunch time that I was feeling lightheaded, and walking very quickly towards the restaurant. I was all excited for good Chinese food, in huge quantities, that someone else was paying for. So imagine my disappointment when we all walk into the restaurant, and there are individual plates of not so good Chinese food, swimming in oil. Yummy. But I'm not complaining. It is definitely better than the bread and butter that I normally have for lunch when I am in the States. And I finished eating early. Which is always a bonus. Well, not always. But right now, yes.

I spent the remaining hour of my lunch break trying to memorize the paragraph that I was going to be quizzed on in an hour. It was a paragraph describing Kong Yi Ji 's appearance (he is the character in the story that we read). Thank God I have a good memory. I must have looked like a complete fool as I was walking to class, saying the paragraph to myself. Ah well, a little crazy is a lot fun. Don't you agree?

I did make one tiny little mistake during my one on one class with my teacher today. I did the paragraph with not too much trouble, and then my teacher and I talked for a little bit. Then she looked at me and says "Now tell me about the author that you researched, and the book that you learned about." Huh. Right. WHAT???? That was basically my response. I had forgotten to look at the schedule. No one does! They always tell us what our homework is. So I missed this tiny little section. But this wasn't really homework, because we weren't being graded on it. But still. So that was my "What the Fuck" moment of the day.

After that, there was a short, 10 minute long practice for the HSK listening portion. Basically, they read us out questions from previous HSK tests, and then we have to answer them. It's practice, and completely optional. About 8 people came. We all sat down, eager and confident, and they started reading. We got to about question 3 before the laughter started. In this case, it was not happy go lucky laughter, but more of that desperate, hopeless laughter, the kind that says "As if I actually know what you are saying" and "there is no way that I am ever going to pass this test." Our teachers got mad at us for laughing too much. I don't want to think about the actual test. That is going to be painful. Surprisingly, I actually did better on the second half. That was when I figured that I should actually start really paying attention to the questions. And I did better. Funny how that works.

For the rest of the afternoon, I did my homework. Nope, no Jack today. Today is my rest day, thank god. I have actually forgotten what it feels like to walk, and not be in pain. I really do think that it is him helping me stretch that makes me sore, not the work out itself. That should say something about Jack, I think. I'll let you figure out what.

My homework. Here are the two paragraphs that I had to translate. I thought that they were special enough to post here:

"It was the winter of 1917, a strong north wind was blustering, but the exigencies of earning my living forced me to be up and out early. I met scarcely a soul on the road buy eventually managed to hire a rickshaw to take me to the South Gate. Presently the win dropped a little, having blown away the drifts of dust on the road to leave a clan broad highway, and the rickshaw man quickened his pace. We were just approaching the South Gate when we knocked into someone who toppled over.

It was a grey haired woman in ragged clothes, She had stopped out abruptly from the roadside in front of us, and although the rickshaw man had swerved, her tattered ragged waistcoat, unbuttoned and billowing in the wind, had caught on the shaft. Luckily the rickshaw man had slowed down, otherwise she would certainly have had a bad fall and it might have been a serious accident."

If the look on your face right now is a combination of disbelief, and laughter, and WTF, then have no fear, that was my reaction too. I'm going to be completely honest with you, I have absolutely no clue how on earth you say "unbuttoned and billowing in the wind." That's crap, that is. I mean, I can do a rough translation of this (with the help of a dictionary, of course) but it won't be pretty. These are literature paragraphs. They are supposed to be pretty, and flowing. Mine are definitely written by a foreigner. As it turns out, this is an English translation of a Chinese story, and our teachers want us to translate it so that tomorrow we can look at how it was actually written, and compare that to what we wrote. Just for funsies. Oh goody.

I have also spent some of the afternoon watching an exceedingly hilarious show called... well, I can't tell you, because that would be giving away the answer to my trivia question. But it is hysterical. I think that I actually may die from laughing from watching this show. It also has the horrible side effect of making me burst into laughter as I am walking down the street. If everybody didn't already think that I was the crazy foreigner... well, they certainly do now.

And now, it's that time of the night. I am going to bed. Check back tomorrow!