Every language is inherently tied with a life of its own inside those who learn it. My favorite part about telling the stories behind these 'lives' is the first moment of complete and utter panic: a deep gut-wrenching feeling that signals when language immersion begins.
For French, I was in Brussels, Belgium on a student tour and was trapped in a store needing directions. With German, it was the second night staying with my host family in Bad Neustadt. Finally, Chinese found it's own first today while helping kids in an after school program for ReachOut. We had trekked to the middle of nowhere with the help of buses, subways and taxis, and found a school hidden away. Our group was broken up and I was left alone to a classroom, and after a few minutes realized my Chinese was the only thing that was going to get my class by. These terrifying moments keep me learning.
Two days ago the weather improved greatly and I had great experience at a tea shop near our hostel. I was shopping around with Eileen, and we stumbled across a store with a very friendly owner. They invited us to their tea shop, and proceeded to teach us how to make tea and to give us more tea than we could drink. Sipping in the back of the shop and relaxing, it was a very potent "Wow I'm in China moment." I bought a little to have with breakfast, and they invited us to return back anytime.
Yesterday we went to a brunch with the Yale Club of Beijing. It's quite an impressive organization, and they fed us well and provided an excellent speaker, Chris Makos, who was a close friend and photographer of Andy Warhol. Hopefully I'll return to the club in the future!
4 comments:
I'm really enjoying these entries. You could easily write an amazing novel. Can you bring me back some tea?
I agree with Christiana, this is a very awesome thing you are doing- and I am anxiously waiting for your next entry. I'm so proud of you David.
I think I'm going to do a similar type of blog when I go to Thailand... I'll keep you updated!
I miss you! Bring me back something very unique to China... ^_^
"and after a few minutes realized my Chinese was the only thing that was going to get my class by. "
Wow, does that mean you were given a class to teach on your first day? Were you teaching English?
I think it's really neat that you got to see the Forbidden City on a jog, that encourages me to go for sight seeing jogs when I arrive :)
Lucky--yes, it was crazy. They threw us into a classroom of children and just told us to "teach". It was quite sad because the normal teacher spoke only a few words of English, so whatever we could offer was paramount to their learning. We had to dig deep in our creativity baskets to come up with things to do.
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