Languages and Taijiquan

We all know that China is a massive country, but I don't think we ever truly pay enough attention to how complex it is. These figures may be a little exaggerated, but there are a gajillion provinces and even more dialects. My roommate - whose name is Ye Caili - and her friends, who fyi are all great, chat away with each other in mandarin - putonghua - but they each also speak a mother tongue dialect from their respective "villages"(towns?) - all of which, mind you, are in the Hangzhou vicinity. Can you imagine uniting hundreds of millions people with tens of thousands of different mother tongues under a common language? Good on ya, Mao. Seriously, well done.

Today was my first day of taijiquan (read: Tai chi) class. There are 5 of us in the class. Speaking of dialects, my teacher speaks an incomprehensible combination of mandarin and his native tongue. He explained that he doesn't speak mandarin that well, and proceeded to speak with what almost sounded like Chinese with a Borat-esque twang. He's the cutest old man, 72，incredibly patient, loves teaching taijiquan, and practices every morning at 5.30am. We learned today that there are many, many variations of taijiquan moves, of which I am pretty sure we are learning the most simple. 24 moves, 3 moves per class, 2 classes a week. I'm pretty stoked. Caili and her friend Dandan think I'm a bit silly for taking taijiquan as an extracurricular because, in China, it really is just for the old folks.

Surprisingly enough, so is drinking tea. And spitting. Nobody under 40 spits anymore, hooray!