The Simplified Life

I had a realization today while subtly fanning myself on the already “air-conditioned” bus into town that life here, while perhaps not necessarily “simple,” is definitely simplified. And I don’t mean that in a bad way.

No internet in the room (yet) meant that this morning I could get out of bed at 7am, shower, unpack and get to my first of three orientation meetings by 8am. Said meeting lasted three hours, and to most of our questions Jeremy, the program director, bluntly replied, “just work it out.” Though rather undisciplined, the orientation was otherwise surprisingly informative. Turn off the air conditioner when leaving the room. Room phones won’t accept phone cards to call internationally. Air-conditioned buses are RMB2 and are run incredibly efficiently. Hike through tea fields on Saturday, followed by reflexology (foot massages) for everyone. The language pledge.

The language pledge. My brain hurts. Basically, no English can be spoken at any time within the vicinity of program participants – this includes roommates, teachers, fellow foreign students, etc. Since Chinglish is far too tempting, and in fact tends to be my preferred method of communication, we are only allowed to s-p-e-l-l the English words whose translation we don’t know. I h-a-v-e t-o-t-a-l-l-y g-o-t-t-e-n o-v-e-r t-h-e e-m-b-a-r-a-s-s-m-e-n-t of spelling in front of basically everyone. Everyone’s doing it. Whatever. The pledge works on a three strike system.. apparently there are spies everywhere – including our roommates – making sure we don’t break the pledge. Listening, reading, and writing English, however, is totally fine. As long as the listening involves earphones. When people call (from home, presumably), we are allowed to speak English (or whatever), but our roommates can be around to hear us speak. Apparently, we are supposed to kindly “ask them to leave” so that we can carry on most likely chatting about them, the program, the ridiculous way you tried to describe “lucky” this afternoon because you didn’t actually know the word in Chinese.

All of our roommates are really great. Incredibly patient.. or at least most of them. I think that mine definitely wins the prize. She talks SO slowly but every extra second she takes to get her point across in a way that I might understand is wholeheartedly appreciated. I can’t wait to actually be able to chat normally with her instead of taking every 5 seconds to rack my brain for that stupid word that I totally took for granted when I learned it 10 years ago.

The roommates are all around 21. We were talking about the nightlife here and one of the girls said that she had never been to a 酒吧 (literally, an alcohol bar) because her parents wouldn’t let her. Another one – the cutest and hippest of the lot – and knows it – piped in that her parents are the opposite and encourage her to take advantage of her youth. She very proudly said that she had been to a 酒吧 last year with a group of foreigners. It took every ounce of discipline to restrain from high-five-ing her.

……
I think I might be getting used to the toilet. This is good news. My roommate always walks in with her dirty shoes, and since there is a permanent film of water on the floor, she inevitably ends of tracking mud all over the place. She did it again this evening, but since she was in there taking care, at my desperate request, of the flies and larvae that attacked whenever I got within half a foot of the sink, I found it in my heart to forgive her.

Now: exhausted after a day of trekking about town in my arch-support-less purple Steve Madden ballet flats. Definitely not a wise choice for this afternoon’s “bus activity,” which required us to take the bus to and from the University into town four times, but we ended up just taking the bus to the lake, walking around, window shopping. I snuck off to Starbucks; smart move, I know. Rush hour rolled around and the bus option was totally non-existent seeing as every air-conditioned #36 bus that rolled around was practically bursting with people and every taxi was taken, so the other American girls and I somehow managed to finagle the group, which included all of our roommates, into a Papa Gino’s dinner. I’ve not been here a week and by six ‘o’clock today already couldn’t imagine putting another spoonful of [insert Chinese food] in my mouth. I think that three overpriced slices of pizza cured that, thankfully. Not to say that those slices were bad. They weren’t. In fact, they were amazing, delectable, electrifying even.

Tomorrow morning is our placement test. Another 7am wakeup call. I came here pretty worried about my level of Chinese relative to other program students, but I soon came to realize that fourteen years of language study has indeed given me a suitable leg-up.

We’ll see how it turns out.