Its elementary, my dear Watson...

Well, we had our first day of school today. We have 4 days of language schools for 3 hours a day every week. Nine am to 12pm, Monday thru Thursday. At first we were supposed to have 5 days a week but the school dropped Friday off our schedule and offered to replace it with a painting or tai chi class instead and I'm so glad they did. The language experts weren't kidding when they said that Mandarin is the hardest language on earth to learn. Basically every word has at least four different pronunciations and at least 4 completely different meanings. Example, the phrase "Qin Wen" means basically "can I ask?" if pronounced one way or "can I have a french kiss?" if pronounced the other way. Imagine walking into a restaurant and asking for the menu but receiving a slap from the waitress? So tones are extremely important and incredibly difficult and already the teacher keeps asking me to repeat it again and again and my head was hurting after just 3 hours this morning. "No, its Cao. Say again." Meanwhile I'm thinking, that's what I said already.  So I repeat it a million times because the teacher won't take "let me practice it on my own (...later...by myself...at home...)" for an answer.  Plus today's teacher spoke only a little English so we found it really hard to keep up.  (By the way, 'Cao' is pronounced 'ts_h_ow'. Sorry that's the best I can come up with cause there is definitely a 't' sound at the beginning and a 'h' in there somewhere and 'ao' says 'ow' as in 'cow'.)

There are 4 of us in the class -- one of our housemates, and another guy from Switzerland -- and we are all brand newbies. I think the teacher was surprised that we knew no Chinese at all. She opened the lesson by speaking to us in Mandarin.  It was a lovely little opening speech which she ended with a question that apparently required an answer because she looked rather expectantly at the class while we looked back at her rather dumbfounded.  I did feel sorry for her because apparently they hadn't told her we didn't speak ANY Chinese at all.  Or perhaps she didn't really clue in to the fact that the manual says "Book #1" or perhaps she thought that we are doing "Book #1" just for fun or review, not because we need too.   So after the look of "Dang it!  This is worse than I thought..." cleared from her face, we, the four brand new expectant minds were suddenly plunged into a world of strange sounds where the written word doesn't make any sense at all and drill after drill...are we singing???  Although my book refers to Middle C and Eb when trying to help me find my correct pitch.  We are using a book called "Chinese made easier"...um...easier than what?  When I figure that out, I'll let you know because its by far the most difficult thing I've ever done to this day. And I'm thinking whoever wrote Pinyin (Chinese in the written Roman letter form), didn't actually speak English either or they'd have realized that "q" doesn't make a "g" sound and "c" doesn't sound like "t". I can't help but feel a little overwhelmed right now!!!

Anyway, knowing full well its heads in the books for the next couple of months, yesterday I took advantage of a group going to see a village often overlooked by foreign visitors to our area -- the ancient town of Yangmei.  It was established sometime during the Song Dynasty (960 -1279 AD) and reached its heyday during the Qing Dynasty (1636 - 1912 AD) because it was a major port on the Yongjiang River. It was quite influtential during the revolution of 1911 -- few people realize that's its the home to a number of famous scholars in Chinese history.  Its a fascinating, peaceful town but people don't really like you to take their photo here unless you buy something from them!

  

And just a friendly PSA! If you were thinking it might be a good idea...DO NOT wash your food, swim and most emphatically DO NOT DRINK THIS WATER!!!