so blogspot has been down for the whole month over here, hence my failure to update. but blessedly, it has come back, so i thought i'd do a post. i actually also discovered recently that there are web sites that you can use to access all the blocked sites, so i guess i would have been able to start doing posts again anyway. it was so nice to be able to check in on all my blogs, i realized that the internet isn't half so interesting when you can't read the blogs. with this site, anonymouse, i was also able to check wikipedia, which has recently been blocked over here. life without wikipedia is tough. i do not know what we did before it, how could we research all the random terms floating around?
i've started taking the bus to work, which is nice because it means a much shorter walk outside now that its gotten cold, a 1 kuai ticket instead of a 3 kuai one, and that i really get to be in touch with the chinese people. well, i mean i get to be touching a lot of chinese people. the buses are super crowded, i've never seen so many people fit on a bus. luckily its a shorter ride though, so 20 minutes of crampedness isn't too bad.
my chinese is getting better, i've been doing tutoring, and i'm definitely noticing some improvement. but today on the bus i had one of those annoying moments when you're trying to say something simple, and you think you've said it right, but then thinking back you've said something kind of stupid. like i meant to ask the driver "where is the closest stop to precious gold street (where i work)" but instead i said "where is the most nearby stop." i mean not ridiculously stupid, but i should have gotten it right. a better example- in my tutoring class i was trying to construct a sentence to show i understood a grammatical structure. i thought i said, "I told the man that if he got into an accident, I would raise his child." but when i saw my tutor's face, i realized i had said, "i told that man that if he got into an accident, i would have his child." whoops, sort of embarrassing. it's hard in chinese to tell when you've said something wrong though, when for instance the phrase "arrive late" would be literally translated as "eat arrive." or in one bizarre grammatical structure, to say "He was hit by me", you would literally translate it as "He gave me hit" if you hadn't already learned the structure. those things piss me off, although there are some phrases that are cute, like "to be jealous" is literally "to eat vinegar". also, "to sexually harass someone" is to "eat their tofu". Haha. Okay, hopefully you'll start seeing more posts from me. godspeed.