My Grammie’s Aunt Johnnie died yesterday. She was 100 years old. Many of you sent cards for her 100th birthday party that we attended in November in Clifton, Texas. The photo above is from the birthday party and I had it up before on the post about the 100 year old with the 1 year old. My Grammie summed it up by saying that she was a good example to all her relatives and a really neat person. Grammie said that she spent her last 2 days telling all the nurses and nurses aides thank you for taking good care of her and planning the last details of her funeral.
I am thankful that I got to visit her a couple times in the last year and most of all that she was such an important person in my Grammie’s life. My Grammie is so important to me and my heart hurts for her today because she lost Aunt Johnnie.
There are lots of other things I am thankful for this week, but I prefer to leave this post as a tribute to Aunt Johnnie and the great love that she showed for all the “kids” in her life like my Grammie 🙂
Attending language school is the reason we are here and we have settled into a routine. Mike goes over to the school and is learning Chinese characters from 8-10 am. Then the 2 other students join him for conversational lessons from 10 am – noon. Mike is really enjoying learning about the characters because his teacher tells him the history behind the symbol and learning that helps him to remember it. Then Mike comes home, has lunch with us and goes in the bedroom to work. It’s very awesome that he can work remotely from China and that is what allowed us to be on this adventure.
My tutor Kiki comes to the apartment from 10 am – noon. She is really nice and just adores Nadia. Nadia sleeps through most of my lessons, but has been getting up from her nap about 11:30ish. Kiki asked me if I wanted to learn the characters and I told her not right now, I would rather focus on learning the tones and vocabulary. The only real problem with that is that I can’t read anything when we are out and about. That is the most disorienting thing for me since I am such a reader.
Monday – this was a good first lesson because it was all stuff I was familiar with. She told me I did a great job and I was a good student. I told her not to get too excited since that stuff was all familiar.
Tuesday – at one point I almost broke into tears because I knew as I was saying some of the words that the tones were coming out wrong. I tried and tried and couldn’t get some of the letter combinations correct. And of course I got frustrated because tones are the whole basis of the Chinese spoken language.
Wed. – This was a good day. She moved me onto some longer sentences and of course in the beginning I got all jumbled up because of the odd letter combinations. It’s just so different from English or Spanish (or any romance language for that matter) and my mouth wants to pronounce things like you would in English. But I did much better on my second tone practice which was what I had all the trouble with the day before.
I think this is a great way to learn the language because you need to be in the middle of it, but the key is going to be to practice a lot when we get back to the states.
Here is a photo of Kiki and Nadia.
China 2008: March 5th (click to see album)
Nadia and I took a walk tonight and went all around Leisure Garden near our apartment. She wasn’t really sleeping, but the photo was cute of her being silly.
This months elective being offered by the school is Chinese Painting. Nadia was sleeping and Mike was working, so I headed over to the school on Tuesday afternoon. The teacher is an art student at the local university and she was shy, but very good at the style of Chinese painting that she taught today. It’s the traditional black watercolor and I got to do mine like a tracing. She taught me how to hold the brush – this went against how I usually hold a pen, but I could see that over time it would become comfortable. You have to hold the brush straight up and be very, very precise. She told me that I moved too fast and it’s best to do this type of painting when your heart is still and you are very relaxed. I was laughing because I do everything fast and it was hard to force myself to slow down. Next week she is going to teach a different style of painting and how to do flowers. So far it seems pretty cool.
Both of my “paintings” were replicas from a famous painter during the Ming Dynasty.
2 places I generally avoid at home are Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. I prefer almost any other burger place and do almost all my shopping at SuperTarget. And yet here, it’s just refreshing to be able to get a burger that tastes exactly like home (for way cheaper than at home) and to be able to just grab what you need at Wal-Mart. The area that we are living in is obviously an affluent area and the Lotus Center grocery store has prices that are much like America. And the rest of the Lotus Center is a fancy mall with stores like Nike.
We took the subway for the first time last night to go to Wal-Mart. On the way there we passed many stores that are just like America including a 3-4 story mall of places like ESPRIT. Walking down the street to the subway station I told Mike I felt like I was in Vegas with the smoke everywhere, neon lights and expensive clothing stores.
The subway system here has been revamped and all new lines have been added for the Olympics. I am confident now that with my handy map I could get all over Beijing with no trouble. It looks like we will have to take 3 different subway lines to get to the Silk Market for shopping, but I am ready! We are very close to the zoo and the aquarium and I hope to take Nadia there soon. The weather is supposed to get into the upper 60’s later in the week.
