China Day 25

I can’t believe four weeks ago I left Memphis for DC; it’s truly amazing how quickly time flies.

Class was nothing special; Yang Laoshi roasted us, we accepted it because we know our tones suck.

Hannah’s language fail today was saying she wanted to give people kisses instead of saying she had two questions for them, so that was amusing.

In drill two, we had a debate, and I had to argue that being a stay-at-home mom was better than being a working woman, which I did not appreciate. At one point, I told the teacher that I didn’t even know how to argue this one, and she told me to make things up.

The debate was actually fun because we were able to spit fire things back at each other, and at the end of class, Li Laoshi said I did a really good job despite not believing in my assigned position. She’s too sweet.

Side story: I put all the things Yang Laoshi says to us in class on my snapchat story because it’s amusing, but Li Laoshi saw, so when she walked into class, the first thing she said was “I saw your snapchat story.” I was so confused and check my privacy settings to make sure only my friends could see. She told me she wouldn’t tell Yang Laoshi, and tbh I’m not really scared because I’m not making fun of her; it’s more or less me making fun of us because of how bad our Chinese is.

I had the sneaking suspicion that Faith might have told Li Laoshi about my story since she was the last one to watch it, and Li Laoshi is her teacher. All she told me was that Philly showed her, which again didn’t make sense.

After class, Faith said that their class was watching my story during the break and they all started laughing and Li Laoshi saw. Again, nbd, but now I know how that happened.

I’m not looking forward to the newspaper midterm, but I am looking forward to not having class on Thursday.

Also, I was a dumbass today because I didn’t feel like reading the newspaper in full because I thought I knew what it was about. Basically, it was all about the environment, and since I’ve studied environmental science in both English and Chinese, I thought I knew what was up. So when the teacher asked us what we thought we should do to help with pollution, I thought I was being all sophisticated by saying: “well in some countries like Mexico, they don’t let cars with certain license plates drive on certain days.” The problem is, I didn’t know how to say license plate in Chinese, nor do I know how to spell the word in English, so I couldn’t pleco my way out of this one. Instead, what I did, was go up to the board and draw an elaborate picture of what I was trying to say.

Logan then looks at me and says: “oh, did you mean 拍照?” and in my head, all I could think was “how do you know that word without plecoing it?”

I then sat my ass down, looked at the newspaper article and realized that we had already discussed my point and that the word for license plate was one of our vocab words. Way to go.

As usual, I spent my yi dui yi working on homework and having the teacher roast me for not understanding grammar patterns. It’s chill. We ran out of time, and instead of saying “goodbye” she said, “we’re out of time, so you’re going to have to do this by yourself now.” Thanks laoshi.

I did finish the rest of my homework in the dorm, but Katey distracted me with tantan. We’ve got some people aggressively asking for my wechat. We ended up telling one dude that we’d give him mine if we could speak English, and one guy sent a voice memo asking for it. Katey and I tried to type out responses in Chinese, but her phone glitched and kept sending the messages before we were ready. Thank god for the recall button.

Also, we found Steven, and I swiped right because I wanted to see if he right swiped me, but it turns out he either A: did not, or B: I was the first one to swipe. I messaged him on wechat and judging by his reaction, I was the first to swipe, so now we wait. (He ended up swiping right lol.)

I had a good conversation with my roommate about school. Chinese students always have homework on Friday regardless of age, and kindergarteners can have up to an hour of homework, which I think is ridiculous. Also, middle schoolers have night classes in the same regard that high school and college students have. China, chill.

My roommate told me she was choosing her classes, but she didn’t like any of them because they were night classes. She’s also taking summer classes because she doesn’t want to be bored when I’m not around, which makes sense, but also, why would you take more classes after taking 16 of them for the past 11 months. (Summer break is literally only 4 weeks long, like what the heck?)

At 6:25, Korey and I were going to grab dinner with Hannah, but still hadn’t responded to my text, so Korey, Katey, and I sat around on tantan. Turns out it’s really hard for guys to find matches because girls tend to be more picky with their choices. Guys have a limited amount of swipes because they tend to sit on their phones and swipe right on every girl.

I ended finding Korey on the app while he was sitting next to me, and I wanted to take a picture, but the phone glitched and I didn’t get the photo.

Hannah woke up from her nap, and we were off to dinner. We had the chicken nuggies and fries. Korey told us about his time in the military. I jokingly asked if he’s ever killed a man, and the answer is probably. He was talking about how he was on a mission and he shot down a building with a bunch of people in it, and it collapsed. So long story short, unconfirmed, but probably.

I ended up sitting in my room for the rest of the night watching youtube videos. When my roommate came back, she told me I looked sad and dejected, but that’s just my face.

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