Weekends are great! Alisa and I are starting to create our
own routine – take the bus downtown and eat North American fast food. Today we
had McDonalds and Dairy Queen. It
sounds gross, but it’s a nice change after eating Chinese food all week. While
most food and restaurants in China are very cheap, North American fast food
places charge almost as much as they would in Canada, so by local standards
they are very expensive.
Most outings have some kind of adventure, especially since
almost nobody speaks English in our city. Things that would be easy at home,
take extra patience and sometimes creative explanations. For instance, getting
a new battery for my watch took about 15 minutes and 6 store employees to
finally get what I needed. They were all very friendly, and the repairman even
set my watch to the correct time. But paying was a bit difficult because he
didn’t have a cash register, so I couldn’t just look and see the price. He did
the hand signal for six (Chinese have a different system of counting on their
fingers, where all the numbers can be done on one hand), I thought this was a
really good deal and gave him 6RMB (about 90cents). At this point I already had
the watch and was ready to go, but I could tell there was something wrong. I
got out my translation book and figured out the price was 60, so he was
probably a bit confused when I gave him only 6!
Week 3 of teaching starts tomorrow! Two more weeks of work
then we get 1 week off for the Autumn festival!
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