Long Time, No See 好久不见

Did you know the English phrase “Long time, no see,” actually comes from a Chinese phrase? It’s true.
But it has been a long time, no see, my dear readers. Probably thought I was off doing something cool, eh? Alas that is not the case. Well, not quite. I mean, I have been doing some cool stuff recently, just in the usual spots, not traveling.
Work-wise this semester is much easier than last semester. I have a mere 12 hours a week, all speaking class, which requires very little prep for me as I have taught it for years and have dozens of lesson plans. So I have a lot of free time, which sounds good, right? Yeah, I thought so too and was expecting a quiet semester. But the best laid plans…
Instead my free time has been filling up like crazy, proven by my lack of blog entries. Here is a little run down of things that are filling my days.
School:
While this is filling up the smallest part of my week, I still have to teach and all that. This semester I have all sophomore classes and I’m having fun getting to know them better. But my favorite students are juniors, and sadly, for the first time ever I’m not teaching them. But we’re still staying close and I’ve gone out to eat with them, and spent a lot of time chatting with them. When we accidentally run into each other there are a lot of screams and hugs going around. I miss those buggers.

Chinese:
Like I said before I still am working towards my goal of taking the HSK on July 21st, 2013. It’s going to be a hell of a challenge, and so everyday I am trying to study a bit. The HSK 5 had 1300 new vocab words and like the crazy woman I am I decided to make a flash card for each and every one of them. It’s taking me forever, (about 25 words every 20 minutes) but I am keeping it up.

I’m also going to Chinese class. I was a bit nervous as I didn’t attend last semester, and most of my friends who were studying have left already. I thought my classmates would be a group of strangers. Turns out that isn’t the case at all. I have only one classmate, a dutch guy, who was in my class over a year ago. Since it is only two of us, we have a really good time in class, especially because we are competitive. When we do the exercises in class the teacher keeps track of our right/wrong answers on the board. Last week at the end of the section we added it up and discovered we both got 6. At first we cheered, until we realized it was out of 15 and technically that means we both failed. Hey, at least we’re at the same level.
I’ve also been attending a lecture class in general information of China. Things like history, geography and so on. While most of the students are bored, I’m finding it fascinating. Two weeks ago we talked about the population, and the one-child policy, and last week we talked about the government from the past to the present. This is a class for all students, but as you can guess from the topic, the level of chinese is quite high. I pick up about half to two-third of what is said. One of the cool things is that the teacher will ask us about similar things in our country (like the population) and so I get to learn about Ghana, Mongolia, Holland and other foreign countries.
Friends:
Months ago, I managed to meet a bunch of people in Hangzhou (about an hour away from where I live) and we have been hanging out more and more. It’s a mix of Chinese and foreigners and they are not only interesting, but totally fun. I decided to try to save some more money and not visit my friends in Shanghai as much, so I’m glad to find people I get along with closer to home. It’s actually hard to find people you really get along with in China, especially foreigners, and I feel very fortunate to be meeting more and more. And they are very diverse; gay, straight, black, white, brown, Asian, British, American, Tanzanian. One guy is a graduate of Oxford and can speak fluent Russian. Another girl is working for an NGO and I got to stay at her place at a Hydro-power research center.

One of the closest friends I’ve made in Hangzhou is a Chinese guy who has amazing English. But here’s the rub, when we hang out we speak chinese. Usually in the bi-lingual world, whoever has the strongest non-native language “wins.” You speak that language. So if a Chinese persons English is better than my Chinese we speak English. If my Chinese is better than their English, then we speak Chinese. And usually once a relationship is established in a certain language, it stays that way (for instance with my best friend Color we primarily use English despite my chinese improving. It just feel’s weird when we speak Chinese to each other.)
But my friend Jason, who has an incredibly high level of English, actually wants to speak Chinese with me. He feels that relationships in his native language are more real to him, something I understand. It’s my first truly multi-lingual friendship and I really like it.
When you are learning a language, you tend to compartmentalize your relationships. I have chinese friends that I don’t invite when I’m hanging out with my foreign friends and vice-versa. It’s too hard to mix groups that can’t communicate. For instance, with my ex-boyfriend, he didn’t hang out with my foreign friends much because it was too awkward for me. I would basically have to ignore one group, for the other. So I really like having a truly bilingual friendship with a Chinese person.

Exercise:
I can hear all my friends laughing at me now. Becky? Exercise?! Yes, people! I’ve been doing P90x for a couple weeks and will keep it up the entire 3 months. If you’ve done P90X you’ll know each workout is at least an hour, and with set-up, clean up and showering the whole thing eats a good two hours of everyday. It’s definitely a pain, but you should see my bad ass muscles!

So now you see why I’ve been so bus recently. But, I’m a writer first and foremost, so I’m going to try to get back into the swing of things so it’s not such a “long time, so see.”
And by the way, we have imported a few of our sayings into Chinese as well. The other day I was chatting with a local Chinese friend and we made plans to meet that night. His last text to me was 不见不散, a phrase I was not familiar with. So I put it into google translate and it came out: Be there or be square.