Not speaking Chinese sucks

So I've been planning to start my China blog (and shamelessly steal pictures from Dan's) but lately, I haven't been in that good of a mood. I thought maybe I would wait until I had something more to say than "Not speaking Chinese sucks" and "It's really hot here."

But wait! Not speaking Chinese really does suck! I only go to restaurants with pictures or English on the menu, or places where the food is all in hot trays in front of me and I point at what I want to eat. Sometimes when people get tired of trying to tell me something, they write it down. This doesn't help at all because the only characters I know are "people", "mountain", "middle", "kingdom", and the name of our city. Surprisingly these don't come up very often when people write things down for me, so I just stare at it for a while and think "hmm, that one looks kindof like a house. And it's next to a squiggly!"

Thursday Dan and I went to Qi Ao island, and after hiking around we found a restaurant on the beach. We were sitting in the shade and had a nice view of the Pearl River, old men fishing, and young brides getting wedding photos taken on the beach. Everything was going well, until the waiter brought our menu - which was all in Chinese. I stared at it, looking for "people" or "mountain" or maybe even "middle" until the waiter started recommending dishes to us. He started with the most expensive so we didn't say yes until he hit something in the 30 RMB area. This is what we got:



a duck and celery dish



and fried tofu and skinny mushrooms.

The duck and celery was good, but the fried tofu dish was amazing. When we paid for our meal I tried to ask the waiter what it was called, so maybe I could order it again. Unfortunately he only said "jige"* which even I know means "this one."

For my job, I'm teaching kindergarten and first year children's classes. Every child I teach is between the ages of 4 and 8. Their English is actually a lot better than my Chinese, but they frequently say Chinese words that I know, and that's exciting!
1 - they always call me "laoshi" (teacher)
2 - when I ask for volunteers they get really excited, raise their hands, and say "wo" (me)
3 - today I was teaching numbers to my youngest class and they kept using the Chinese numbers, which is about all the Chinese I know!

Anyway, soon I will be taking Mandarin classes from my school, and I have a number for a private tutor. One of the reasons I came to China is to learn Mandarin, so I'm going to be really serious about it. And I know it's my problem: I'm not one of those obnoxious westerners who says "why don't they speak English?" I'm in their country, I'm the one who needs to speak their language. I just find the combination of tones and characters ridiculously hard to pick up.


* - Note: I totally can't spell in pinyin but it's better than my Chinese characters!