The third person teacher

Leading up to my first class day, I called a teacher who I had already met with to set my schedule and said "I don't know which room we will be holding class in on Tuesday." She said "The teacher will tell you which room when she finds out." It confused me, because all along I thought she was going to teach me. Riding a bus all the way out to our campuses is not a desirable job, so I figured maybe she had passed it on to some underling teacher. I asked "Also, can my teacher bring my passport and receipt for my visa to class on Tuesday?" She told me "The teacher will bring it with her on Wednesday. Right now she isn't at school, so she won't be able to get it by tomorrow." Afterwards, she called me back and told me "The teacher will meet you at A building, room 503 tomorrow morning at 9AM." So, I had everything I needed to start class, except I didn't know exactly who my teacher was.

Tuesday morning came, and I woke up with ambitions of a great student/teacher relationship with whoever my teacher was going to be. Shelley had some delays getting out of the house for her class, so I was trying to help her, and as a result, left a few minutes late to get to my class. Not wanting to be late for the first day of class, I biked as fast as I could. Upon arrival, I received a phone call from the lady with whom I had corresponded previously. She said "Jarred, are you having trouble finding the classroom?" "No, I am almost there, give me just one minute. I am so sorry." "Okay, the teacher is waiting for you in the classroom." I felt really bad, because whoever my teacher was was probably wondering who I was, where I was, and if the whole thing was a bad joke and I wasn't even going to show up.

Finally I arrived at the classroom door, sweaty from biking and climbing 5 flights of stairs, and a little flustered. As I approached the door it was like a moment of truth. Who would be the teacher who is solely responsible for my language development, the one teacher who would work with me 10 hours a week to perfect my speaking, reading, and writing? It was intense. Then I opened the door and walked in to... the same lady whom I just spoke to on the phone. Up to this point, I thought "the teacher" would be someone else. Actually, she just referred to herself with a third person title "the teacher." "The teacher will meet you at this classroom" "The teacher is waiting for you." The whole time she was referring to herself! And to make things worse, she continued, and continues to this day to refer to herself only as "the teacher." Let's get one thing clear... this is not an old lady, and I am not an elementary school student. I haven't found out her age yet, but I am fairly sure I am older than her. Yet, she insists on referring to herself not as "me" but as "the teacher." I asked all my friends if their teachers did this, and mine apparently is the only one with this strange power trip. Josh told me that in ancient times, the emporer referred to himself in this way, and he even had a special written character pronoun to indicate that someone was writing about the emporer, not a common person. Maybe the teacher has her own pronoun. Maybe I should only refer to myself as "the student." Imagine that dialogue
"The teacher will give you your homework now."
"The student is ready."
"Write these characters 5 times."
"The student will write them to the best of his ability."
"Ok, have a good afternoon."
"Thank you the teacher. The student will see you tomorrow."
"The teacher will see you tomorrow. Goodbye."

Overall, my first week of class was exhausting. I would give my left arm for someone else to take the class with me, to have to answer the teacher's questions so I could give my brain a 2 minute break. As it is, we have 3 hours of class on Tuesdays and Wednesdays with a 10 minute break. On Thursdays, we have 4 hours of class and she is merciful enough to give me 15 minutes of break. One 10 minute rest and one 5 minute rest. Thanks the teacher. She is relentless and uses a red pen to check every assignment that I do. Keep in mind that I do these exercises right in front of her, and she watches me do them, and corrects me as I do them, so she knows as I am doing them what is right or wrong. Yet after she has watched me do them all, she still insists on putting checks by the correct answers with a red pen. She is the youngest old-school teacher ever. I will let you know as soon as she breaks out a ruler to slap me with, or demands that I bring her an apple.

check.

coming back to asia, i had high aspirations of learning to make a lot of homemade things so i didn't have to have them sent from america or buy them at import stores at jacked up prices. one of the top things on my list was spaghetti sauce. it is just so much cheaper. i knew of one lady here that did it, and i told myself in coming back i would learn how. last night was my first attempt... and the biggest spaghetti lover in the world (my husband) thought it was wonderful! so i have a new recipe that will be added to the routine. i love that jarred's favorite meal is so easy :)

i have also been baking homemade bread bc bread here just tastes a little strange, and it is delicious! so far i have made honey whole-wheat yeast bread and whole-wheat oatmeal batter bread from recipes my friend beth gave me before i left. and i made banana bread to give to my neighbors, which i haven't done yet but will i promise, bc people here love it, once they get over thinking how weird it is that a foreigner would put bananas in bread and how do they make homemade bread anyways. and my betty crocker cookbook has about a trillion recipes for instant breads and yeast breads, i have a lot of experimenting ahead of me...

ordering dinner

Tonight, Shelley and I returned from a 2 day excursion into the big city. The big city has gotten a little bigger in the last year. When we came back from America in July, 2008, the city had around 5 million people. Shelley heard today that the number has increased over the last year... to almost 8 million. That is a 60% increase in a year. Traffic is worse, the people are worse, our favorite restaurants are being torn down to be replaced by apartment high rises (RIP Snowman). It is horrible. We came back to take part in this culture, to become these people, and it just gets more and more difficu.... WE HAD PAPA JOHN'S FOR LUNCH TODAY! Along with the growth in population, it turns out the big city just got a little more cosmopolitan. For $16US, we can get a 14" Meat Lover's pizza. And to polish it all off, a DQ has gone up right across the street. Green tea blizzard anyone? I had an oreo blizzard, and Shelley got her usual, a chocolate dipped cone. Only they did this artistic thing with the chocolate dip. They of course pumped the ice cream into the perfect little humps on the cone, the way only DQ can. However, they only dipped the top part in chocolate, as to accentuate its perfect peak. Imagine the Taj Mahal with a fudge top.

Let's just say our stomachs hadn't had an American sized meal in a month and a half. The pizza and ice cream combo, probably worth a solid stars and stripes' 1500 calories, put us into a food coma. On the trip back out to our home, we just kind of stared at each other. Our eyes were glazed over, and the last thing we wanted was food. However, we realized at 5PM that dinner was inevitable, so we decided to order food from our favorite little restaurant in town, and take it home with us to eat whenever we got hungry again. Ordering food at this restaurant is a process. It involves walking back to the kitchen with them, seeing which vegetables, tofus, meats, and meat parts they have, and then mentioning dishes until you get one they can make with all the ingredients on hand. Everytime you ask for a dish, you finish the sentence with a questioning tone, like going to Wendy's and saying "Yes, I would like a junior bacon cheese burger?" Tonight, we ordered 2 dishes. The first is a dish with green beans that we were fairly sure they had everything to make. When I said "I want pork fried green beans?" the fiery little waitress said "we can fry them in vinegar. We don't have pork fried green beans." I saw the pork, I saw the green beans, and I was confused why they couldn't put them in the wok and fry them together. So I bypassed the waitress, went into the kitchen to the cook standing over his wok, and said "can you make pork fried green beans?" He said "you mean the spicy kind?" "yes, like the kind from the province of your restaurant." "I can make them." So I went back and told the waitress, and she wrote down the order as if she had totally forgotten that they didn't have this dish in the first place.

Next, Shelley asked for a dish that involves tomatoes and pork slices stir fried together. The waitress replied "That dish is not tasty." We looked at each other kind of confused. Not only was this dish delicious, we had never been refused an order over the server's personal taste preference. She went off to argue with an old man over the price of his soup, and we told another waiter, this one a teenage gentleman "We want tomato fried pork slices?" He replied "Tomato fried pork slices are not delicious." Now imagine going into a restaurant, sitting down, looking at the menu, and saying "I'll have the she crab bisque." The waiter replies "I don't like sea food, therefore you can't have the she crab bisque." This is kind of what we were up against. I told him, "We like this dish. Can you cook it?" He said "we can cook it, but it isn't delicious." Then I looked at Shelley, kind of thrown off guard by this whole thing. I think they had almost convinced me that I don't like tomato fried pork slices. Shelley, being the rock that she is in these situations (and probably close to being out of patience), replied "we like it. we want it." So, he reluctantly wrote it down, and 6 minutes later, we walked out of the restaurant with 2 dishes. One didn't exist, and one was not delicious. At 8PM when we finally regained half of our appetites, we heated them up and enjoyed every last delicious green bean and tomato slice.

fall holidays

So our past week and half here were filled with holiday celebrations! oct 1 marked the 60th anniversary of the country. not too much was happening around here, but the capital was full of parades and celebrations that the rest of the country watched on tv. we watched some that night on bbc, and it was pretty impressive. granted, the military parade containing missile launchers and manless drones being marched through the capital city was a little eerie, but exploding twice as many fireworks in the culminating celebration then the olympic opening ceremony was quite impressive. most impressive, was the govt declaring an 8 day holiday to celebrate this important anniversary. so for us, no classes for a week.
and then 2 days later was mid-autumn festival, where we all eat mooncakes (or are supposed to) and go outside and look at the moon and tell this love story about the girl in the moon, yada yada. we spent the day with some friends at an old folks home (i guess retirement home would be more pc). tradition in this part of the world is that grandparents live with their children (usually their son) when they get older, so for them to be living in this place pretty much denotes that they don't have family. they may never have had kids or something may have happened. anyways, they are basically all alone in the world family-wise.
we spent the afternoon cleaning their rooms, which were really really dirty. we sang songs and some friends did performances. and we gave them fruit and of course mooncakes!
it was an awesome experience and we hope to go back!

how much does 600 sq ft of styrofoam weigh?

Driving on our scooter the other day, we flew by this little man pulling this monstrosity of a cart. It was massive. We think he was probably taking it to recycle to earn money to live on. And the most ironic part was that less than 30 seconds after seeing him we saw a Maserati drive by.

the most beautiful sight

Ok, so not the dust. But our suitcases unpacked and stored away under a bed for the first time in about 2 months is an absolutely beautiful sight to me. we are officially moved into our apartment. and we love it! nothing is completely organized, but we are home. i don't think either of us really realized how stressful being in constant transition was until we actually slept the first night in our own bed!
and the other night we had a couple friends over for dinner for the first time in our new place! and after being here for awhile one said that our apartment was "simple yet homey." and it made my night. i had never used those words, but that is exactly what i was hoping for. i pictured a place that our moms could sit down in and feel comfortable in, but also friends we make here can come into and relax in and not feel out of place. and mostly i wanted a place that jarred and i would love and that would feel like home. and we have it. what a blessing.

the mysterious trash bag

i was sitting putting on my shoes. jarred was standing 7 feet away, a step into the hallway of our apartment building gently urging me to hurry up. having filled up our trash bag after dinner last night, jarred had taken it out of the trash can and tied it closed, and it was sitting by the door ready to be taken down the 5 flights to the big trash can outside. and then it happened. the whole bag suddenly convulsed back and forth for 2.5 seconds, like whatever was inside wanted out. and then as suddenly as it started, it stopped. with looks of horror on both of our faces, we just stood frozen for a second. and nothing else happened. so in an attempt to see if we were safe or if we should run for high ground, jarred kicked the bag. but it seemed that the boxes and trash inside just shifted around. so with a great show of manliness, jarred grabbed the bag and took it downstairs. a mouse? a rat? a cat? we will probably never know. and in fact, i hope we never know. but one thing i do know is that i will probably never take out the trash.