Today was kind of stressful. It began with my weekly 10 minute oral test (not too bad), but then I decided to Go To The Post Office. My roommate offered to take me, which was really nice of her, but also very, very stressful. My roommates treatment of me is sort of the way you'd treat a space alien, a pet, and a small child all rolled into one. She couldn't be nicer or friendlier, and I think the main problem is that this is the first time she's been exposed to someone from another country, so she doesn't really know what's hard and what's easy, but just sometimes...
When you're in a foreign country, the biggest problem is figuring out how things work - what's different, and what's the same. What's easy, and what's hard. For example - riding a bus in itself is no problem. Knowing where to get off the bus is really, really hard. Getting on the right bus in the first place is probably the biggest challenge of all! However, once you know where you're going, it's a piece of cake, and if you can look out the window and recognize your destination, then you don't need your roommate to yell at you across the bus, "文兰下车!" which translates into, "Helena! Get off the bus!" Once you put me on the right bus home, I recognize home when I see it! It's funny how humans are programmed to be able to recognize where their bed / all their stuff is.
I don't know why I keep writing about the busses in China... it's just that every time I ride one, it strikes me how, even though the busses themselves are identical to the ones in Germany in terms of manufacturing, the whole bus riding phenomenon is entirely different. For instance, in Germany there is a yellow line next to the driver. You do NOT stand in front of the yellow line. You get on the bus, put your money in the box, and it gives you exact change. In China, (at least today, when the busses are crowded), you stand in the wheelwell and hope you don't get clocked in the head when the doors open at the next stop. Today, I was able to make my way up from the wheelwell to stand about six inches away from the driver. It was cool, because I could look right out the front of the bus. The highlight of the day was going through an intersection where the traffic lights were out - BOY, is that chaos in China! Fortunately, we were in a bus, but imagine two lanes of traffic coming from each direction, people trying to turn in ALL directions, and random bicycles/three wheeled carts trying to make their way through it all, PLUS busses and trucks and pedestrians... I swear, there's a certain energy and joy in China that would be lost in a more regulated society. In a very fundamental way, standing right next to the bus driver while you inch your way through utter chaos is FUN. Provided of course, that the truck coming from the right stops in time!
One thing I've really noticed about China is the amount of crap that people have dangling from their rear-view mirrors. I don't really know how to explain it - mostly it will be a square with a character or two inscribed in it, with a red tassel dangling below. Everything dangling from the rear-view mirror will be red, and most of it will be tasseled at least once if not twice. The BUS I was riding in today had two oversized tassels hanging from the rear-view mirror, both of them with the characters "平安" which in English translates into "Safe journey" or "Godspeed". If anyone needs all the lucky talismans they can get, it's a bus driver in China...!
The post office was incredibly stressful, mostly because my roommate kept telling me how to do everything, even the things that were written in English. "See that? That's where you write your name." "Yes, I see! It says, "Sender". It's in English!" She did help me out with my return address, which was really nice. It's just hard to explain to someone what foreigners have trouble with. She sees me have trouble with what to her is the easiest thing in the world - writing my return address - and assumes that if I have trouble with that, I'm definitely going to have trouble with the customs forms. Except that the return address requires writing characters, and the customs forms are in English (and she KEPT telling me to "write clearly! write clearly!" to which I kept responding, "I AM writing clearly! Every American postal worker will be able to read that, and I woudn't need to cross so many things out if you didn't keep interrupting me to tell me to write clearly!!!") But in the end, it was a successful trip. We stopped by the grocery store on the way home, where she carefully guided me through the store, and asked me what color underwear Americans like to wear. Apparently, the Chinese favor red or green colored underwear, and NO one wears white underwear (in China, red is the luckiest color, and white is the color of death). I mentioned that some Americans like to wear black underwear, which lead to the question, "but what if you're wearing white pants?" to which I responded, "then you wear white underwear!" which then lead to the whole white underwear being unlucky bit. Honestly. Some things don't need explanation!
ok... off now to shower, then head out to Beijing Opera tonight. I am going all out and putting on makeup - my roommate is very interested in the fact that I will be putting on makeup, and wants to watch, to see if Americans put on their makeup differently. Man - I stress out enough with the whole makeup thing to start with... how different can it be? I mean, it's all the same - just the colors are different.
Beijing Opera report tomorrow - stay tuned!
