Our encounter with Lunch

Today Lisa and I had a lunch adventure.  While yes, Lisa and I have been here for a while, we have thus far found ourselves in one of two situations when it comes to getting meals: either we have been with someone who speaks Mandarin who has ordered for us, or we have gone to a western style restaurant where we can select the number of the meal we want.  Today, as we were on our own and wanting to eat, we decided to break that cycle and order from a Chinese restaurant for lunch. We armed ourselves with a list of common Sichuan dishes listed in both English and Chinese and hit the streets.  After walking for quite a while and seeing only hotpot restaurants (a restaurant where you have a basin of hot broth boiling in front of you and then you cook your ordered food in that) and deciding that they were maybe above our level of food ordering capability we started wondering where all those little restaurants we had seen everywhere had gone.  Finally we found a friendly looking place and walked in.  After quite a few minutes of frustration and having them say no to all the dishes we pointed at on our list, they finally suggested (through much pointing) that maybe we try the restaurant down the street.  After walking in the direction they had pointed for a while we decided maybe there wasn't a restaurant there waiting to serve us from our list and dejected, we headed back for home.  On the last little street of our journey home we were happily rewarded with a little restaurant that displayed all their food at the front.  We pointed at what we thought looked good.  It turned out to be a delicious meal of rice, with various vegetables, chicken and tofu.  We went home happy and refreshed.  I guess I never really appreciated the fact that I could communicate with strangers as much as I should have.  It turns out being able to understand all those pesky sales people trying to sell you stuff is a good thing. 

Mark

In The Beginning...

Well, after an arduous 26 hours of traveling, here we are in China for 10 months of volunteering teaching English and learning Mandarin.  We have been here over a week now and I have never felt so overloaded with new information.  There are a lot of new and exciting things to explore.  Our host family as well as others involved in planning our stay here have been very gracious and patient with us, taking the time to show us around the city and teaching us all sorts of things we will need to know during our time in Nanchong. Mark and I got our class schedules yesterday.  We will each be teaching two English speaking classes at North Sichuan Medical University.  As well, we will together be teaching a course on "the society and culture of English speaking countries".  That one makes me a bit nervous, as we have to lecture two and a half hours each week on things like "the Political System in New Zealand" and "Social Problems in the United States".  We were given a text book, but it will be a lot of work to put together the entire curriculum for the year.  I hope we can make it interesting.  We have almost two weeks before classes start, so we will be hard at work preparing in the next little while!

Lisa