Today I Met “Devil”

Here’s a picture of Chandler, another awesome NSLI-Yian, and I at the track. If your wondering why I look so red in the face, it’s because I just finished a workout.

早安 (zǎo’ān)！On the first day I came to China, they asked me what I wanted to eat for breakfast. They showed me a few options, including a traditional Chinese food called 粽子 (zòng zi), but they warned that my stomach would not feel good if I ate 粽子. We had fruit and oats instead. However, after seeing that other NSLI-Yians had tried this dish, they gave it to me today. 粽子 is wrapped in a long leaf and tied with string, and the insides consist of sticky rice and bean paste or meat. The one I tried had a hint of sweetness. While I was eating my sticky ball of rice with bean paste, 吴擦 was trying to explain that my stomach might hurt after eating this. She even used a translating app to tell me what indigestion is in Chinese. Not very reassuring. Sticky rice aside, today we learned more about the different denominations of Chinese money and how to buy things at a store or restaurant. We did quite a few role play activities where one student would be a shopkeeper and the other a customer. At 3:00 pm, we had our first Chinese test. Woo hoo! There was a written and speaking portion. It wasn’t incredibly hard, but the speaking and listening section was the hardest for me. At the end of day, as you can probably guess, I went for a run. This time a random girl asked if she could run with me. She did so for one lap and then quit. At the conclusion of my run, I saw the boy again. While I was sitting with 吴擦 and her friends, he came over and asked us if we remembered him. I realized who he was, but by the time I realized, he shied away. We went out to a restaurant near the school and ate noodles and dumplings. I asked 吴擦 if I could have some vegetables and eggs, so I had a meal of eggs, cabbage, and soy milk. The owner of the restaurant gave me my meal for free as a gift and also because it was very cheap to make. Today, 吴擦 had English class in the evening, so I tagged along again. It was a very interesting experience. As I listened to the Chinese students make mistakes in English, I thought that this is how I must sound to them when I speak Chinese. One boy referred to a boy as “she” not “he” on accident, and I remembered when I accidentally used the wrong pronouns in Chinese. They were learning about ways to learn English, which were ways that apply when learning other languages too. At the end of the day, I met Micah’s host sister named Devil (Micah is a girl in my Chinese class from Indiana). Devil is her English name, and she informed me that Angel gave her that name. She thought I looked like Hermione, but I feel like that’s only because I’m one of the few blonde-brown-haired, blue-eyed females she has ever met. I’ve met other Chinese students with very interesting English names, like Candy and Summer, and also some with more common names, such as Tracy, Julia, Betty, Tony, Toby, and Jay. At the end of the day, my host family offered me some dragon fruit. It was incredibly delicious and very beautiful with deep plum-color tints. The day before, I tried lychee, which is a type of fruit that has a hard, reddish-greenish shell and translucent flesh with a small pit in the center. I love all of these new fruits!