Tower of Babel

So, after 6 weeks of living in another country I have come to find that language is one of those things I have taken for granted my entire life. Maybe its even more frustrating to me since I have a degree in Communications :) What at first we thought would be "an adventure" has turned into being 27 and feeling like an infant. Not being able to read, write, or talk, is to say the least very frustrating. Our lives have resorted to a big game of charades and pictionary.

Example 1: Hungry and looking for a quick bite to eat we stopped by a little bakery where I purchased a little pastry that I thought was filled with chocolate. Instead it was bean curd.

Example 2: Picture menues!!! Our saving grace - sometimes. Pictures can be very misleaidng, especially when you'e hungry things look like what they are not. For instance what looked like green beans turned out to be an extremely HOT pepper. Realized that AFTER we took a couple bites. The heat takes a few seconds to hit. We are both pretty sure we now have ulcers.

Example 3: Bought an oven! Besides the fact it brings back childhood memories of baking in an Easy Bake Oven, because thats what it looks like, we were so excited to be able to start baking! However ALL directions are in Chinese. As of right now it takes 2 hours to bake one tray of cookies. Yes, you read that correctly 2 HOURS! Maybe someday I can figure out how to put it on the correct setting....

Example 4: We experienced a small victory in that we are now able to say the address of our school and our home to the taxi driver. We no longer depend on somehting to show with the address written on it in Chinese. However, we are still trying to learn the correct way to say "stop here". The other day as the driver was approaching our desired destination Michael told him "keting, keting!" which is translated "living room, living room!"

Example 5: Our first day of class we were learning pronunciation and tones. One of our excercises was she would say a word and we would say which tone it was -1,2,3 or 4. Well, we had evidently moved onto another excercise and I was the only one in class who did not realize that. She wrote two columns of words on the board and she would say a word and we would say which column it was in, either 1 or 2. I thought we were still doing the other excercise. So when she said a word I yelled out "4" in Chinese. I actually did this a few times and Michael leaned over and asked what I was doing. It turned out she was calling on another student, and I kept answering. On top of that, I kept yelling out "4" which wasn't an option for what we were doing. To make matters worse, 4 in Chinese is the same word for "death". So I figure it was somewhat concerning to my teacher that I kept randomly yelling out "die, die!" to her in class.

Example 6: Michael decided it was time for a haircut. There's a small place next door and we decided to try it. We went in, he sat down and the guy looked at him and raised his hands as if to say "so what do you want?" Michael looked at me, I walked over and pretended to buzz his head with a razor, complete with sound effects. Then I pretended to snip the top of his hair with scissors, also with sound effects. It worked, The guy's eyes lit up and Michael got a great haircut all for 5 kuai, which is less than a US dollar!

In our short time here, we have gained many more stories of language mishaps. Trying to buy flour and buying cornstarch. Making a man in the market mad because I said the wrong thing when he tried to sell me something, ordering a certain dish and getting other things with it that we didn't want, etc., etc. But afterwards we are, for the most part, able to laugh at it. And we both look forward to the day when we will be able to not just say a phrase or two, but actually hold a meaningful conversation about the Good News with someone in their heart language!