Rats and other difficulties (day 4)

Class (characters).

Nǐmén hǎo! There are rats above my head. I hear them crawling around at night, it's kind of creepy. I mean, nothing that you can't get used to... Story of my life here? Today was the first real day of class. Which meant two hours of spoken and two hours of written chinese. Our first teacher is enthousiastic yet erratic. She keeps telling us 'fei cheng' or something like that, basically meaning 'good job', even when we totally mess up the speaking. And believe me, the extent of stuff that you cán mess up when trying to speak Chinese is astounding. I'm not even going to get into it anymore, except for the fact that I studied for hours on end after school (yeah, really) without really getting any further in my opinion. I'm quite shocked at my complete ineptness! Anyway, teacher number two doesn't take it as sweetly. She keeps repeating what we say in a slightly different way and we never really completely get what the big deal is, although I'm sure there's SOMEthing. All in all, complicated. On the other side, the people (again) are awesome- some very interesting and smart English people and a tall, muscly, blond, pierced, and extremely shy German guy. 

Spicy breakfast!

I was introduced to a few new weird food-things, such as a wonderful, wonderful kind of fried sweet baguette. That's gonna be my breakfast tomorrow! I guess what I don't learn by studying... I learn a lot about very different things. Such as the ongoing struggle between Krakow and Warsaw (apparently Krakow thinks THEY should be the capital and not Warsaw, since they are the city of Kings). I also have learnt a lot about vodka (that's really L.'s fault, my Polish roommate). I spoke to an ex-Oxford student about 1984 (the book) and how that compares to the Chinese society of these days. I learnt how not to look at Chinese people so it's not so obvious how much they stare at me. And just a few seconds ago I heard that the supposed rats from upstairs are actually a dog. Hmm... I do hope my problems with Chinese turn out in an equally pleasant way. For now, zàijiàn!