Communication (or lack thereof) with the Chinese

Scuba was kind enough to give me access to add to his blog. Becoming an honorary Scuba Steve was always one of my goals. As Scuba has talked about in his entries, the past few days have included multiple culture shocks that have imprinted life-long memories into our brains. I want to add to these experiences by touching on our interactions with natives and other foreigners we have run into.

As previously mentioned, our first dinner was with a couple of administrators from BSU, but only one of them spoke broken English well enough to interact with. He informed us on some of the preparations for the Olympics and what has changed around campus along with some of the specific areas of study amongst most of the students. However, being that we had just arrived earlier that day, all I really wanted to do was stuff my face with delicious, authentic Chinese food.

A couple of days later(Wednesday), we had the day off and were desperate to immerse ourselves into the culture. A few of us walked over to the basketball courts in the center of campus in search of a basketball to join in on. Luckily there were a couple of students shooting around and they were happy to welcome us, but one was quick to say one of the few English phrases he knew, "I sorry, my English is no good." Because of the language barrier there was not much verbal interaction, but throwing a non-English speaker into a team of Americans made no difference in how we played the game. So not only was it fun to be playing basketball, it was a cool to have such an extensive interaction with these 2 students without having a full conversation. In addition, there were multiple Chinese spectators who, by watching us play, made me feel like we were the US national basketball team. They never stop staring at us like we are celebrities!

Later on that day, a group of us took a walk to to the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan Garden) and stopped for lunch on the way. This was the first time we had to order food ourselves, aside from the dining hall in which we just point to what we want. Absolutely no one in the restaurant spoke a word of English which made the ordering process extremely awkward. We had virtually no idea what we had ordered, but the food turned out to be pretty tasty. Walking over to the garden was the first time we spent a significant amount of time outside of campus, and the same trend, celebrity treatment, applied. This also continued throughout our time at the Old Summer Palace.