A Long Week

So if you want to talk about a random week… this has been it. There have been all sorts of crazy stuff happening this past week. There are lots of great things starting to happen out here but at the same time it has been very draining. I’ll try and give everyone a rundown so they know what all has been going on:

Wednesday: I got an invite to go out swimming with the guys to this large pond/small lake that is on the northern edge of town. It has been pretty hot out here lately so I figured it would be a nice chance to cool off for a while. The water was actually really clean and FREEZING. There were about eight or nine of the basketball guys all out there hanging out and going swimming. It was a fun day, and as random as it is to be in an Asian pond with a bunch of little guys in their undies, it actually seemed fairly normal. I don’t think a lot of the cultural things really phase me anymore. Don’t get me wrong, every now and then there will be something and I just have to go ‘huh?’ but a lot of the random things out here are starting to seem normal. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have a great dose of culture shock coming back to the states.

Thursday: I ran into another friend from the states in the gym and he invited me to go get massages with him and some other friends that night. I still got all my basketballing in but it was nice to just get to hang out with some English speakers for a while. While we were getting massages he told me that he found a shop in town that sells basketball nets, and since our court didn’t have any we decided to go out and buy some. They were only a few dollars but they pretty much made us rock stars. All the guys were very excited to see them and it is helping to build up some of relationship. Things out here operate a lot on a relationship currency. If you have a good relationship with someone you can make all kinds of things happen; however if that relationship isn’t there you aren’t going anywhere. It is the same idea with buying things here. You basically have four prices for anything: the stupid white person price, the smart white person who knows how to bargain price, the local price, and the good relationship price. Everything is negotiable and totally depends on your relationship with the person. So while basketball nets seem like a small thing they might end up paying off with helping to establish some relationships.

Friday: I spent most of my day Friday up at the hospital. I wasn’t sick (thank goodness) but one of my friends from the states was. He had been traveling down south and came back with a lot of symptoms of Malaria. But after five IVs and about six hours in a sketchy hospital he was up and moving again. I’m praying that I never have to go to this place for treatment. I’m pretty sure it would be like going to an American hospital in the early 1900s if you took out sanitation. At one point I had to go and hold the IV while he went to the bathroom and other than being filthy there was no sink (or soap) in the only bathroom in the entire hospital. It was pretty gross. At least one of my friends out here is an American nurse and she can help make sure that everything gets taken care of.

Saturday: On Friday night I went out with the basketball guys to play some games and on the way home one of them invited me to go with him and a friend on a bike ride out to a mountain lake. I figured that it would be fun and he is pretty much my closest friend out here (since he is the only one that can speak English) and so I agreed to go. We left early in the morning it took us a little over an hour to get out to the lake. The bike ride was pretty intense. We basically rode up the ridge of the valley to the other side to this alpine lake. It was a beautiful ride, except that I couldn’t enjoy it because my legs were burning the entire time. It was good to get to meet the other guy who went on the trip with us. He is home for the summer from working on his master’s degree in a big city and he also speaks pretty good English. We got out to the lake and, like a lot of things out here, most of it ended up being a tourist trap. There is a new wetland preserve that has just been built on the lake and so we paid the couple dollars to get in and walked around for a while. Eco-tourism isn’t really a big business out here so we had the entire place to ourselves. The environmental manger side of me was freaking out about this place because of how many things they did wrong. Like so many other things out here, nothing is spared at the expense of making money, so a lot of the ‘preserve’ had been paved over, construction was everywhere, there were new huge buildings and conference rooms, and there was even a local art museum. While it doesn’t seem like a lot, there was a pretty good environmental impact. While we were walking along the paved roads it looked like there were thousands of bugs moving around on the ground. It turns out that they were actually very small frogs and they were everywhere. We went inside the museum/conference center and looked at a lot of local ancient religious art. I asked the guys about it and then said that I didn’t know a lot about all of that because of what I believed. The friend who was studying with us also told me that he was a believer and then he started asking me all sorts of good questions. He brought up the subject throughout the day and we had a lot of good opportunities to talk and also to talk to the other guy who was with us. After lunch we went back to my house and played around on the guitar for about an hour. I had a few opportunities to share with them more while we were playing. Both of the guys wanted to get together again soon and hopefully I can start a weekly study with the new guy that I just met. It was a very tiring day but worth all of the exhaustion.

Sunday: So on Sunday we were supposed to have our basketball game but the other team didn’t show. A few of us were out at the court and it started to rain. We were about to go inside when the man who is a former pro-basketball player called us over, put us in his car and drove us to his workplace. He is a big shot in the local gov’t here and he took us up to his office and let us hangout, made a phone call and then a small army of men showed up to cleanup the court and play. We sat around and watched his team play a match and then played the other team after they did. It was a good chance to get to connect with this guy and he and I had a good chance to ask each other some questions about family and things like that. He seems like a very good guy to invest in because he is always looking out for all the other guys and he is very patient with his son, which is a very rare thing out here. Hopefully I can get some more opportunities to get to talk with this guy.

Monday: Today we had our makeup basketball game. I’m pretty sure the guy I was covering was about six-three and two hundred forty pounds. He was a big guy. He was one of the guys on our team’s former sports teacher and he wanted to lean on me the entire game. Between that and not getting to sit out the entire game I was pretty worn out afterwards. We won though. After the game all the guys went and got dinner and then wanted to come back to my house and play guitar for a while. I had an opportunity to play some songs for them and used that as an opportunity to share some. We are supposed to all get together again later on in the week and hopefully we can make coming over to my house a weekly thing.

So that’s been about it for my crazy week. Needless to say it has been hard keeping up with my language study because of all of the random things that keep coming up. I only have a week and a half left on my initial stage of language study and then I should have a little more free time with it and it will be more conversational. I have had a lot of good opportunities to speak the language and I think moving into the conversational stage will be helpful because I can still spend a lot of time with the guys I have met and also work on language at the same time. I’m also hoping that I can find some downtime in the next couple days to relax a little bit. I have been going pretty hard over the last week and I’m looking forward to taking a break for a day or two.

Karaoke

Monsoon season has officially begun out here. It doesn’t rain all day every day, but there is usually a pretty good rainstorm every day. It hasn’t changed getting to play basketball yet, but I have a feeling that over the next couple weeks it might. So our big activity this week was going out and singing karaoke at a local place. It is a pretty high tech set up. You go into this big building with neon lights and walk down these long hallways to a room that your party has all to itself. There is a big screen TV, a touch screen computer with all the songs, and the whole rock band lighting set up. We were planning on going swimming, which is what I wanted to do, but the weather didn’t cooperate. So karaoke it was. It is kind of a weird thing that twenty-year old guys with tattoos and who like to play sports also love to go and sing karaoke. And man, do they LOVE to sing karaoke. So four of us went and spent the afternoon at the karaoke place. Most of the time we were there I just sat around and listened to them sing these random songs that I’ve never heard before and couldn’t understand. After three and a half hours I was starting to go crazy. At least one of the guys, who had never done karaoke before, was also dying to get out of there. I did end up having to sing a few songs. The had a lot of English songs, and I found a few by Coldplay and some other decent bands that I stuck in there; however there was this option to basically take a song and stick it in front of all of the other songs, so… none of those songs ever came up. The only English songs that ever did come up were ones by the Backstreet Boys or Avril Lavigne. I’ve heard them before but they would not have been my first choice of things to sing. After about the third hour of songs I had one of those intense thirty-seconds of culture shock. There was just this sudden feeling of ‘where am I and what is going on?’ It passed pretty quickly but for those thirty seconds I was freaking out.

After our karaoke party we walked back and the guys wanted to eat. It sounded good to me; however after seeing the food it didn’t look so good. We stopped at a small hotdog stand and picked up some hotdogs. I don’t know how hotdogs can be more sketchy than they are in America, but they are. It didn’t come with a bun; just a toothpick and they put some kind of spicy seasoning on it. I’m glad that they added the seasoning because it covered up the weird taste. Actually the taste wasn’t near as bad as the texture. It is hard to describe but it was crunch outside and kind of squishy on the inside. I managed to put mine down though. After the hotdogs we walked a little farther and one of the guys paid a street vendor for some ‘fish’ on a stick. The only think worse than fish on a stick from a street vendor (actually I’ve found out there are a lot of things worse) is when the fish has a tentacle on the end of the stick. I’m about 90% sure it was squid, but there is that 10% that still has no real idea what it was. Don’t get me wrong, most of the food out here is great, especially the stuff that I order for myself. I just think most of the locals have different tastes. So that pretty much was my Sunday. We got back and went and played some basketball and I called it a night. Other than the weekends basically I study all week long. I’m on my sixth week of intensive language study and I only have two left. I don’t really know what the game plan is after that. I think I will get another tutor, possibly one of the basketball guys, and we are going to start working on conversational kinds of things. I’m looking forward to getting to start something a little different.

Shao-Kao

So this week has been more language study. I know that everyone thinks that being over here is this huge adventure and is always exciting, and in many ways it is, but in a lot of ways it is a lot of studying. There just is not a lot you can do until you get the language down. So once again, most of my week has been spent learning the language. Well, that and playing basketball. That is about the one social outlet that I have. I had to take a few days off this week because I kind of jacked up my back a little bit. Some would say it is because I'm getting old, but I'm blaming it on the fact that the court we play on is super slick and the fact that I ran into the most solid guy I think I've ever seen. I was driving to the basket on Tuesday night and this guy kind of jumped into me. Normally it wouldn't have been that big of a deal except this guys was solid (and really good, it turns out he is a professional basketball player that lives in our complex) and when I landed kind of funny i slipped a little which I think thew my back out of whack. A few days of stretching and taking it easy and I'm back at 100%.

On Tuesday I went out to an area of town that I'm going to focus on. It is only a few blocks from where I'm living but if you walk about a mile it starts getting into a village and it is a little more rural. The area just seems like a very dark place. It is very dirty and there are a lot of apartment/hotel types of places, except very run down. We walked around for a while and eventually came to a more rural section. We saw a Buddhist temple and it was packed full of people. We had an opportunity to talk to a couple monks for a while and it was just a strange place. We visited some folks that were parents of a friend of a friend and sat and got to share with them for a while. They invited me to come back anytime and gave me their phone number. They offered to take me out to some different villages for some culture, so one of these days when I get a little more language I'm going to try and follow that up.

Other than that this week was pretty low key. I spent a lot of time hanging out with the guys I've met playing basketball. They took me to lunch on Friday and we went to an internet bar and shot zombies on computers for a couple hours. One of the guys had to go to a class so I decided I could better use my time doing something else and bailed with him. We played some basketball that night and then grabbed some dinner and then went and played a little pool at a place close to our complex. Last night we I told them that I would take them out to dinner and so we went and ate some shao-kao (pronounced shaow cow and roughly translated as 'fire food'). You basically sit around a little metal table with a fire pit and a grill in the middle of it. It is great food if you have a lot of time and want to do some hanging out. I made the mistake, which I will never do again, of letting the guys order. They got some normal stuff like dumplings, grilled potatoes, sliced beef, and egg plant. They also got some not so normal stuff. We had some pig brain stew, which actually wasn't bad (except it was hard to get over the texture). We also had some some blood sausage, which wasn't good. And last but not least we had some stinky dofu. I've eaten a lot of bad things in my life but this is pretty close to the top. It smells like distilled gym socks and mold. Oh yeah, and it has hair. Lucky for us it was the second thing brought out to the table and the last thing that got totally eaten. One of the guys dropped one in my bowl and they all watched to see if I would eat it. I did and I'm pretty sure they got the show they were looking for. I almost choked on the thing but I managed to eat it. I had to brush my teeth twice last night to totally get the taste out of my mouth, and sometimes I think I can still taste it. I think the flavor is burned into my brain. I've been regretting it ever since; not just because of the taste but because I have been sick to my stomach all day today. It has been over twenty-four hours and I'm still not feeling so hot. It probably could have been any number of the things that I ate that has done it but I'm going to blame the stinky dofu.

The Away Game

So this week has started my intensive language studying. I've got at least eight weeks of learning language between five and six hours a day, six days a week. I basically study three hours a day on my own and then meet with my tutor for about two hours. I'm learning a local language which is only oral so we do a lot of pointing at pictures, I write down how I think it sounds, and then reviewing the audio recordings that I've made. I'm studying with the guy I stayed with during the first village trip so I've been out to his house a couple times this week. It is a little far but they usually feed me while I'm there and it has been good to get to see them and spend time with Grandpa and the baby. As strange is it sounds, it is a lot like visiting friends (granted they are friends I can't really talk to. . . but they are still friends). I've also discovered the gym in my apartment complex. My apartment is right behind the basketball courts and the gym is right next to that. It is actually very nice! I mean, I've been working out in the Anson Field House for the last four years, so I'm not very picky, but this place is way nice for being out in a small rural town. So I've been going up there every day.

Basically my day looks like: wake up and read/eat breakfast/read, then study for an hour or two, go work out, lunch, meet with my tutor, then study a little more and then basketball at night. I've noticed this week that there are a bunch of guys that play basketball every evening from about 6:45 until it gets too dark to play (around 8:30). So I've been out there and played with them a few times this week. They are actually pretty good for being out here. I've played a decent amount of basketball in this country and most everyone here is horrible. Most all of these guys have some concept of how to play though, and a few of them are actually good. I kind of have an edge being a good four inches taller and forty pounds heavier than most all of them, so that helps with getting picked on teams. One of the guys I played with one night picked me on his team and we won a lot (it helps that he is one of the better guys out here). After playing together for a couple hours he starts talking to me in English. I was thinking 'You speak English! Why didn't you bring this up sooner?!?' It turns out his English is actually really good. So he is kind of my first friend out there. We played together over the next few nights and he told me that we have an apartment complex team that plays on the weekends just for fun, and I got an invite to play with them this weekend.

So today was our big game. I got a text last night telling me that we were meeting at the basketball courts at 2 pm and taking a taxi to our game. It turns out we play away games, and our game today was in a town about forty minutes away on the other side of a mountain. So we load up into this really nice Jetta and drive out to this big complex with a large iron gate and an armed guard (which kind of jumped out at me since guns are illegal here). I'm quickly told that we are playing a military base. We go out and start warming up and then this whistle is blown and about sixty men in uniform come marching out in formation chanting and carrying stools. My friend who speaks English says 'look, we have an audience.' It is a little intimidating being the only white guy at an away game against the military (especially of a country that you're country doesn't always get along with) and then having a pretty large audience all packing heat. But once the game started it all kind of faded away. Both teams had coaches, however I didn't understand any of what mine was saying, refs and score keepers. We jumped out to an early lead and were winning 23-10 at the end of the first quarter. I'm pretty sure I had the most muscular guy out here I've ever seen guarding me. Then in the second quarter some other guys showed up and my guy was replaced with an even bigger guy. We were about tied at half time, then were down in the third and pushed ahead in the fourth. We ended up losing when the other team started hitting a lot of threes at the end. I think the final score was 100-94 but I'm not totally sure. They used some kind of weird scoring system and wrote it in chalk.

I did okay in the game but constantly had about three guys guarding me. Their basic game plan on defense was to stack three guys in the paint on me, have one guy guarding the ball, and then have another guy waiting down court for a long pass and an easy fast break basket. For some reason our team could not figure out how to defend this. It also didn't help that they didn't keep track of fouls and when you got fouled there were no free throws, you just got the ball out of bounds. So I got fouled. A LOT. I think it averaged out to once every two trips down the court. So I had some kind of messed up stat line. I think I had a couple steals. I had three or four blocks, including one where I chased a guy down on a fast break and threw it out of bounds when he layed it up (all the military guys yelled). About eight points (remember the foul thing...), and at least twenty-five rebounds. The team we played was pretty good though, so I'm not too worried about anyone else we'll face. And I honestly think if we played them again we would win.

After the game we left pretty quickly because all the military guys dispersed and later formed a line. I noticed that they all had guns and my friend who spoke English said 'look they are about to shoot their guns.' That was about the time I got the hint that we should leave. The coach and five of the guys were taking the car back to the school to study so that left the four older guys and myself to find our way back to our apartment complex. We had to walk about half a mile back to the main road and then were going to hitch-hike back to town. We were about to get in the back of a cargo truck when a minivan taxi pulled up and we all jumped in that instead. It is funny how sports bonds guys together. After the game it was like we have all been best friends forever. We joked about the game and how the other team played dirty and how we should have won. After we got back the guys took me out to dinner at the front gate of the apartment and we spent a couple hours hanging out. Somehow I always find myself in these random kinds of situations when I'm out here. Don't get me wrong, it was a great day. . . just random. But since these guys are about the only ones I know in this country I'm sure we'll all be hanging out a lot over the next few weeks.

Village Week Two

Well I've survived week two out in the village. It was a good week. The setup this week was a little more . . . rustic. Things weren't bad but our village was more on the outskirts of the valley so it was little more rural than last week (aka, not a fun to have to visit the toilet and no shower for the week). The village was a great location. We lived right along the southern ridge and very close to a lake and a golf course. Nobody really plays golf out here but they have a couple courses. I think it is just too much money for anyone to spend on a hobby, so only tourists go and play out there. The family I stayed with this week was great. There was an older man, who told me to call him Uncle, and his wife, Aunt, and they were both great hosts. We couldn't understand much of what each other said but they would always just smile and laugh. Our basic day would be that we would get up and cook breakfast then go for our morning walk. Most days this consisted of hiking up the ridge and collecting firewood. It was good to just get out and there were some amazing views from on top of the ridge. One morning Aunt decided to take me out to the golf course. Like everything else around here, you just talk to the guard a little bit and they let you right in. So we walked out there and then around the first five or six holes and then back again. It was a LONG walk. The course is on the side of the ridge so it was a lot of uphill walking. And it was hot this week, so we got a good workout in every day. After our walk we would cook lunch, then it was nap time, and then I'd spend most of the afternoon studying. I didn't get as much studying in this week as I would have liked because every time they saw me with my language book they would come over and want to help me out. It was actually a good review on some things but it made me go a lot slower. Our evenings usually consisted of getting dinner together and then watching TV. When you're in a culture where there is not a lot to do you spend a lot of time with meals. Over the past two weeks we probably averaged a good hour on getting breakfast and lunch ready and then dinner would usually take between one and a half and two hours. It gives you something to do though. And Aunt knows how to cook too. The food this week has been really good. Usually there would be a mix of something a little weird or that I wouldn't like with something that was amazing. So I tried to fill up on the good stuff as much as I could. Thursday night I had a few things that I'd never had before. We had some rabbit (not bad) and some horse (not good). I had forgotten what it was like to be living with a grandmother. They have no hesitations to put things in your bowl if they don't think that you are eating enough of your vegetables (or horse for that matter). So that is a little different but Aunt wasn't as bad about it as some others that I have known.

There was a little more English this week. The son who lived at the house could actually speak a little English. So it was not as hard to communicate as it was last week. By about Wednesday I was starting to have conversational issues. Basically being out in these villages has been taking on a vow of silence for the past two weeks. It was fun but it was starting to get old not having anyone to talk to and not being able to communicate anything more complicated than 'I don't want that.' One of the things about learning a new language is that you are basically forced to be an introvert until you learn how to communicate. It is very frustrating at times. But it is good motivation for learning.

I got home this weekend and enjoyed a good shower and then have basically been running errands. It makes for crazy times when you move to a new country and then spend your first two weeks there out of pocket. It makes my weekends back in town very busy with trying to get things done. I did take a break yesterday afternoon and went and hung out with a bunch of other foreigners and local teachers. We went to 'the fun place' and had a big cookout. One of the guys brought a bunch of pork tenderloins, some veggies, and we had some marinated chicken and we had an ol' fashioned bbq. It was the best meal I've had in a long time. Then we went out and played some laser tag. We played on teams with the Americans against the locals and even though we had two people less than they did, we dominated. I guess that is what happens when you play people who live in a country with strict gun control laws. It was a good relaxing day and a great way to unwind from spending a week in the village.

Village Week One

Well I've survived my first week out in the villages. To be honest it was a lot less village-like and a lot more resort-like than I thought it was going to be. The house I was staying at was more in a neighborhood on the edge of town instead of being out in a village. It was a great place to stay. The houses out here are built in a style that has a large courtyard in the center of the house and the rooms are actually all within the wall. It is kind of like an old fort I guess. The house I was staying in had a small garden in their courtyard (as opposed to most people who keep animals and random junk) and it was really nice. there were a couple of cherry trees that were just starting to become ripe, so I had cherry blossoms and also fresh cherries whenever I wanted them. They also had a lattice built with lilacs hanging from it that you had to walk under to get to my room. The room I stayed in was very clean and the house, in general, was VERY nice. Even the bathroom wasn't all that bad. I mean, it was still a squatty, and you had to go around the chicken coup to get to it, but it was very clean. There was a concrete area with a large slanted pipe in the hole and they even had a bucket with water in it that you used to sort of flush everything down. So I can't really complain about the set up.

No one out there spoke English, so most of my week was spent in silence or just trying to get some basic points across. The family was a dad, mom, their one year old baby and grandpa. Grandpa watched the baby all day because everyone else was at work. So for most of the week I was with him on babysitting duty. It was actually really nice to be watching the baby. I think it was comforting to know that there was at least one person that I could communicate better than. And the baby and I got along great. I think it was because of our common bond of not being able to speak. Basically my days would look like:

-Getting up in the morning and helping with breakfast: I got to build and keep up the fire, but they wouldn't let me touch the food.

-Then our morning walk: Usually we'd take the baby out to the street vendors a few blocks away.

-Then nap time.

-Lunch

-Studying for a couple hours after lunch

-Our afternoon walk. These were a little more random. One day we went out to the new sports complex that they are building in our town. It is very nice but they are still doing a lot of construction on it. We got out there and Grandpa started talking to the guard at the gate and after about ten minutes he let us walk right on in. We climbed up into the new soccer stadium (walking right past all the construction workers wearing hard hats) and saw the new basketball complex. I should be pretty nice once they finish it all. Another afternoon we took a bunch of carpet on a bike out to this large pond that is a few blocks away. We got out some brooms and some laundry detergent and threw the carpets in the pond and then Grandpa and I started scrubbing away.

-Dinner, tutoring, and then crashing sometime around 11pm

So that was pretty much my week. Another random event was that on Monday a guy showed up with a medical kit and I was kind of wondering what was going on. Grandpa pointed at the pigs and so I helped him round the two of them up. I then got to watch as the guy castrated one of them (the boy) and then cut into the side of the other one and pulled out part of the intestine or something, cut it off, and then stitched it up. I'm still not totally sure what that was all about. Tuesday was haircut day. A guy came over, he's related somehow but I'm not totally sure, and he brought some clippers. He gave Grandpa a haircut and then he let me cut his. I figured I'd return the favor by letting him cut mine. I was going to have to have it all cut off eventually anyway and I figured it'd make a good story. I had a language breakthrough this week too. On the way back from going to see the new sports complex the baby went to the bathroom in his pants. They don't really use diapers out here and so there is a lot of times where we'd have to stop and Grandpa would pick up the baby, drop his pants, hold him out and then we'd wait for him to do his thing. Every time he'd do this out by the road I would always wonder if people thought it was weird (especially since there was a white guy just sitting with them). Anyway, the baby went in his pants and so Grandpa was cleaning him off and then he said 'pants' (not in English but in the language I'm learning) and I knew exactly what he said without thinking about the context or anything. It was a small thing but it is nice to know that I'm starting to get a little bit of the language.

I got back to my place on Friday night and then have been running errands all weekend. It makes for crazy weekends when you've been gone all week and then try to cram everything you need to do to get settled in into two days. I met my new landlord and paid a year's rent on my apartment. It is a really nice place. It has two bedrooms, an office, it is clean and in a great location, and all for about $2000/year. I did manage to go and get an hour and a half massage with a couple of the girls that live out here. I figured that it would be $8 well spent after a week in the village. And it was. I spent the afternoon today playing a little basketball. The basketball court is right behind my apartment building and I'm going to try and spend some time out there once I finish up all my time out in the villages. I went out there to watch them play for a minute last week and then I went out to play a little today. One of the guys from last week recognized me, which isn't saying much because I kind of stand out. Hopefully I can start getting to know those guys once I have a little more free time. I'll be heading out to the village again tomorrow morning and I should be coming back on either Friday or Saturday. I've been told that this village is a little more out of town, so it could be a little more village like. If it is anything like this last week it won't be bad. I'll be staying with the in-laws of the guy I stayed with this last week, so I'll at least have a little bit of a connection. I'll catch up on things one I get back in a week.

I'm back!

Okay, so after much harassment from people I've decided to resurrect the blog. I'm not going to do daily updates or anything like I've done in the past. I mean, who has time for that kind of thing? My goal is to write something once a week or if something big comes up. I'll be back dating a few of these first entries from my journal but I should be caught up soon.

I've made it back to LJ and there were several things that I've forgotten since the last time that I was out here. The first one is that it isn't a twelve hour flight from L.A. to Hong Kong, it is fifteen. I'm pretty sure that I have airplane a.d.d. because I'm always dying by the end of that flight. I did end up next to a nice Australian guy who was about my age. He had a really thick accent and was hard to understand but we got along well. He invited me to go grab lunch with him in Hong Kong but I figured since I only had a four hour layover I'd better just hang out in the airport. After Hong Kong I have two more stops and with each one it becomes more and more like a different place. Hong Kong's airport is different but it is different in the fact that there are Prada and Gucci stores. With each stop afterwards you become more and more rural and things get increasingly less western. At my second stop I remembered a few more things. One is that there is no such thing as a line here. People just crowd around and push their way towards the front of whatever line they are supposed to be in. I remembered this pretty quickly so I did the same and it saved me a lot of time. I also forgot how big I am compared to everyone else here. The people over here are generally small but most of the people I would see were minority people and they are even smaller. I'm basically a giant wherever I go. The third thing I remembered in the airport is that every price is negotiable here, including how much you pay in the airport for overweight baggage (which I'm pretty proud that I got a third of the price knocked off).

After getting to town it has been a busy couple of days. Friday I got moved in and ran some errands and then yesterday we had a big Easter egg hunt with a ton of kids from our apartment complex. I've also started language already (I think it is a record to start that on your first full day here). I basically work with a tutor for a couple hours a day and we have a book full of pictures. We work in groups of six pictures and he says points and says the word and I write down how I think it sounds. Then we go back over the words again and he just points. Then he mixes up the order and says the words and I have to point or do the command that he is giving. Then we record an audio file for me to study later. Then we add six more. By the end of each session we go over between forty and fifty words. It isn't that hard until you start having thirty plus words you're supposed to remember and your brain is tired. But I don't think it will be too bad. I'm looking forward to getting the language down.

My game plan for the next couple of weeks is to spend them out in some villages. I'm not exactly sure what to expect. The villages that I've been in before have been pretty rough places to live. No running water, not good food, and only an outhouse with a hole in the ground. I'm going to spend my first week at my tutor's house, then come home for the weekend, then go back out again to another village the next week. I'll be leaving tonight and will be back on Saturday. Six days is a long time to spend out in a village. The longest that I've stayed out before has been four days and by the end of it I was dying to get back to civilization. I'll update things once I get back.