Celebrating one month survival! & Heeello to language study!!

Tomorrow will mark my ONE Month here in E. Asia. Can't believe it!! And supposedly I start my intense schedule this week. As it turns out, my teacher's mother had an emergency surgery and she will be out for two weeks. So, my intense week didn't start out so intense afterall. I got a mellow start, each day so far I have a chance to chill, eat a nice breakfast in the morning and study, and in the afternoon, I head out to meet my tutor for some one-on-one learning. I have two tutors. A man and a woman. The male tutor is for learning basic pinyin, the female one is teaching me how to actually converse with others and to help review my classroom lessons and to teach me how to read these lessons out loud. Sigh! so sad to learn how tone deaf I am. And Chinese is such a tonal language and nasally, so wild to keep getting reminder to speak from the front of mouth!! I feel like I'm speaking German; though I never took German. I admire any foreigner who speaks Chinese so well (like my long term colleagues, it's amazing to hear them). I never realize how many tones there are. Michael, who is a trained vocalist is quite tough to please...all his students say so. He seriously corrects and listens to my tones with his eyes closed, it's intimidating. While Wendy, she's so sweet, very patient and lots of fun to hang with. I studied at her place today and had a great cultural exchange with her family. Her mom was there and we interacted a little. Wendy's mom is such a sweet lady and is very much your common local housewife. She was so gracious and similarly to any local people, very excited to meet a foreign Chinese person since they hardly ever interact with one, not to mention know of one. To many of the locals, Chinese is Chinese. You are one regardless of where you came from and you 'should' know chinese. If you don't, you are strange, at least it's a strange concept to them. She had tons of questions to ask me but was quickly stopped by her daughter who didn't want her mother to embarass her. I picked up some but had very limited ability to answer her...oh well! First question that comes out often is 'Ni duo da le?' = "How old are you?" Well, I've would've been fine to answer her except Wendy was so embarassed by her that she sent her to make us homemade noodles instead. I wish I could interact with her mom more, and be able to take pictures of their place and the food. But I didn't want to make a spectacle of them. The noodle was yummy! However, the major starch intake put me into a food coma upon coming home. Needed a nap and took a power nap before heading out to our meeting...now I know why there's a siesta time. They have a big lunch (filled with starch & veggie) and have a food coma afterwards, I guess why bother going to work when you are not productive?? Right?? While life is sailing along and I am getting more at ease with it all (it's great to take the bus around, I get to learn the city much more); I still struggle with occasional digestive issues. Wonder why?? And I'm not even eating out much anymore. Oh well...

Hope things back home are okay! I've been trying to follow the election...between the crash of the stock market and the election, life back home seems like it's not dull at all. (bu tai hao ba!=not too good, right?).