Just Another 美国 Au Pair in Hangzhou

I was just running around the house with the Grandmother hunting down a house fly to no avail. So my time may be limited for this one. Nevertheless, here we go. Friday the Au Pair representatives came up to Hangzhou for a series of meetings so they dropped by the house. We had a very long conversation about religion and politics over some delicious chicken and crab. It mostly involved explaining the origins of Judaism and why they are different from Christians, and how Chinese communism is drastically different than Karl Marx communism. All parties involved left informed, educated, and full of crab. Saturday morning we all went down to the school for their annual 5k fun-run fundraiser event. We got their just in time for me to be thrown into the 5k starting line and start running without stretching. I definitely regretted this afterwards. But hey, between waiting for the kids to come within eyesight and the traffic stops, I still ran a 30:00 flat. After that the kids went ...

I love the feeling of being a regular traversing the Pacific Ocean. This was my 7th transpacific flight within a 1 year span and I felt well accustomed as the hours flew by. A couple of new mothers sat in front of me, so I had brightly smiling Chinese baby faces to entertain me for 12 hours. Also finished the whole 1st season of This Is Us and I’ll definitely need to continue that in the near future. Upon landing in Shenzhen I was immediately reminded of the fact that I don’t speak or understand anything resembling Chinese despite my desperate efforts to study on my HelloChinese language app (which its voice recognition software can be more than sketchy on many occasions). In broken Chinese I wandered around the terminal to try and find a place to check in for my final connecting flight. Finally, a kind woman in red came up to me with a cell phone and used a translation app she had to help me out. I took off for Hangzhou shortly after. In the long-awaited 80 degree fahrenheit he...

Literally me this entire week, when I finally understand a single word anyone says: Okay, so maybe there was a little dash of sarcasm and/or click-bait-ery in my title. But really, though. Mandarin is probably the easiest -- nay, the simplest -- language out there. “What? But everyone says that Mandarin is the hardest language in the world and you have to have perfect pitch to learn it and and and…” So why would I argue otherwise? Well, here’s some quick examples. Mandarin Chinese has a total of 3 pronouns. That’s right. JUST 3. 我 (Wo, I), 你 (Ni, You), and 他 (Ta, He/She). Now, there are a handful of articles that can be suffixed to these 3 in order to imply plurality or possession (们, 的, etc.), but at the basis, you’ve only got 3 pronouns to worry about. Wow. So hard. English, on the other hand, has at least 15 pronouns I can count off the top of my head. We conveniently mixed plurality and possession into the words themselves just to complicate things. Plus, we have t...