Language Incompetence

Having lived in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language before, I knew adjusting again would be challenging. But I didn't realize I would be this incompetent! If you can't read most Chinese characters, it's difficult to do even simple things like using the washing machine or buying food at a restaurant. I can recognize the characters for "meat," "chicken," "fish," and "vegetable" but that's pretty much it. And there are so many characters, and usually no English translations.

Same goes for ordering drinks. For some reason, even when I try to speak Chinese to people, they have a hard time understanding me. Like today I tried to order pearl milk tea from a small tea stand. I told them, in Chinese, "I want a small pearl milk tea, no ice, half sugar." Which is straight-forward enough to say, but the guy taking my order still looked confused. Maybe I'm not getting my tones right, but I don't think my accent is that bad. I can't wait for classes to start so I can see if other people in the class (including the teacher) can actually understand me.

It's been raining non-stop...again. It's really tempting to stay holed up inside (to avoid getting sick and to save money), but if I stayed inside every day it rained, I probably wouldn't ever see sunlight. So tomorrow I'm going to make it a point to go to this exhibit downtown. It'll also be the last day of summer vacation so I better enjoy it!