Outing with Field and Joey

These are a couple of Don's freshman students. Field (L) started emailing Don awhile back. They were short messages but arrived very very frequently. The thing is that he is very quiet in class and hadn't spoken to Don much outside of class. Imagine our surprise when he offered to show us around and then showed up with Joey in tow. Joey, by the way, is also very quiet in class. They both did a great job starting up and sustaining conversations with both of us. In my opinion, they were both very brave. I'm not so sure I would have offered in their place.

We are finding out that students here view teachers with a high level of respect. No, that doesn't mean they are absolutely attentive in class. It does mean that they want to buy us our meals when we eat together. It means they pour our tea or beer to show their respect. Respect is a very tangible thing here. It's expressed through a series of gestures like pouring for someone or clinking you beer glass lower in the air than the person you respect.

So we spent a nice afternoon wandering around the Black Tiger Springs and a small war museum. The view from the photo above is from the war museum up on a hill. We got a nice view of the city from up there. Many people were fishing and in the upper right hand corner is one of the natural springs. The crowded area is where a man was using a kettle to bring spring water up from the ground and filling water containers for people. Don got our water bottle filled later and I am happy to report that we haven't felt any ill effects... yet.

We had lunch in the old part of Jinan, translation "an area that hasn't been torn down and rebuilt yet". This is the image of Chinatown all around the world. Here, it's just a part of town.

We finished our day searching for an electronic dictionary for me. It was funny when the saleslady proudly showed me the feature that reads out English words. Here, many student take advantage of electronic dictionaries to look up words in class and have them pronounced. So she was quite confused when I spoke through the students and was asking for a feature that spoke Chinese rather than English.

I finally found one though and now can translate Chinese characters. I am getting to practice my writing skills when I copy the character onto the screen. Thankfully, there is a predictive mode so I don't need to be exact. The device kindly gives me 9 options it thinks I might have written and I can chose.

The only problem is that the instructions are in Chinese so I've been using the dictionary to translate them. Slowly but surely, I'm getting the hang of using it. We finally found the mode where we can write out English sentences and the device will say it in Chinese. This will be handy if we really get stuck.

I'm hoping to learn more Chinese characters this way but mainly we are now able to decipher more labels, signs, packaging and menu items. So I've been translating our chip bag, noodle bag, electricity & water bill and anything that has legible writing just for fun. While the translations are often humorous, they give us a better idea. It has made many more things understandable. It also has a nifty feature that reads you Chinese books or English articles... when you are too lazy to read it for yourself from the screen. Good bedtime stories!

J