85% chinese

In the past six weeks, I have gotten used to...

• paying in RMB - I no longer convert back to the US dollar (unless I am trying to rationalize a seemingly expensive purchase)
• responding to "Teacher" and "老师" and even "Hamburger"
• speaking slowly and using direct/easy vocabulary
• saying "haiya" (pronounced hi-YAHH) to express frustration. Often.
  
• running on a treadmill that tracks my progress in km - again, the conversion to American units is no longer necessary
  
• biking and running in a city where cars drive on sidewalks while bikes pulling entire truckloads use the road
• eating at a restaurant or street vendor 2, 3, and sometimes 4 times a day
• drinking disgusting canned coffee that tastes suspiciously like the container it comes in
• using chopsticks - even for pasta in my apartment. Can anyone find a fork around here?!
• overseeing my students' morning exercises and eye exercises. Hard to believe how foreign these seemed just a month ago!

8:00 "morning exercises" in the courtyard of the ISS

• living in the tropics - this Minnesota girl even put on a sweater when it got down into the sixties last night
• eating meat with relatively little idea which animal, or part of that animal, it originally belonged to
• my rock hard bed
• being unable to understand the majority of signs and conversation around me
• bartering, sometimes to 1/4 the asking price, for seemingly everyday purchases
• pretending I knew the computer in my classroom wasn't going to work and that I really did intend to play Bingo/hangman/murder mystery/20 questions/charades for the last 15 minutes of class
• unexpected surprises in class at the last moment. Key example from this afternoon: my year 1 class had an extra student, Enson, who is my Year 4 low-level English Corner. He couldn't explain his presence to me with his limited English, but when I asked another teacher later, I found out that he had been "acting like a Year 1 student so today he will be a Year 1 student." This would be the classic degrading punishment, made altogether more degrading by the fact that in our spelling contest, Ben and Coco beat Enson on every single word.

Enson, Ben, and Coco caught in a rare quiet/studious moment

Of course, there are some things I'm still working on: the absolute mess of the Chinese planned-one-day-at-a-time school system; being stared at and photographed endlessly ("外国人!"); and my 7th-9th grade class, who openly state that they have no interest in learning English, and instead belittle each other and me for 40 straight minutes each week (seriously: this week after they left, I locked the door, sat in the empty classroom, and cried). But my assimilation list is growing longer and I am already getting the sense that leaving in February might not actually be all that easy... It's nice to feel at home on the other side of the world.