270 dtg (the universe delivers team hanyu)

Before I came to Qingdao a wise man told me that it should come as no surprise if, during my time here, I continually met people who would be ideally suited to assisting my cause of learning Chinese. "The universe arranges itself around your goals" he told me. "Really?" I had to wonder, the universe arranges itself? Come on, I thought ... how could that be possible.

I'm more of a control freak, and so figured that if I blindly followed a routine of studying for thirteen hours a day I would be fine. Therefore, I planned the following:

1) to never work in a job that required teaching english
2) to sit next to a non-english speaker in class
3) to find a girlfriend as soon as possible (and speak in Chinese obviously)

One and a half months in to my time here, I have achieved none of the above and yet the universe has indeed delivered Team Hanyu. I ended up sitting next to the only other Australian in my class, but it's great because if either of us don't understand a point, we can always quickly work it out together using English. In the meantime, just across the row from me sits Fu-Xin (who I have renamed Cong-Nu "Clever Girl"), you may remember her from an earlier blog. We hang out together quite a bit (because she's so cool), and yes, I still can't speak Korean so our Chinese is mutually progressing rapidly.

I didn't want to get a job, but some extra pocket money doesn't go astray. Sure enough, the universe deliverd a new student to our class, a Japanese lady with a 10 year old son who needs a few hours a week of help with his English homework. Since her son loves Australia (they holiday there), she was ideally looking for an Australian male ...

I haven't managed to find a girlfriend, but my study of Qingdao's night spots ended at the second place I went to, so I've pretty much stopped looking. The first was the student hang-out, the second happens to be this cool place with a funky group of young Chinese people about my age. Shonny, the DJ, and I talk music. Rachel and Ella (also both Chinese - I'm using their English names for simplicity) will happily chat away to me in Chinese for hours on end and seem to have no problem with my constant requests for them to repeat themselves.

Plenty of people in China advertise themselves as private-tutors, but really good ones are hard to find. That makes me especially lucky to have found Cynthia, my jia-jiao (home teacher), who you may remember from an earlier email will not only teach me at home, but will go as far as correcting every mistake I make while we are out at dinner, sharing a drink or even (attempting) to go on a blind date!

If you run a lot, you know the value of a good massage. When you can find a cool guy from Shanghai who'll work on you for one hour, talk about his family the entire time, and only charge you 20 kuai (US$ 2.50) for the privilidge, you can't help but think that's a pretty good arrangement.

So the University offers a Tai-Chi class, you can't help but think that it's going to be taught by a septagenarian. No no, it's a cool guy who, just for fun, will show you how to turn each Tai-Chi move into a little piece of kung-fu. Cool!

I wanted to learn a little more about Chinese culture, and sure enough the universe delivered Sunny, a local university student. We chat together for an hour every afternoon, and she teaches me cheng yu gu shi, which are these short sayings that Chinese people love to drop into conversation. shou zhu dai tu (guard the tree wait for the rabbit) is one of my favourites, I recommend you ask your Chinese friends to tell you the story … it's pretty cool.

Depending on your religious (or other) persuasion, I guess you could call this a miracle, fate or luck. I'm not sure which it is yet, but if it is indeed religious it's certainly a LOT more interesting than a creation story, and it's worth reflecting on at some point. In the meantime though, Team Hanyu and I have work to do - there's only 270 days to go!