258 dtg (i got married)

Shang ge xing-qi wo gen yi ge fei-chang piao-liang de gu-nian yi-qi jie-hun le. Ke-shi, wo-de xing-niang fa-xian-guo wo-de pu-tong-hua hen bu hao, suo-yi ta ma-shang jiu zou le.

(Last week I got married to an extraordinarily beautiful woman. But, my wife discovered my Chinese was really bad, so she immediately left me).

It all happened in Si-chuan (four rivers), a province (sheng) in Western China (Xi-fang Zhong-guo). About 40 of us (mostly my Korean fellow students) went on a university organised guided tour (lu-you) to E-mei Shan (High Eyebrow Mountain), Le Shan (Happy Mountain) and Jiu-zhai-gou (9 Fort Trenches). If you have seen the movie Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Hero (Ying-xiong), then you will be familiar with the beautiful landscape at Jiu-zhai-gou.

The minority people (xiao-shu min-zu) who have traditionally lived at Jiu-zhai-gou are the Zang-zu. Luckily for us, they happened to be hosting a cultural evening, which was a great chance to learn about them and their way of life. Evidently, an important consideration in the selection of a groom (ma-fu) is his ability to win tug-of-war contests (bi-sai), and of the eight males selected at random from the audience, the winner happened to be me.

As you know, my listening skill is pretty bad, so I didn't understand most of what was said for the next twenty minutes, but with a bit of help from the MC and our tour guide (dao-you), I managed to get married (jie-hun). Now, tradtional Zang-zu marriages involve the bride and groom meeting on the big day itself, and so it was not until I pulled back the veil that I actually got to see my wife (lao-po) for the first time. Well, she was gorgeous. Unfortunately, I wasn't quite what she was expecting, hence our separation (fen-bie) just three minutes later (the show was over and it was getting late).

To all of the people who have suggested I will get married more than once, I meekly submit that you were right. I will try to invite more of you to marriage Number 2 - as well getting more than 15 minutes notice myself. To my darling ex-wife (I'd use her name if only I knew it), I am sorry that things didn't work out - but I want you to know life was bliss during out short time together.

Paulie

ps: I will post photos just as soon as I manage to get them on to a computer.

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!