chi fan le ma?

That means "Have you eaten rice yet?" Like Cambodians, the Chinese are far more likely to ask you about your food situation than how you are doing. Which I like a lot. Honestly, when we say to someone "How are you?" we really don't care how they are. We are being polite, merely acknowledging their existence. I think this is a much less pretentious greeting.

I think cities have it in for me. It took a couple years for me to get really sick in Cambodia. I have been in China for less than 3 months and have already gotten sick twice. Good times. So my dear mother has reminded me that I haven’t updated in a while. A lot of this has to do with the fact that I work mainly with Americans and other westerners now, so I don’t have nearly as many fun and exciting stories.

However, if you ever do up and decide to come to China, here are a few things you might want to keep in mind. I mentioned before that China is a strange mixture of America and Cambodia, so case in point: Like Cambodia, almost all toilets are squatters. And like America, they don’t have basins of water for clean-up purposes, people use toilet. Unlike America, the paper is not provided. Ever. If you go to Cambodia you can’t stay quite clean because of all the water, you just have to deal with a wet spot on your pants. But here that is not the case. If you don’t have any paper you are slam out of luck. And restrooms are generally filthy. While they always flush theoretically, usually (in order to conserve water) the pressure is pretty minimal. So imagine a public toilet that hasn’t been flushed in a few days. I’ll go in the bushes thank you very much. Also, and to be fair I have only seen this one time, there was a bus stop where the stalls had no doors. It was not pleasant. If you have a problem with people staring at you because of the color of your skin, I don’t suggest entering a doorless restroom. It is strange because there are people all over the place cleaning up streets and sweeping and scrubbing traffic dividers. No one cleans the bathrooms. Everyone has to have a job here; it’s the law. Unfortunately public toilets got the short end of the staff list.

Fortunately at school the bathrooms are much better, and we have awesome cleaning people. Our cleaning/maintenance people are pretty cool. We can’t really communicate but they smile a lot and help whenever they see I’m having problems with Chinese appliances.

Instead if just working with English Language Learners like I thought I would, I work with pretty much all of first grade. It’s a fun mix, but first graders are certainly a handful.

I’m enjoying living on my own. I can cook a few different meals and the veggie stand across from house has excellent stuff. The funny thing is that I don’t really know how to cook a lot of western food. I’m much better at making rice-related dishes. Although I did recently purchase a Jiffy cornbread mix and am planning to make it in my rice cooker. Will let you know how that turns out.

A parting note: congrats to both the Rangers and the Tigers for reeking of excellence.