Snow and Mandarin
It snowed this weekend! It was so pretty- Mark and I curled up in front of the fire for most of Saturday and watched movies and napped. Yay for cozy-time! It's still so cold here that a lot of the snow hasn't melted. I get today off, but Mark had to go into work. Boooooo. I should probably do a deep clean of the house... but I think I'd rather go to yoga at 10:30, take a nice hot shower, and then go to my parents' house and hang out with the family for a while...and then I'll head back home, curl up with the kitties, and read a book or two. That sounds like a much better day, right?
It's so hard to...relax...when I know there is other stuff I could/should be doing. But there are typically more hours in the day than I account for, so I'll probably have time to deep clean at least one or two rooms.
Mark and I found an awesome Chinese restaurant yesterday. It's funny to me when they ask me if I can use chopsticks, but just assume that Mark can, even when they can tell he's not Chinese... and then when I order in Chinese, they're all surprised. So then they think that Mark must speak Mandarin, too, and they'll talk to him and he has no clue what they're saying most of the time. I'm not up to speed with my Mandarin anymore, but I can speak and understand quite a bit more than the mister. He'll learn, though! But yeah, awesome food, super nice owners- they even brought one of their patrons over and introduced him to me- the white girl who had studied in Beijing. I love how enthusiastic the Chinese get when I'm able to put a sentence together in Mandarin. Even if it's only one sentence. Haha. It's a relief to see how much of the language comes back to me when I'm around other people speaking Mandarin. I really learned a LOT in those 4 short months... 6 years ago. Yikes. I'm shocked at how much I remember, even though it's not a whole lot. But Chinese is quite a bit easier than most people think... the tones are probably the hardest part. Well, that and learning the written language. But spoken Chinese- not that hard if you can get the pronunciation down. Tibetan is waaaaaaaaaaay harder. Heck, even French is more difficult because of all the verb conjugations and whatnot.
Okies, I've rambled on enough for the morning. Zai jian!
It's so hard to...relax...when I know there is other stuff I could/should be doing. But there are typically more hours in the day than I account for, so I'll probably have time to deep clean at least one or two rooms.
Mark and I found an awesome Chinese restaurant yesterday. It's funny to me when they ask me if I can use chopsticks, but just assume that Mark can, even when they can tell he's not Chinese... and then when I order in Chinese, they're all surprised. So then they think that Mark must speak Mandarin, too, and they'll talk to him and he has no clue what they're saying most of the time. I'm not up to speed with my Mandarin anymore, but I can speak and understand quite a bit more than the mister. He'll learn, though! But yeah, awesome food, super nice owners- they even brought one of their patrons over and introduced him to me- the white girl who had studied in Beijing. I love how enthusiastic the Chinese get when I'm able to put a sentence together in Mandarin. Even if it's only one sentence. Haha. It's a relief to see how much of the language comes back to me when I'm around other people speaking Mandarin. I really learned a LOT in those 4 short months... 6 years ago. Yikes. I'm shocked at how much I remember, even though it's not a whole lot. But Chinese is quite a bit easier than most people think... the tones are probably the hardest part. Well, that and learning the written language. But spoken Chinese- not that hard if you can get the pronunciation down. Tibetan is waaaaaaaaaaay harder. Heck, even French is more difficult because of all the verb conjugations and whatnot.
Okies, I've rambled on enough for the morning. Zai jian!