From Grits to Chopsticks

Learning a foreign language can be difficult, especially when you’re old and the language is Chinese.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just go to sleep with a book under your pillow and absorb vocabulary?  Too bad that doesn’t work – maybe we just need a smaller brain.  Read on…

This weekend, we went over to our landlord’s house for a delicious meal (I sat down for this photo to avoid dwarfing them):

Our hosts were extremely gracious, preparing 10 dishes for us – the number of dishes shows a very high level of respect.  Fortunately, their son-in-law is a great translator and kept the conversation going since our Chinese is so weak.  After dinner, we were introduced to Ping An, their pet bird:

Just when we were feeling bad enough about our limited Chinese, Ping An demonstrated his skills in Mandarin and in the local dialect.  Interestingly, he puffs out his feathers as he talks:

Click this link to watch as Ping An demonstrates his skills: TalkingBird

If you can’t see the video, perhaps you can listen to this audio clip: PingAn Audio

Perhaps we should stick with English.  Speaking of which, we held our first English Corner last week and had a good crowd of new students:

For snacks, Susan made a enough cupcakes to spell out “Welcome to English Corner.”  Perhaps it’s just my foreign palate, but I think cupcakes are a lot easier to eat than mooncakes (maybe I’ll have one right now!).