Today I had a decent Chinese language learning experience. I got my teacher to explain a sentence structure that I don't understand. I still think it's weird, but I kind of understand it.

My roomie has been sickly today with some sort of stomach ache or other. I had class (in more than one way) and couldn't be around to be a kindly nurse. I did accompany him to the drug store to purchase a thermometer. You try miming a thermometer! Try! It can't be done. I pointed at my mouth and ear, said something about too hot or too cold, and otherwise made a fool of myself to an ever-growing audience of Chinese women. Finally my roomie drew a picture on a piece of paper and the women suddenly understood. (As he drew the picture, they kind of laughed about the fact that he was drawing a picture.) Then they got one out and started lauging about my pointing at my ear. No, I know that you don't put a traditional thermometer in the ear. However, kid thermometers go either in the ear or in the rear. I wasn't going there. So I tried to explain that you use them for kids, but that I didn't want a kiddie thermometer because we're in our twenties and let's not be ridiculous. Ok, so I don't know the word for ridiculous. We got the thing, but we don't know how to read it in Celsius other than 37 is body temperature. Silly rest-of-the-world system.

Something is happening in China's politics. The VP got fired and stuff's shifting. I'm not worried, but it is notable.

Another small victory is that today I got my cell phone to store names in Roman letters as opposed to Hanzi characters. Hooray for the shift button pressed a bunch. I'm glad, because my arbitrary system of character assignment only works to the extent that I could remember the characters I assigned each person. I was running out of memory.

I'd very much like to make a Beijing subway system video soon, because it's kind of crazy. I don't know if I can without looking completely ridiculous. I'll try, though. If only YouTube had smell-o-vision...

T