As much as China can stress me out sometimes, it also makes me laugh really hard. I have two prime examples. One is a little funny and the other just plain freaky.

After a long day of teaching, I went to Phil’s school to wait until English Corner began. English Corner is a time when the serious students can come and talk to us and practice their English. It is a great concept and all, but it just doesn’t work too well. There are a hundred good reasons why it doesn’t, but I’ll get into that another day. After EC was over, Phil and I went outside to talk to Holy about the trip we are going to try to take with him during the Spring festival. Because we won’t be staying in Fuyang for our second semester(long story and I promise I will post about it soon)it is now becoming more difficult to organize our trip. It’s frustrating, but because we promised him, we are going to do everything we can to make it happen. As we were talking this is what happened that made me laugh so hard. Let me preface this by saying that Holy is 17 years old and speaks English very well. The fact that we can talk, understand, and joke with one another in the same language even though he is Chinese and we American shows how good he actually is.

Looking out over the wonderful and very polluted Fuchun River I asked Holy,”Is there anything on the other side of the bridge?” It is the one place we keep saying we are going to go but never make it.

“What do you mean? Something interesting? Something to see?”

“Yeah.”

Holy paused for just a second, and then said. “Maybe in 20 years.”

Now after typing this I can see how you may not be laughing very hard, but at the time, and even after hearing it, I still find it funny. It was probably one of the first jokes that I have heard a Chinese person say that I both understood and found funny at the same time. It totally made my day. I needed a good laugh after dealing with little devils all day.

Now for the freaky creepy moment of the day.

I won’t talk too much about this. I’m a little tired tonight and talking about it still freaks me out. On the way home from Chinese Class, Phil and I ran into a guy that I think lives in the apartment building adjacent to us. Every time he sees me or Phil, he yells ni hao(hello in Chinese) and runs over to us. In the past he has asked me to eat with him and wanted to know who I was waiting on. He’s always come off as a nice young guy, but doesn’t speak any English. I’m sure that I misinterpret a lot of what he says and that is the only reason I haven’t told the head of the school about him yet. Keep reading and you’ll understand why. Phil and I think that he was he either A) asking to pay 100 yuan to sleep with me, 100 yuan to sleep with Phil, or 100 yuan to sleep with us both. We concluded this because he showed us his wallet, did the sleeping motion with his hands, pointed to me, pointed to Phil, and even tapped Phil on the bottom. We were all really confused. We also picked up on something about tomorrow which we could only think meant that the 100 yuan would pay for services rendered until tomorrow. I’ll be avoiding that guy for some time now – at least until I can have some figure out what in the world he was saying and asking us to do.

Ah, you gotta love China. Gotta love the beast.