New Friends and Utensil Confusion

Last week I was complaining alot about how I don't speak enough Chinese outside of class. Since then I have found ways to remedy the situation. I started meeting with my language partner, I speak Chinese off and on with one of my friends, and yesterday I invited a Japanese girl who doesn't speak English to lunch. Her name is Yuko. She's one of my classmates, and she seems really cool.

I went to lunch yesterday with her and Donny, and it was nice to only speak Chinese. Furthermore, it wasn't a stilted conversation - it was a fairly normal one. Perhaps our topics were not the most sophisticated, but we were talking, and it didn't feel difficult. I hope I can hang out with Yuko some more in the near future.

Last night at dinner, Donny looked up from his Thailand chicken and said, "How do you hold a fork?" This wasn't a style question. I started fumbling with my chopsticks pretending that they were a fork. I had no idea. How to use a fork was something that temporarily escaped me. When I finally got something that I thought may be right, I tried lifting it to my mouth and knew that I was wrong. I realized that I hadn't thought about forks since I had gotten to China.

Today, though, I found out that I do, in fact, still know how to use one. My classmates and I all went out to lunch today. Someone had previously decided that we would go to an Italian restaurant in Wudaokou, so that is where we went. There were no chopsticks there. I didn't feel like I was in China anymore. That's actually good, though, in this case, because if the food had tasted like Chinese Italian food, I would have been sad.

The food was actually really good. I do think it made my stomach hurt, though, because it was so much heavier than what I've been eating for the past month. I've needed a change of pace lately, though, so lunch was a welcome one.