The End is nearer

We've been in China for two months. This morning we moved out of our host family's apartment amongst chirping and chiding and much henpecking. Our host mother made us slippers and topped off our train travel snacks with three pound pears.   Last night they took us out to dinner for Sichuan's famous hotpot. We ate pig throat, chicken stomach, cow tail, octopus, bamboo shoots, mushroom, cow stomach, duck blood, cucumbers, sea kelp and pig brain.

In terms of how it all tasted, much of the non vegetables had the consistency of the boiled octopus. The duck blood and the pig brain being the exceptions to the rule. The cubes of blood were as soft as tofu and for me lost in the sea of garlic, cilantro,  ouster sauce,  numbing peppers and oil. The pig's brain, Sebastien and I agree, had the constancy of scrambled eggs but tasted like liver.

We had our language level assessment on Friday. I did an alright job. I was able to talk the tester about my hobbies and living in France. I told her I like to blog and she asked me how many hits I've had since I started blogging. Hilarious. That was all part of the schema though. The test had four parts: warm up, probe, role play and wind down. The probe is supposed to take you further than you've studied and see what you can make of it. I could not tell her how many hits I've had of all time. But I was able to say about how many a day or per week.
My role-play was from the last chapter in the book. It could be she chose it because it should have been fresh in my mind or because she thought I could handle it. Either way, my class never got there. It was supposed to be about setting up a hotel room for your mom to come visit you in Beijing. My class did go over objects in the house that could break so I was able to ask if there would be a western toilet and an air conditioner or if there was a restaurant nearby or a market place.
She told me my tones are good and I have a large vocabulary but that I need to work on my pronunciation. I told her that I'm translating every sentence I say to her from French before I speak it!
I've spent a lot of time thinking about why that might be...

French was my first second language and as I've just lived there, so it's still very fresh in my brain. I also have an emotional attachment to it. I need to keep speaking it though because I can feel my tongue getting lazy.
It's funny, I told our Dean that I wanted to join or start a French club given our familiarity with the language and the land and it turns out they realllllly needed a French teacher so Sebastien will teach six hours of oral French....in lieu of oral English. Lol, He was pretty pissed off at me for a moment there. No more than I would have been in his case; probably less in fact. 

But I reminded him of the time, about five years ago when he insisted I take the Praxis 0014 exam and become a lead teacher. I was quite satisfied with my wage bracket and comfortable with my workload, in short my misgiving were many--not the least of them fear of failure. I signed up but was only able to take the test in Baltimore and had to be on my way before the first Marc train from DC. So we took a cab. Yes, we--as in  my incredibly supportive partner and myself left our North West DC apartment before first metro and cabbed it to Baltimore. He awaited me patiently  in the lobby of the testing center headphones on, working on his writing project. And you know what, I passed that test.

I think this situation with the French class is much the same. He feels that he isn't a strong enough French speaker to teach it but I believe in him and know he will learn so much as he goes. I'm in his corner not only because I love him but also because I want to live up to his example. And frankly, I really wish I was half as ready as he is to teach French.
Well, it's his turn to use the internet so I should get going. We have just one week left of training before we all head out to our respective sites. Part of me acknowledges I could be out making memories with my colleagues but this hotel's bathtub isn't just going to fill itself...

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