Psychology, Tartarus, and Peanuts

I am proud and rather relieved to announce that I have survived my first (half) week of school.

This weekend all I really want to do is sleep. I get up at 6:30 on weekday mornings, and somehow I managed to end up going to bed late every night this week. Being that tired is like self-sabotage for me, but I think I did okay in spite of it... and there is a 7-11 across from my school that sells lots of cheap coffee, in case of emergency.

This week I learned that whether or not I have a good time at school almost always depends on me. I think I already knew that, but theoretically knowing and actually realizing something are completely different things.

So let me just walk you through my first three days of school... forgive me if this is really long.

On the first day, I rode the bus (as I will do every day) and was pleasantly surprised to see that my school bus is, in fact, awesome. It's nothing like the standard yellow school buses they have in America. This bus has seats like first class airline seats: they're big enough to fit two of me, really cushy, and very, very easy to fall asleep in. As if that weren't enough, there is a big flat screen TV in the front, as well as several smaller TVs throughout the rest of the bus. In the morning they usually show the news, and in the afternoon it's soap operas (or at least I think it is - I can't always tell because they're in Chinese). So yeah, I basically take a charter bus to school. That's right American school children - be jealous. >:)

Once I got to school, a really sweet and helpful teacher named Tiffany was waiting to show me to my first class. My school has never had exchange students before, so everyone is really eager to make everything go smoothly for me and the other exchange student (he's from Germany; his name is Felix). Tiffany showed me to my Chinese class, which is basically just me and Felix in the Anglo-American Culture Room with a private tutor name Sophie. It's called the Anglo-American Culture Room because it's set up to look like a typical European or American living room. There's even a Christmas tree in there all year round (and there are Christmas decorations in the main office all the time... I don't get what it is with Christmas here). Chinese is going to be one of my favorite classes I think, because it's something I can apply right away. I'm always trying to learn more, more, more. My host sister tells me I'm a good student... but I think I'm just an obsessive one. :P

After Chinese class was over, a bunch of other students came into the room and said hello to us. They are all our classmates, and they were very friendly and happy to talk to us (and to try and understand our broken Chinese). It was great to be welcomed to school that way on the first day; it really made me feel a lot more comfortable. Thank you Sophie for arranging that. :)

Tiffany came to find us again at lunch time, and was nice enough to show us the cafeteria and let us eat lunch in her fancy office. After once again being stuffed like a dead animal at the taxidermist, I went to business psychology with Felix. It's called business psychology, but it's more like stare-blankly-at-the-Chinese-on-the-board class. We had no idea what the teacher was talking about for the second half of class. For the first half, though, it was basically about us. Our teacher asked us a bunch of questions, and some of the students got brave about half an hour into it and started asking us things too.

Speaking of being asked questions, here are some of the more common ones I get:

Question: Why aren't you fat? And why is America fat? (I get this a LOT)
Answer: I am a mythical creature known as the American who doesn't like McDonald's. And two-thirds of America is fat because two-thirds of America is simultaneously hungry and sedentary.

Question: Why didn't you go to China if you wanted to learn Chinese?
Answer: I wanted to learn Chinese without being arrested or asked for money because I'm American. Just kidding.

Question: Why don't you eat more?
Answer: You want me to eat more? O.O

Anyway, on to my second day of school. Wake up, feed the fish, go to the bus, watch the news, sleepwalk to 7-11, decide it's too early for breakfast, go find Tiffany... Oh, cool. Cosmetics class. In Chinese. For four hours.

In all honesty, my cosmetics teacher is pretty legit. He doesn't speak very much English, but he's really nice and he dresses pretty bad ass for a teacher. I think he must be really laid back, because he let someone bring their dog to class. Yeah, you read that right - this guy walked in with a little white dog and the teacher didn't give him a second glance. I wish I could bring pets to class in the States, because I totally would bring my attack cat and set her on someone I didn't like. All I would have to do is throw catnip at them... >:)

Ahem. Anyway. We took a break halfway through the class, and I got to meet some of my classmates. About four girls came over to me to say hi and see what I was doing in my little notebook I pulled out partway through class because I wasn't understanding anything the teacher was saying. When they saw that I was practicing Chinese writing, they started laughing and telling me I was "hǎo kě'ài" (very cute). I was writing random sentences like "The white cat is noisy" and "I really love waffles," so it must have looked really funny. Plus, it was probably all wrong - I'm surprised and encouraged that they could actually read any of it in the first place! Before you get all impressed, though, I wasn't using actual Chinese characters. I was using Chinese phonetic writing, which is basically like an alphabet for Westerners who are trying to learn to speak Chinese. Baby steps, baby steps.

After the break, I sat through another hour and a half of Chinese speech that I didn't understand. I can pick out words and phrases, but that gets old after four hours of sitting and doing nothing else. Luckily, I am an incredibly skilled daydreamer so I was able to pass the time in Imaginationland.

When class was over I went to have lunch with Tiffany again - but not before losing my phone. I think that was the low point of my day. I was already feeling like I failed myself a little bit because of the fact that I didn't take very much initiative to meet people in class; I was being shy until they came to me. I was thinking about why I was behaving that way (and how to fix it) when I realized I didn't have my phone and felt doubly incompetent. Tiffany helped me look for it, and I got it back eventually (it had fallen out of my pocket in class), but the little things can really get you down sometimes. I felt like a loser because I wasn't eating lunch with my peers, and I was frustrated because I don't know why I am so nervous about taking the initiative with people. But as I will explain in a moment, when I get introspective (which is very frequently) I don't stop until I reach a solid conclusion.

After lunch I went to English Communications class, which has got to be the single easiest class I will have. I'm in there because my American school requires me to take an English class (everyone here agrees that is dumb) but I'm actually glad they require it now because I think it's where I will make a lot of my friends. Since the class is about English, and taken by people who can already speak pretty good English, it's actually taught in English by a really funny Australian guy named Peter. Felix and I are in this class together too, and both the teacher and the students made us feel really welcome. I have been trying to choose my seats strategically when first coming to class so that I will end up sitting by Taiwanese people instead of empty chairs, and this is one of the few classes in which it has worked. I'm in the middle of the class in the second row, surrounded by a bunch of very friendly girls (plus Felix). One of them gave me a wasabi cracker without telling me what it was... so we got some laughs out of that, as well as some pain. XD I think English class will be really good for me because it's one of the few classes I'm actually somewhat comfortable with. I felt myself automatically becoming more outgoing and breaking free from the little spell of depression I had at lunch.

I had time to kill after class was over, since the bus didn't leave for another two hours, so Felix and I went out to explore Toucheng (the town our school is in). We wanted to find the train station for future reference, and to my surprise we were actually successful. On the way, we decided we wanted to go to the Luodong night market that night, so I called my host dad to make sure it was okay and off we went.

Actually, the story is more complicated than that. I really could have been a lot smarter about this and wasted a lot less time. What we did was go back to school, get on my bus (he usually takes a different one), walk from the bus station to my aunt's house to ask her if I could go to the night market, find out that no one was home, then call my host dad and walk a long way to the train station in my town to go to Luodong. We probably wasted a grand total of two hours, but we did get to go to the night market for a while and I think it was worth it.

Once we actually found the night market (which was easier than I thought it would be) I felt like a kid in a candy store - both literally and figuratively. Night markets have everything, including candy. I've been being very frugal with money because I'm paranoid about running out, but I can already tell that night markets are going to make my wallet suffer massive internal injuries.

Firstly, there is the food. I figured out long ago that Taiwanese people are in love with food even more than Americans are (and they're still thinner by a gargantuan margin, because they're just awesome like that). I couldn't name everything I saw there if I tried. They sell a million different kinds of fruit, tons of chicken (all parts of the chicken), fried food (including pig's blood), various kinds of tea, etc. etc. etc. One vendor gave us free samples of this strawberry fruit juice he was selling, which turned out to be a great marketing strategy because we immediately bought some.

Secondly, there are the clothes.

You do not understand until you've seen them.

Picture the types of clothes you like to wear - the clothes that you just have to have the moment you spy them in the store.

Then imagine that you see them everywhere.

Then imagine that they are half the price they are in America.

By now you may have some understanding of what I was going through. I wanted to buy all of them. But we were short on time, and I told Felix I wasn't going to take him clothes shopping with me because I would be trying on everything and he would probably start to hate me. He kept telling me to just keep looking forward, ignore the clothes, ignore the clothes....

Not possible. I think I know what Tantalus feels like now - seeing, but not being able to buy, buy, buy.... Buy all the things, buy all the things, BUY ALL THE THINGS!!!!!!

I really need to calm down, and then get some girlfriends that I can go shopping with or I'm going to go (even more) crazy. Or maybe I could just fly my bestest shopping buddy ever over here... Kaitlin, come visit me! :D

Anyway...

Besides food and clothes (*sniff*), there are night market vendors who sell all sorts of little trinkets made of glass, beads, and everything else under the Sun. They are exactly like the kinds of things I decorate my American bedroom with, so it's not just the clothes that are going to suck all of my money away. I already have a little glass penguin that my aunt bought for me when we went to a night market in Jaoxi (and I just discovered that it GLOWS IN THE DARK!!!) and I will probably come home with a hell of a lot more than that. Everything is so skillfully handmade and so damn beautiful. Seriously - buy all the things, that's what I want to do. This is what I save my money for.

After we finished at the night market, we took the train home and I slept like a (dead) baby. Taking the train is a little hectic without someone who can speak and read Chinese because only the most basic information is written in Western characters (basic information does not include which train you get on for which destination), but thankfully we happened to meet one of our classmates at the train station and she helped us get home. And of course, by the time I actually got to sleep, it was really late again.

Okay, two thirds done! Next morning - wake up, lay there, try to bargain with the powers that be for more sleep, realize it's not going to work, sleepwalk to the bus, sleepwalk to 7-11, sleepwalk to school... And now it's time to sleep-kick.

I have a classmate named Joyce who has very graciously agreed to teach me and Felix some martial arts before school on Fridays. I think she said she was teaching us Shaolin Kung Fu, but I could be wrong about that. :S Anyway, we met her on the basketball court and she taught us some of the basic kicking styles and a little bit of one of the forms. Maybe I'm still technically a tae kwon do black belt, but having not practiced in over three years, I'm a little out of it. I can't kick quite as high as I could when I was fourteen, but we have all year to improve so maybe I can get some of my flexibility back. Unfortunately for us, the air did not seem to appreciate how much it was being kicked. It got really, really hot while we were practicing - it is so warm and humid here; there is nothing like it in the US as far as I know.

After getting our butts kicked by the heat, Felix and I headed for digital photography. We seem to have ended up in a lot of each other's classes, which is cool because we have a way of encouraging each other to be more social. Digital photography was (no surprise here) all in Chinese, and since we were the first people in the room we weren't able to just walk in and go sit by our classmates. I've noticed that we seem to have this opposite magnet effect on the people in our classes; they don't know how to talk to us so they tend to sit at different tables or at least several seats away. We're used to getting to class five minutes early, but here everyone walks in at the last minute after we've already sat down so we have the pleasure (not) of observing how they react to foreigners. Like I think I've said before, everyone is really shy.

We took a break halfway through class, however, and Felix suggested that we roll our wheelie chairs over to the table where everyone else was sitting and say hi. I swallowed my nerves and just did it - and it turned out great. I introduced myself in Chinese, and everyone warmed up pretty quickly (although it was soon discovered that my Chinese is, in fact, deplorable at best). We all added each other on Facebook, and I felt a lot more optimistic about school after those two minutes of positive social interaction. It just takes one or two nice people to make the new kid feel more welcome, I am discovering. I swear on all that is holy that if I ever see a struggling foreigner at school again, I will not hesitate to go over and say hello.

Class ended, we had lunch with Joyce at this Korean restaurant across the street, and then we went to... dun dun dun... gym class. Insert high-pitched string music here.

How did I end up taking gym class, of all things? Good question. I'm not entirely sure. But the bright side is that it's perfectly acceptable to just sit out and talk, especially when you're the foreigners and there are kids in the class who want to practice their English. Our gym teacher introduced me and Felix to two Taiwanese girls and told us to practice our second languages on each other. "Taiwanese are very shy about speaking English," he said. "You just have to take the initiative." Something about that one little statement really made me feel a lot better. It was like he was telling me, "They're not ignoring you, they're not indifferent, they're not mean - they're just a little shy. When you just go up to them and say hello, they will talk to you, and you will find they are very friendly." So far, that has universally been the case. Once we started talking to these girls, they were really, really nice and it wasn't awkward at all. I just kept smiling and laughing (mostly at myself and my Chinese mistakes) to dispel the nerves. Once some of the other students saw that we were friendly, they came over and said hello as well. One guy told us that his English is really bad because (and I quote) "I only know how to say 'fuck you' and 'fuck your mother.'" And then, of course, it turned into let's-teach-the-exchange-students-how-to-swear-in-Chinese class. XD As Felix put it, people come and talk to us once they realize that "We don't bite... yet." I had to hit him for that one, but since I was laughing so hard it probably wasn't very effective. :P

One hour and several Catholic jokes later, I took the bus home and went to sleep. Finally!

So what did I learn this week?

I have a huge tendency to intensely psychoanalyze people's behavior, especially my own, and while I was sitting in class not understanding anything that was being said I got to thinking about what makes me so shy around my peers.

When I was a little kid, there was no sign of this behavior. Everyone was a potential friend, and I didn't hesitate to go up to anyone my age and say hello. And yet now, I have to push past a barrier of nerves and actually work up some courage just to go introduce myself. So what happened in between?

I can remember countless times in elementary school, and even more in junior high, when I would find myself in a situation where I didn't know anyone. I would try to approach someone or maybe a group of people, say hello, and just be totally ignored - or worse, rudely asked why I had approached in the first place. Maybe there was the occasional friendly classmate, but for the most part everyone already had a comfortable group of friends and they were reluctant - or even actively opposed - to letting anyone else join them, regardless of who they were. Several years of getting the same negative results, and I am now conditioned to fear social rejection when I try to get to know people.

The good part about this is that I'm not actually very shy at all. Not naturally, anyway - I only act shy because enough of the kids who went to the same schools as I did are jerks.

This realization made me feel a lot better, because once that fear of social rejection is realized and dismissed, I become very outgoing and eager to meet people. And there's no reason for fear here, because once I start talking to people they are as friendly as they can be. They're like peanuts: I just have to give their shells a tiny pinch to crack them open, then they're delicious (and by delicious I mean friendly). Consider my conditioned habit extinct- and thank you, psychology class.