Day Three

Day 3 was a little bit slower. This morning I worked on a power point I am going to present here at CAU and then I will modify it some for AP ventilation on Monday. I had Belinda (the woman who is helping me at MAFIC) look through it. This made me realize how I need to choose my words more carefully for ease of understanding and translation processes. This afternoon we went for a bike ride to the bank to exchange my money. I have never waited in a line at a bank for so long. We had to pick a number when we entered the bank. While walking to our seats a woman gave us a different slip because she had two. This moved us up nine places. We waited for 2.5 hours for 10 people to do their banking with four tellers and an ATM. It was very slow but she said that is how it always is. After that, we rode past a park that we stopped and walked through for a while. She said it was for growing medicine plants. It had some cool architecture also. We then headed to the “market” or I would say a grocery store. This was absolutely packed with people. I spent 80 RB (not sure how they spell it but that is how they say it) this translates to about $12. I bought some of their food and some good old standards that I recognized such as Oreos :D. Everything was in Chinese. When we checked out, she had to go grab something so I just waited in line. There were about 10 people after me so she just went to a different line. When I got to the register the woman said, what I assume was that the apple I was trying to buy was not weighted and priced. I found out that even though it was wrapped individually it still needed to be weighted buy the fruit. So I motioned to her to forget it. Then she told me how much it was….on Chinese…there was not price screen. My confused look got her to write it down. So in some sense I managed to buy food semi successfully. Tonight I was able to get together a rough plan for my travels for the next two weeks. I will be traveling a lot. Tomorrow and Sunday the English teacher is going to take me site seeing! I am adjusting fairly well to the food, but I think I will be craving a bunch of meat off the grill when I get home, as there is hardly any meat in their diet. I also played ping pong with some of the kids tonight. They took me to the cleaners. :)

Ethan Spronk