Hi ho hi ho, it's back to work we go

Work was fabulous today. I graded my 5th grade tests and worksheets and felt extremely productive. Shakespeare tonight went well also. We're really getting to know the actors well, and they are getting into their roles. We do goofy warm ups to get them thinking creatively. Today, Ray gave Ted and I this situation: Ted was cashier and I was a customer checking out. Something about the make believe items I was buying was supposed to make Ted want to ask me on a date. ...all this while Ted was embodying a cat and I was embodying a Pit Bull with my actions. Haha. These were funny. In the other warm up, with 2 of the set hands, we were Russian ballet dancers begging for money. It's amazing how short goofy activities can work on pronunciation and help the actors prepare to act characters that aren't themselves.

After Shakespeare, Athena and I went back to the same vegetarian restaurant we went to last night. Last night the 3 of us split dishes, but you can also order individual dishes with rice for cheap. This was tonight's dinner:

I'm not sure what it was because the menu is a photo album with Chinese characters. I can tell you there were green bell peppers, another type of red pepper, different types of tofu that tasted remarkably similar to different types of meat, mushrooms, and a pepper sauce. It wasn't the best dish I've had there, but you gotta try or you'll never know, right?

Athena and I reviewed Cantonese over dinner and then pretty much ran across town to class. The neatest thing that we learned tonight was where the Cantonese character for types of fruit came from. For example, the romanization for "apple" is "pihng-gwo" and the romanization for "mango" is "mong-gwo." The character for the "gwo" in these is a two part character. The top part looks like a square with a two-by-two grid and the bottom part looks kind of like a table with the legs v'ing out from the middle. The top part of this character represents a crop field. The bottom part represents wood. Thus, the character together that means fruit is talking about the crop of the tree--fruit. Pretty neat, huh? These Chinese language historically was very pictorial. The simplified characters of Mandarin, the most popularly used dialect of Chinese today, do not have nearly the intricacy of the original pictures. Some characters still do though--for instance, the character for "home" in Mandarin is a pig in a house--the animals used to live indoor. Nifty, huh?

Oh, and I almost forgot--calling some one 'chicken' in American culture implies that you don't have the guts to do something, right? The literal meaning of which really has no connection. Tonight, we learned that calling someone a chicken in Cantonese is much more serious and offensive. The word for 'chicken' is pronounced 'gai' (kind of like 'guy'). If you say 'Neih haih gai' (You are a chicken), you are calling someone a female prostitute. If you call someone a duck, it's a male prostitute. Interesting cultural differences and interpretations of slang. And last, the word for 'turkey' in Cantonese is literally translated 'fire chicken.' So Happy Fire Chicken Day here soon!

That's the report from here, y'all take care now.