This morning, the family bought some steamed dumplings (baozi) and some kind of soup + tofu (dofu) for breakfast. It is around 32 cents for 10 of these small dumplings. Today I took the bus alone for the first time. It is a 10-15 minute bus ride to the language center when traffic isn’t bad.
I had my first two and a half hour Chinese lesson today with my teacher, Cherry Chen. For the first few days, I am the only student in the class. Then someone else is supposed to join in later this week. Today time was spent on Phonetics, or how to pronounce the sounds. For example, the letter “e” is usually pronounced “uhh.” I’m also trying to memorize numbers between 0 and 10, which would really help when I’m trying to buy things here.
I took the bus back to the apartment afterwards and had some dinner with the family and they practice English for a while. Then I try to get away and go to sleep.
If you want to see where I’m located using Google Earth, I’m staying at 39°55’27.14″N, 116°29’54.95″E. I think the image from Google maybe less a year old, but everything around looks completely different. I am taking classes at 39°54’21.02″N, 116°28’15.50″E.