Buying things

One of the favorite questions asked me by my students is "when you go shopping, how do you communicate with people?" Fortunately I know how to ask "how much?", I know the numbers, and I know enough to say "too expensive". :) Also, I am fortunate to have a few American friends here who are learning Chinese and can help me out a LOT.

Living in China is really lots of fun, even when things go slowly or don't go the way you want them to. I enjoy living in another country, and I think everyone should have the experience sometime in their lives. Today I actually went downtown and paid my phone bill (yikes!). It used to be that you could just go to any bank and pay there, but now I guess the rules have changed or something (?) and you have to actually go to the phone company, called CNC. The people there were very polite, but I of course couldn't understand what they were asking me in Chinese. The customer at the next counter over was able to ask me if I just wanted to pay my phone bill, to which I gratefully replied "yes".

I've been excited by some recent purchases of mine. One of my American friends in town got a new cell phone, and gave me the old one. That has really come in handy. Although I will NOT give out my number to my students or random strangers, it's still very useful when I want to get in touch with some of the other foreigners in town. My other fun purchases the other day were a DVD player (again, one of my Am. friends who's studying Chinese helped me out there) and a bus pass. It's so much fun to use the bus pass, because then all the locals look at you with a kind of awe when you use it on the bus. And now that I have the DVD player, I can finally put my big-screen TV to good use. :)