I finally have pictures

So yeah, it was hard for me to upload pictures when I didn't have my own computer and I never had time to save my pics onto a flash drive and carry the flash drive with me to the internet cafe. Now that my host family has the internet, I was able to upload some pictures... I don't have most of my pics because most of my pictures were uploaded onto my friend's laptop and not mine. I'm going to have to get the pics from her laptop sometime and show you guys because I have some awesome pictures of stuff.

Anyway, I've been super, super homesick. I miss my family and all my friends soooooooooooo much. I can't describe it in words, but all I will say is that I cried this morning after I talked to my mom on the phone. First time I cried because of homesickness on my trip. I cried another time while on the trip, but it was because I was frustrated because I couldn't knit (my friends were teaching me how to knit and I was having a hard time and felt stupid). Like, I actually took time yesterday to see how many days left I have in China. I have about 80 something days left. China is great and all... and I do want to improve my Chinese, but I really wouldn't mind if I were to leave it all and go home tomorrow. My mom told me that my sister was already asleep... it was like 8 PM their time. My 15-year-old sister sleeps way to early. My mom said my dad left for Cambodia the day before. I missed him by a day! I felt so mad that I didn't get to talk to him before he left... although the trip to Cambodia was a bit impromptu. She said he might visit me too in China, which would make me really, really happy!!! Maybe he'll go to the Tennis Master's with me in Shanghai in November!!! Dude, like seriously... those are the only two things I really think about at the moment: home and tennis. If my dad comes, it'll be like a dream come true... not just for me, but probably for him too because tennis is like his favorite sport ever. Well, it used to be his favorite FAVORITE FAVORITE sport, but now it's probably tied with football.

But yeah, I got cut off from my mom while she was trying to describe to me how to write my dad's name in Chinese. Describing Chinese characters is like a thing with my family. Sometimes while I'm away at college, I'll call my dad at night when I see a Chinese word I don't know and describe to him and ask him what it is, "It has 'hand' on the left side and then *** at the top and then *** on the bottom" and then he'll know what it is. Or sometimes I'll ask him how to write a word in Chinese and he'll describe it over the phone, "It has a 'mouth' at the top and then the two lines and curve down at the bottom." I forgot which jing and which zhong my dad's name was. There are a lot of homonyms in Chinese. I wanted to get him a stamp with his name on it. So my mom was describing the word to me. She said jing, was the jing in jingzhi, which means mirror. And then she said zhong had 'gold' on the left side... and that was when we got cut off. Although, I think I know what it is now.

A bit pet peeve I have in mainland China... simplified characters. I pefer Taiwan in so many ways. One is that they use traditional characters and that their accent is more like the way I talk. When I learned Chinese when I was younger, we used Taiwanese books, so i learned traditional characters and Taiwanese pronunciations. My first day of Chinese classes in China was horrible. I couldn't read very well because there were so many simplified characters I didn't know and usually the simplified does not even look like the traditional in any way. It took me a few days to figure out which certain characters corresponded with which.

Accent is another pet peeve in China. Just like in the U.S. where there are many accents and pronunciation, it's the same in China. I don't really like the Beijing accent and the way they want you to pronounce things in class is like the "standard" way of speaking, but I like my way of speaking... everyone tells me I sound like I'm from the South (Southern China). It makes sense because my grandparents are from Southern China, which gave my parents the accent, which they gave me that accent when speaking Chinese. People say i have a Cantonese accent when I speak Mandarin, which I thought was weird because I don't even speak Cantonese that well... but then I realized that my dad speaks Cantonese and probably when he learned Mandarin he had a Cantonese accent when learning it and passed that onto me. It's like an American learning Spanish and then teaching their Spanish to their kids. If their kids had no other Spanish speaker to learn from besides their parents, then they will probably also get their parent's American accent in Spanish.

Things make so much sense to me now. Weili, one of the girl's on the program, is Cantonese and speaks it fluently. She was born in the Canton province, but moved to the U.S. when she was 7 and only started learning Mandarin in high school. She said Cantonese does not have any sh-sounds, which helps me understand why all the Mandarin words like s, sh, x are all pronounced the same by me. At home when speaking Chinese, I pronounce everything with the s-sound. I don't differentiate which is s or x or sh. Also, I learned that there are certain words that I use that are Cantonese. Like, fire is "huo," but I say "fuo" and marriage is "jie hun," but I say "jie fun." Weili said that the way I say it is Cantonese. I just found out the other day that the way I say throat "ho long," is Cantonese... not Mandarin. The Mandarin equivalent sounds nothing like it at all. EVERYTHING IS SO MUCH CLEARER NOW.