Chapter 5 - Xiang Pian

Chapter 5 is about pictures and family members. 張老師 (Zhang1 Lao3 Shi1) asked if I had any pictures and I said yes. Of course she asked to see them and I whipped out the spare passport photos I keep in my wallet. She was disappointed it was only me in the photo, so I told her that I also have my iPod with digital pictures. So she made me take it out and show some to my classmates. The first one I brought up was of my dad's family. 這 是 我 爸爸. 這是 他 哥哥, 我 的 大伯. 那是我三伯. Zhe1 shi1 wo3 ba4 ba. Zhe1 shi1 ta1 ge1ge, wo3 de4 da4 bo2. Na4 shi4 wo3 san1 bo2. This is my dad. This is his older brother, my eldest uncle. That is my 3rd uncle. And so on.

The backlight was not on permanent, so I had to reset it and in doing so lost the picture I was originally showing. The next one I could bring up quickly was of my sister's family. 張老師 took the iPod and then began to quiz my classmates on who everyone was! Of course, you can tell who my sister is, but when she asked Guo 小姐 who the guy was, she said she didn't know, and Teacher reprimanded her! 他是她姐姐的先生. Ta1 shi4 ta1 jie3jie de xian1sheng1. He is her sister's husband. Everyone agreed that the kids are cute, especially the 男孩子 nan2hai2zi boy.

We had a few other odd moments in class - including asking Luo Xian Sheng if he has any girlfriends, knowing full well that he is married. Zhang Lao Shi said that many chinese men are married but also have girlfriends.

After class I went back to Ximen - boy, 3 times in less than a week! This time to attend the premier of 3:10 to Yuma in Taipei. I had met Arthur, the Special Assistant to the President of Long Shong Entertainment at Dan's party on Saturday. He offered me free tickets for me and some friends, so I happily accepted. The screening was preceded by a promotional event consisting of half a dozen horses with Arthur and company dressed up as cowboys. After some time, they moved from the MRT station to a square closer to the theatre, where they picked up some models (male and female), who then (somewhat awkwardly) mounted the horses for photos. People were getting their pictures taken with the horses left and right. I had no desire, as horses are not a novelty to me (though it was nice to see them without muzzles). But after so many people offering to take a picture, I finally accepted one guys offer to take a snap of me. We ended up chatting for a while, which was nice, because his English was worse than my Chinese, forcing us to converse in 中文 zhong1 wen2 Chinese.



ok, now it's getting late so I'm going to speed up the rest of this entry.

Movie, 3:10 to Yuma, with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale - I enjoyed it, surprisingly for a Western remake.

Afterwards, we went to 牛店, Beef Restaurant, 91 Kunming St. I split a large bowl of noodles with beef and soup, including 3 kinds of meat products. It came with a dipping sauce that was quite tasty. I forget the name of the style of soup, but it's different from the Heping St one...qing something. Quite good. The noodles come in a choice of wide or thick. The soup comes as original or pepper.

We wandered around a bit afterwards having different snacks. This is the result of Richard requesting a cold mango drink without tea. They ended up putting mango syrup with green tea and then topping it off with this thick white cream.