Ancestors are Not For Rent

Chinese lesson for the day --

There is a subtle difference between the Chinese character for "ancestor" 祖 and for "rent" 租. That's Chinese characters in a nutshell - tiny strokes can represent something completely different.

My friend gave me a handy little black Moleskine notebook, and I've been using it to jot down some of the words and phrases I encounter. Here is a sampling of some of my favorite entries:

• 阿華田 "ah hua tien" for Ovaltine
• 虎頭蛇尾 "hu toe sheh way" which translates to tiger's head snake's tail, which means to start something with vigor but fail to see it through

and my personal favorite

• 江洋大盜 "jian yang da dao" which means notorious bandit leader. Incidentally, one of my local friends told me never to say this because it's archaic and people will think I am weird, and she will pretend not to know me, haha. Still, my biggest deterrent is the fact that the opportunity to bust out with this choice phrase is virtually non-existent in modern Taipei.

I go to class for two hours every morning, with a 10 minute break in between. We have a total of 4 students in the class (myself included), and everyone has grown up abroad with either one or both parents being Taiwanese. There's a kid from Thailand, probably 13 or 14 years old, one gal from Southern California, and a guy from South Africa, both around 20 years old. The Thai kid is annoyingly vocal about every little thought that pops into his spiky little head, while the other two are quiet as mice, and I'm somewhere in between. The Thai kid keeps yelling out the wrong answers to just about everything, even in the absence of a question being posed, and I just want him to shut up, but at the same time I can't help but smirk when the teacher tells him that he is wrong yet again. Makes me wonder what is more annoying - a smarty pants who is always right or a nitwit who gets nothing right? Tough call.