Surnames

Had second day of class yesterday, and I am no longer at the top of my class. We have moved on to greetings and titles, like how to say Mr. So and so, stuff beyond our lessons with Jade. Had a different teacher again for the first hour, a guy named Tony Liang. He was teaching us about Surnames. The top five most common Chinese names are Wang, like Vera Wang, Li, like Bruce Li, Zhang, Liu, and Chen. There are 92 MILLION people with the last name Wang. Our teacher joked to never say the word wang, because you will turn a lot of heads. Ha! For reference, the most common American surname is Smith with about 2 million people. Crazy huh?

Trig was getting pretty stinky, so as inspired by my skyping session with Steph and Virginia, I decided to give Trig a bath. Funny thing was, he started to shed more after the bath. He will going bald soon, I'm sure of it.

We also went to a U of M happy hour last night. Meet several very nice people. The host, in particular, was giving us all of these suggestions for good hikes in the area. Made me very excited, but apparently the best time to hike is in the fall, like Nov. I dont think we can wait that long.

More cultural tidbits!

Tidbit 1. Cooking with Interesting Ingredients. This one is not a shocker, but as I've been trying to cook semi-authentic dinners, I've had to stock the kitchen with a lot of interesting ingredients. I'll just name a few. Fish sauce, oyster sauce, rice wine, sesame oil, turmeric powder, hoisin sauce, and siracha. In the restaurants, we've eaten things like squid ink soup, the thousand year old egg (and didn't get sick Dad!), chicken feet, etc.

Tidbit 2. Taking your shoes off. Whenever you enter someone's home, you immediately take your shoes off, sometimes even on the landing before you enter. When we see how many dogs pee on the sidewalks here, this makes perfect sense. But, I'm sure the tradition stems back farther. Not sure of the true roots.

Tidbit 3. Tea drinking etiquette. You are never supposed to pour your own tea. So whenever I am out of tea and Drew doesn't notice, I have to either give him a long stare, which sometimes backfires, so it's becoming a less preferred choice, or I refill his tea to hopefully give him a hint. But it's an interesting rule. It forces you to, in most circumstances, serve others before you get served, or pay very close attention to the needs of others.

Tidbit 4. Don't drop your chopsticks on the floor. Apparently it's bad luck, and I totally did it last week at dinner. I was trying to be a good storyteller, so in mimicking Drew, I was waving my arms around dramatically, and hit the ends of my chopsticks sticking out of my bowl catapulting them through the air and onto the floor. Luckily, the people we were eating with were American, so I don't think they knew this bad luck rule. But, our waitstaff didn't come over much after that.

This pic is not of Trig, but you get the idea. Also pics of the squid ink soup, thousand year old egg, and chicken feet. Don't gag too much.