In my element

From now on, I hope only to meet other foreigners in Starbucks. While this is a likely scenario, because, tragically, I do go to Starbucks much too often here, I have become much too attached to the image I project in Starbucks here. I appear much more capable of living here than I actually am.

An American woman that recently moved here was behind me in line the other day. She heard me order various drinks and pastries, with directions for all the hot/not hot/iced variations that we needed. I may have answered some other small-talk type questions on top of that.

"Wow! How did you learn all that Mandarin?" she asked me. I confessed that really, it was just Xingbake Putonghua (Starbucks Chinese), and that as soon as I stepped out that door, my mad skills weren't really mad or skills.

A week or two later I ran into her again, and she introduced me to some other recently-arrived foreign women, and she mentioned that they were signing up for Chinese lessons together. I asked who they were using, noted that I would love to use that teacher, too, but she was too expensive for us, and I couldn't commit the time for her less-expensive group classes.

"What are you talking about? You don't need a teacher," she said, then turning to the other women, "You should hear her. She's fluent!"

Ha! I am glad she met me at Starbucks, and not in the new Sichuan restaraunt we went to last night. They couldn't understand me at all, and when they found another customer who spoke some English to help me, she laughed at me.

"You are ordering in Chinese and they don't understand you? That is funny."

Maybe I can just live on Bing de Mocha and Niu Jiao Bao.