Culture shock? (or coca cola, doritos and hip hop)

It's been a busy several days. My Candian friends left yesterday, which leaves me as the only non-proficient Mandarin speaker, and leaves me without my best translator. I'm getting by, though "ting bu dong" (I don't understand) is fast becoming my most common expression.

There are about 60 people from Taipei who have been here since yesterday. Most of them are doctors and they are giving all 90 some children physicals at once. They're checking hearing, vision, teeth, height, weight, blood pressure, ears, nose and throat. I was corraled and made to fill out a form and go to the first station (I think they're worried about me because I told them I had a stomach ache), but I escaped when I saw the computer was free in the office. :) It's very organized chaos all around the campus.
The night before last we had a going away party for Melody, Esther, Emily and Greg. The kids here are organized by houses- there are 2 girl houses and 5 (I think) boy houses. Each house did some sort of performance- singing or dancing. They were so cute. To end the show, we performed the same aborigianl dance I posted a photo of in my last post. We've been having some of the highschoolers teach us. I danced with the 3 girls and we recruited 3 guys to dance with Greg. We practiced for 3 or 4 nights before hand. It was so much fun! Everyone was cheering so hard by the end of our performance, even though I KNOW we made fools of ourselves (we hadn't practiced on the stage before and it's much smaller so we didn't really have ths space we needed, plus we started wrong- oh well- everyone loved it anyway). I had to laugh one night as we practiced though. The kids had come over to the guest house where we were living and we were all in the common room. We took a break from dancing, and sat around eating doritos, drinking coke and listening to hip-hop. I guess youth culture has some universals.

Today I'm feeling a little adrift without my foreign friends, but I feel like I'm beginning to adjust. Here's how I know. I finished a bowl of noodles using chopsticks faster that the native chopstick users at my table. When a little boy slapped me in the face, I thanked him- he was killing one of the annoying "wenzi" (mosquitos). I respond to jie jie. I had a real conversation in Mandarin (limited to where did you go? I went to buy tea. Where is Greg? I don't know. Did you go to school today? yes. How was it? It was good. but it was still a conversation.)

Ok, I'm off to church.