我是学生！ [I'm a student!]

Thursday was my first day at my new Cantonese language classes.  Classes are from 11 to 1 every day.  I already shared a picture of my course materials, which are terrifying, but I kept myself calm thinking 'how much can they really cover in two short hours?'  The answer is two long hours.

Let me back up first...

When you move, it's often the simple things that you forget to pack.  I forgot to bring a backpack.  I know it sounds geeky (and NOT very HK, where style is paramount) but when you're heading out for a full day, kicking around the city, doing a hike or going to class, a backpack is pretty essential.  So on Wednesday, I went to 'Times Square', a seven story shopping mall down the street to buy a backpack among some other things for our new home.  [Did you know that housewife duties include doing all the shopping? Ah-mazing.]  Back the the 7-storey shopping mall...

Inside this mall were many surprising and beautiful stores... most of which are far too fashionable and made for people much smaller than me.  The 5th floor was dedicated entirely to sporting goods stores and athletic, casual wear stores.  I found a backpack at the Patagonia store.  Check.

Hong Kong is truly a vertical city.  I had heard this before, but I hadn't really understood it.  Essentially, if you want to own a 'storefront' in Toronto, you are looking for ground floor, hopefully on a major street to gain as much foot traffic as possible.  Here, any floor goes.  You see signs at street level for Dim Sum on the 8th floor, Starbucks on the 3rd floor, heck Foley and I were in an electronics 'mall' on the 10th and 11th floors of a shopping centre last night.  You see, Hong Kong Island (for obvious reasons) has limited land space.  Imagine Manhattan, now imagine Manhattan with mountains in the middle of the island... that's Hong Kong.

Back to my first day of class...

So I donned my new (unstylish but functional) backpack, and walked to class.  My class has six students, including me.  One American girl of Korean decent, two German guys on vacation for 3 weeks (they're flight attendants), one Vietnamese girl who also spent a few years living in France, and one Spanish guy who is a Thai boxing instructor.  It's like the whole world in one tiny classroom.

Aside from the Spanish guy who struggles with English still, and is learning Cantonese via English instruction, I am the WORST student in the class.  Holy crap, it's tough.  On day one, we learned the first six tones to Cantonese (more tones to follow), we learned pleasantries (hi, how are you, would you please come in, please sit down, would you like tea, where are you from, sorry, please, thank you, excuse me, etc. and responses to all these), how to refer to people (terms for Mr/man/husband/sir, wife/Mrs., Miss/women, etc.), numbers 1 through 100, and the major countries of the world and their people.   That was all in the first hour.  The second hour is with our 'tutor' who runs conversational practice with us, using all the terms we JUST learned.  I'm BRUTAL.

Tones. In case you don't know, Cantonese is a tonal language.  That means that the tone in which you say a word matters as much or more than your pronunciation of the actual sound.  For example, the word si (pronounced 'see'), means six different things depending on the tone assigned to it.  There are the high tones (high increasing, high decreasing, high flat) and the low tones (low increasing, low decreasing, low flat).  SO, combine these tones with the new words that we were learning and it's A LOT to take in.  I did about 6 hours of homework that afternoon/evening, and I was still overwhelmed.

Icing on the slice of life that day?  We were waiting after class for an elevator.  After about half a dozen PACKED elevators arrived with no room to physically squish another person inside, eight of us decided we would just take the stairs.  We were only on the 6th floor (technically 7th, since it goes ground, then 1st floor, etc. here).  We took the stairs the whole way down only to find out there was no way out.  Even the fire escape was locked (safety first?).  We walked back up, checking every locked door on every floor back up to the 6th.  Eventually someone discovered us in there, and we were able to get out... It was only about 15 minutes in total, but I spent 15 minutes locked in a stairwell after my first class... humbling.

Mike's words of reassurance when I told him how challenging the course is... "Well, you can always take it again and again if you need to".  Sweet.  So he's preparing for me to fail beginner, level one at least twice.