Another Day, Another Meet

Good evening.  Or morning, or afternoon, or whenever you happen to read this.

Yesterday I met yet again with my conversational partner, known to you as Amber.  Some of the first words out of her mouth this time were “Okay, tell me if this is common in America”.  That got my interest right away.

Turns out Amber has been having some trouble with her roommate.  Roommate has been doing some things that are not cool with Amber, and when Amber asks about it and/or outright says “not cool”, roommate replies with “it common in America” (her roommate is from China too, I might add) and continues to do her own thing. 

So I told Amber that while it wasn’t unnecessarily an uncommon thing here, it was definitely considered not courtesy if it made your roommate uncomfortable.  That got us onto when and how to switch rooms and whatnot because it was making Amber uncomfortable and she wanted to switch as soon as possible.

Once that serious stuff was out of the way, we went on to more frivolous subjects, such as school.  I have found that Amber has what sounds like the most awesome class ever.  It’s a lunchtime class, and what they do is each day the professor takes them out somewhere in the area for exploration and whatnot, and then they go eat lunch out and about somewhere before coming back.  That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.  Exploring the area and eating off campus?  I’m thinking yes.

Then we went to the opposite spectrum of our boring classes, which for me is definitely math.  She agreed with that, laughing at the fact that she breaks the stereotype of Asians being good at math.

At some point she asked me if I knew how to drive and I said yes, which seemed to surprise her a bit so I asked about it.  Turns out that in China you can’t drive at all until you turn eighteen.  No permits or any type of preparation like that.  Once you’re eighteen there, you go in, take a class or something and get your license.  Simple as that.  The drinking age of twenty-one here also surprised her, because there is no real set age in China.  She only found out that there was even a limit here when she was at the store with her friends and they tried to buy some alcohol.  We seem to be finding new cultural differences like that each time we talk.

When we talked about free time it brought us to the subject of movies.  For Amber there aren’t many options in that area here in the States.  She doesn’t like to watch our movies very much, because they’re hard to understand without subtitles and you can’t get subtitled movies online easily.  So she only really watches Chinese movies, which poses a whole new problem in that most Chinese movies won’t stream in the States.  It’ll just give her the “unavailable for streaming in this country” error (which is really annoying if I do say so myself).

It was somewhere around this point that I had to rush off to another appointment (aka ping pong playin’ with a buddy), so we said goodbye.

And that, my friends, is the tale of my Idon’tknowwhatnumberth meeting with Amber.