Keep Calm and Feel Like an Idiot

Stay calm, and repeat after me.

On Saturday I got stung by a bee on my arm for the first time ever. Everyone got all worried and told me I needed to go pee on the sting right away. I stayed calm and felt like a little idiotic as I went into the bathroom and peeled off my shirt to make sure the bee wasn't still on me. I decided...not to follow the urination custom. That's... a bit too much culture for me.

The fact that Taiwanese people advocate using one's own urine as relief for bee stings  was just one of the lessons I learned this weekend. Here are a few others


1. Party Games Are an Eastern Delicacy  - The people here know a billion of them, most of them require little to know materials or set up, and they're all awesome. On Sunday at a small church activity we played a telephone-style game involving transmitting a message via charade. At the barbecue on Saturday, we played a game designed to trick your mind and make you look silly where you had to pantomime the motions of a boat in water. What pantomime you performed had to do with where you sat in relation to the person who was "it." Flailing arms, strange shouts of "hulu" "hu-ka" and "hua-hua" abounded. 


2. Paper, Rock, Scissors is Not Enough. The easterners have apparently become bored with the traditional  triangular battle schema of paper, rock, scissors, (PRS) and have devised an almost endless array of game variations to add to the fun.  My tutor here taught me last week a variation that involves a fast-paced PRS, followed by a contest of slap pantomiming. On Saturday, we played a PRS Hybrid that involved shouting "seaweed, seaweed!", and seaweed pantomiming. On SUNDAY, we played one with a circled up group that added hilarity with PRS duels being tossed around the circle amid shouts of "hulu-hulu," "hwala-hwala" and side-splitting.


3. Party Game Rules are a Foreign Language. You ever been at a party and you're playing this new fun game that everyone knows the rules of except you? Or maybe you're just taking longer than the rest to get what the rules are? You feel kinda retarded, right? Or maybe if you don't get it you just give up and let the natural flow of the game teach you how to play. Now take those feelings of awkwardness and imagine how they would multiply when you have to experience the same things in a foreign language. I always know I'm done for when the native speakers around me start asking clarification questions on rules. 

It was a weekend of lots of laughs, lots of strange, silly, inhuman chants, and lots of feeling like a complete idiot. It wasn't easy to stomach the awkwardness when I couldn't grasp something just because my brain couldn't process the Chinese fast enough. It wasn't easy to swallow my pride and avoid the temptation to constantly think "put all these people in a foreign language situation and see how they do!" 


I stomached, I swallowed, I endured. I'm not a hero. I'm just trying to be a friend. It's not hard to get over feeling like an idiot when you're around the best people on the planet earth. LM