sweet!

白老師 (Bai Laoshi) goes by the English name "Mr. White." I find this hilarious. A fellow student remarked on this as we were chilling with the teachers in the hallway, saying how he thought it was cool. He was promptly slapped by 藍老師 (Lan Laoshi).
Anyway, I'm feeling a lot better about classes here. I guess I'm a week behind on most vocabulary stuff, but my oral Chinese is WAY better. This is because I spend most of my time chilling at the 華語中心 (Hua Yu Zhong Xin, or Chinese Language Center, also sometimes smushed into "Why Junction") talking with the teachers. This is definitely something I think is cool about this place, all my misgivings about the intensity of the program aside. It's totally chilled out in regards to student/teacher relations so I'm actually pretty good friends with all the teachers + administrators now. Everyone here seems to be really chill, in fact... today I saw one of the 60+ year old teachers try to bite an American student for making fun of her.
Anyway, I honestly am having real conversations about real topics (REAL topics!) with the teachers, and other people too, in relatively quick Chinese. My reliance on "qing zai shuo yi bian" (please say it again) has dropped drastically to the point where I only use it if the question is inaudible. Earlier I had a discussion with a teacher about terrorism, and how in America we're constantly bombarded by terror warnings and how we get used to it. I also had a discussion with my uncle and aunt about American drinking culture earlier, over dinner.
I haven't really gotten into the swing of classes having just completed my impromptu Shopping Period; however my 1-on-1 tutorial hasn't changed and it's hard as ever. Today I had to read out of the fucking newspaper which was murder. If I didn't already know that there was a 7-Wonders-Of-The-World election coming up (thanks Brazil!) I would have been completely owned, rather than just 98% owned. Seriously, the only things I could make sense of were the dates! However, it went to show how useful Zhuyin is, because I was at least able to get the pronounciation of characters I didn't know; a lot of them turned out to be place or people names.
Tomorrow is the welcoming party for new students which actually might just turn out to be awesome. Word got around that I play sax, so I'm putting on a little performance tomorrow; I arranged two traditional Chinese/Taiwanese songs for me, a cellist, and a trumpeter who are here (the cellist is actually a Yale grad), and I'll play a little solo thing too.
ALSO my life is looking up because I found what I was looking for in my two biggest extracurriculars: saxophone and Muay Thai! I randomly walked past the music department and heard a grad student playing, so I'm gonna play a little with him tomorrow. And last night I found the address + phone number of a Muay Thai gym. Hell yeah!