CLUE in Chinese

We try to have a tutor event each month to spend time with our tutors here at language school. We all meet with a tutor one on one for two hours every week day. Because of this we get to know them pretty well during that time but we also like to spend time with them outside of this scheduled time as well. These are often our most significant and important relationships while here studying Chinese. The tutors rotate each month so we also miss seeing our previous tutors.

playing games!

This Friday was our November tutor event. We had a game/movie/video game party at our office at school. It was quite the success. I am pretty sure the number of Chinese friends outnumbered Americans (we also invited any other Chinese friends we have to come as well if they want). We played games in the main room, a few guys played some PS2 and a few people watched Remember the Titans in our listening lab. There were all kinds of games from Uno, Rook, Settlers of Katan, and then our group-trying to play CLUE. The game was in both Chinese and English but the problem (one of them problems) was that it was in traditional characters (not the simplified ones that we all know-the traditional are hard even for many Chinese people to read). At the time I was the only foreigner at the table so I started explaining how to play CLUE in Chinese, of course. It was quite the task-I realized I don't even know an articulate way of explaining it in English but we kept trying. They finally understood the main ideas and we started trying to play. Another hard aspect was I don't know how to say all those weapons and rooms in Chinese and I just called the people by their color (Hongren, bairen, lanren-red person, white person, blue person). After a while we decided it was too hard and not very fun so we swited over to Uno-a great idea. We had LOTS of fun playing Uno and I taught them additional fun rules. By the end of the night we were all great friends and exchanging phone numbers. I made many new friends and got to hang out again with my previous tutor. I am so happy to finally be making more Chinese friends here and excited about hanging out with many of these new friends.

my CLUE table

(An additional fun fact-Chinese people are very interested in asking about our new future president-they all want to know what I think about him and my taxi driver last night knew more about him than me... I decided I need to learn some more political words in Chinese so I can know more what people are talking about!!)