What I've Learned: November

I'm not sure how long this particular recurring blog theme will survive.  My monthly ongoing lists of what I've learned here have been getting shorter, and I should've seen this coming.  The biggest change that I've undergone since arriving here, short of perhaps my strong belief that everyone should live for a while in a country other than the one in which they were born (if they can), has been that I'm not nearly as acutely aware of the differences in my surroundings here as compared with what I'm 'used to', and what I am learning from them.  (Pardon that egregious run-on sentence).  Put simply: I'm used to it -- China -- now.  I live here.  I noted in late September or early October that I was starting to feel like I lived here, rather than just on an trip or adventure in China.  That process has continued over time.  The fact that the lists of what I'm learning here are getting shorter doesn't mean I'm getting less out of the experience.  It's just becoming more about the experience itself, on macro level, and less about the little things that I pick up.  But anyway, here's what I learned in the month of November:

• November 11th is the unofficial holiday for singles in China.  Get it?  11/11.  The day to celebrate being a 1!  Apparently the traditional celebration is KTV (karaoke).
• Explaining the concept of verb tense to Chinese people, even my colleagues at work who speak decent English, is tricky.
• The Vietnamese are a very proud people, more so than I've noticed amongst Chinese or other cultures (other than Americans, perhaps).  The victories over the American and French in the 20th Century hold very palpable places in the historical memory there, and those memories are visible on the streets and in the museums of Hanoi, as well as in the conversation with the Vietnamese themselves.
• I apparently look like Dexter, from the TV show.  My Chinese friends have started calling me Dex.  It's a cool nickname, but I can't say I agree...

• The Chinese are obsessed with marriage, and relationships; the Vietnamese are even more obsessed.  One Vietnamese guy offered me his friend to marry.  I think he was joking, but I can't be sure.  His friend told me that in her village, men traditionally brought water buffaloes to the family of the girl who he wanted to marry.  I immediately set off in search of water buffaloes.
• Expats band together.  This has its downsides, making it too easy to comfortably hang out with English-speaking Westerners, as detailed in a few of my blog posts.  But it also has its upsides, like on Thanksgiving, when it was very clear that a lot of the misgivings about being so far away from home, which I try to suppress in favor of having the best possible time here, are shared by all of my friends.
• Those expats that band together are also incredibly diverse.  I have met with (and live with) some of the most varied and different people I have ever met.  Even the Americans comprise a vast swath of humanity, with very little in common other than that they are all abroad together in China.
• I am very bad at shopping in general, particularly for other people, and even more particularly for souveniers.
• The Vietnamese language, which has Sinitic roots, has various similarities to Chinese despite sounding totally different.  Various simple words have identical sounds (if you ignore tones, of which Vietnamese has six, compared to Chinese's four).
• Chinese people (or perhaps Asians in general, just to make this gross generalization even more offensive) appear to be incapable of finding their assigned seats on an airplane without flight attendant assistance.  Seriously, the tickets say, in big letters, a number followed by a letter.  This number-letter combo corresponds directly to a seat, which is displayed in similar prominance along the aisles of every airplane.  Is it really that hard?
• The travel bug continues to solidify its residence within me; the more I do it, the more I want to do it.  While I've never thought that I would live abroad forever, I think I will be constantly thinking of the next trip.  These three months have made two things abundantly clear: there is way, way too much to see, and I want to see as much of it as I can.
• In that same light, one of the reasons I'm out here is for adventure -- weekends in the rainy mountains, nights on a random boat in a beautfiul bay in Vietnam, intense darts matches at bars around Shanghai, Chinese karaoke -- the randomness of chance ocurrances for a stranger in a now-slightly-less-strange land.