Many if not most Genuine Encounters are not as successful as the bookstore one the other day. A lot more go like this, which is what makes the whole language learning thing frustrating. So I go into the Peace Corps office last Friday in order to turn in some paperwork. You have to sign in first. There is an imposing looking guard sitting behind a desk and you need to show him your I.D. Usually this is uneventful, but when I did it this time, the guard showed a marked interest, said something I understood not at all and pointed to a place in the sign up sheet where it seemed I had signed in but not signed out. He was not at all pleased and all I could do was utter a lame "dui bu qi."

It got even stranger when I started to walk to the door to go upstairs. All I could understand was "ji lu," by which I gather he was asking which floor I was going up to. I said "san lu," or third floor, which wasn't necessarily the floor I was going to but was something to say, and was probably the last thing I said he understood.  And he did not seem pleased.  He showed me the sign in log for the staff and I saw there was only one person, an assistant in the medical office, who had checked in. He tried to phone that person, but got no reply. Then he said something I understood not at all. At that point I had enough information to realize that Friday afternoon of the New Year’s weekend everyone had taken off. But I wanted to practice my Chinese. I realized this was a genuine encounter. But I had limited success. I tried to ask whether people would be back today. I think I asked "when will they return home" instead of "when will they return," which of course made now sense. I thought he said something about lunch (chu fan) at one point, and then pointed to the clock and said one o’clock (yi dian). But I could not connect this with any narrative that made any sense. Had the person in the medical office gone to lunch at one o’clock? If so, why did he try to contact them? Had everyone gone to lunch at one? If so, why had no one else signed in that day? Had he had lunch at one? Why would he tell me this?

This was going nowhere. At one point I just decided to pretend like I understood what he had said, and left.