Have you eaten....

Ni chi le ma? ...or in English, have you eaten? I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I was asked this question last summer. Of course, my kind students knowing that I didn't speak much Chinese would always use the English version of the question.

You may not be thinking that it is a very interesting question, but every time (for the first couple of weeks) I answered their question I was guaranteed to receive puzzled looks. Their puzzled looks to my answer ALWAYS puzzled me. You see, they would ask me, "Have you eaten yet?" Usually when I was asked I was on my way, so I responded, "No, I'm on my way. Do you want to come?" It never failed that they would stop, give me a puzzle look, and then walk off not knowing what to say.

What did I do? I went to my team leader who happens to live in China and asked what was going on. Why did they always look so puzzled and not know how to respond when I answered their question? You see, no one told me that "Ni chi le ma?" was a typical greeting in China...I guess kind of used interchangeably with something like "how are you?". All my students wanted to hear from me was a simple "yes". That one simple word would have saved so much confusion. They didn't know how to respond when I asked them to join me for lunch/dinner because they had already eaten.

When I caught on to their "greeting", I was so excited! It really made me feel "Chinese". It was also pretty fun to "beat" them to asking the question. "Have you eaten?" quickly became an ongoing game between a couple of my students and me. So much fun!

Here are just a few "eating" pictures...in fact, these ended up being some of my FAVORITE pictures that I took in China!

Ni chi le ma?