Going back in Time

So, this was ages ago, but I fail at updating things, so...

When I got back from my trip, I went and had dinner with my host parents from the last time I was here. It was the most shocking experience of being back here, I think. Almost everything was the same. I felt like I was back in high school. I had to try really hard to remember that I've been gone for 4 years.

One big difference in the neighborhood was the fact that it's about about 20 minutes from the Olympic park. I looked down a street and was surprised to see the Bird's Nest. It shouldn't have been that surprising, but it was just a dug-up lot when I was there last time.

My parents were great, it was really nice to feel like I could actually communicate with them... They showed me pictures my host sister had sent them from Florida.

It was a very nice time... My host dad used me to study English on the drive home..

I should try to see them before I go back to the US.

Beijing-->Nanjing-->Shanghai-->Hangzhou-->Xi'an

ok, so... it's been a while. I've been back in Beijing for about a week and a half, but this class is proving to be harder than the last one. Or at least, it has more busy-work. This will be a really long post... but it will have pictures! (as soon as the internet isn't so slow I can't even get on to check my email half the time)

also: Hi Nana! Mom told me you've been reading this, so I thought I'd say Hello!!

but ok, so our trip! the whole group went together to Nanjing, which would have been nicer if we hadn't spent half of the only day we had there having this woman from the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing center try to sell us on their graduate program. (our program director graduated from there last year and they thought they would "take advantage of us as a captive audience". it felt like college visiting all over again, only involuntary.)

This was actually pretty cool, this was Sun Yat-sen's tomb, which is in the middle of this really huge park. there were lots of steps involved...

We went to Shanghai after, which was pretty cool... it has a very different feel than Beijing. I would have liked to have a little more time there, but it was interesting to have a little glimpse. some people were complaining, saying they wished our program was in Shanghai, but I think Beijing will always be my city. The picture below is a meat-on-a-stick stand.... with the sticks in the trash-can.

This isn't the stereotypical skyline-view of Shanghai, but I like this picture better than most of the ones I took of the iconic version... you can still see the CCTV tower, so you know it's Shanghai.

we spent an extra night in Shanghai, and after 5 of us headed to Hangzhou. It's a beautiful city. we rented bikes and rode all the way around the lake that's on the West side of the city, which was where our Hostel was. we spent most of the time on the lake... we also walked up the hill next to it to where there's a closed-off pagoda. Jenny and Emily wanted to hop the fence, but there wasn't really anything to do once inside, so they didn't.

Bill's bike kept breaking, so everybody pitched in playing mechanic.

Pictures of the lake.. in the second one, I was trying to get one in the style of traditional Chinese paintings, since the lake had that kind of feel to it, but I think this one needs a little bit of tweaking befoe it achieves its full effect...

The pagoda

the only downside to Hangzhou was when we first arrived and we were looking for cabs to get to our hostel. we had 5 people, which is 1 too many to fit into a cab, but we found this parked cab and we asked him if he could take all 5 of us together... he said sure, for an extra 10 RMB. As we were standing there, a group of other men gathered around watching and joining in the conversation. The cab driver motioned us to go stand on the other corner so he could turn around (or so we thought) as we were standing there, one of the men from the group waved us to follow him. we followed him, thinking he wanted to take us to where the cab would let us in, but then he led us to this black car and wanted us to get in. My immediate reaction was to say no. We had gotten a call earlier from Bill, who was meeting us in Hangzhou and had said he had tried to take an illegal cab because the cab driver had said 20 RMB at first but then switched it to 40 halfway through the ride and Bill had just gotten out of the car in the middle of the city. So I asked this new person how much it was going to cost. he'd upped the price to 80 RMB. We turned around and walked away.

Our hostel room in Hangzhou... it was pretty nice...
But anyway... the other less-enjoyable part of our trip was the train ride from Hangzhou to Xi'an. Hard sleeper tickets were a little more expensive than we'd figured, so three of us ended up taking hard seat. The problem was that while the ticket lady told us it would only be a 16 hour train ride, it ended up being a 22 hour train ride that was 2 hours behind schedule. So we lost a day in Xi’an because we spent it sitting on the train. You might think sleeping sitting up wouldn’t be that bad, but then you do it in seats that do not recline at all with nothing to lean on except your stuff, which you are holding in your lap because the baby across the aisle keeps peeing all over the floor. That was fun, let me tell you.

While we were waiting at the train station in Hangzhou, we went into a KFC to sit for a bit/use the bathroom/eat. As we were sitting, this little girl came in and sat at the bar-style table we were sitting at. the waitress brought her a cup of milk and she was sitting there drinking. Her clothes were kind of shabby, and she didn't have any parents with her. We pooled our money, and Bill asked her what her favorite kind of sandwich was. Bill went to the counter and bought her a chicken sandwich and we all waited to eat until she'd gotten her food. as payment, she went to the counter and asked for extra placemats that they put on the trays. Jenny had a swiss army knife, so the girl paid us back by making us snowflakes from the placemats. we spent a good 40 minutes making things out of paper for her and she for us. it was really sweet. She was so cute and seemed really intelligent. she had sort of a naivete about her, she didn't realize we weren't Chinese. It was really sad to leave her, but when we left, the waitresses all crowded around her so look at all the stuff we'd made.

Xi’an was lovely. I had forgotten that I’d been to the Muslim quarter of the city before, and it was fun to realize that I was visiting it again. I think Chinese Muslim (in Chinese, they’re called the ‘Hui’ ethnic minority) food is my favorite kind of Chinese food, but I haven’t even had it in the more densely Muslim areas of China, so I s’pose I don’t really know what I’m talking about. We also went to see the terra cotta soldiers, which I’ve already seen, but Emily hadn’t and she really wanted to. They were… much less inspiring the second time.

Then we got on our train ride back to Beijing. We shelled out for hard sleeper that time, since one hard seat overnight was enough. It was nice to have a couple of relaxing days in Beijing before class started.

Next post: Visiting my Host Family and the Olympic Center!

Work work work

Ok, so... things that have happened recently... well, we went to the MuTianYu section of the Great Wall last weekend (on my birthday!). It was pretty, even though it was one of the more rebuilt sections. The really fun part was the luge-slide on the way down. Basically, you sit on a little seat that has runners on the bottom and there's a handbrake and you just.... slide down this metal pathway. It's... possibly the least safe thing ever. Especially when you've got a plan to go really fast down most of it that involves stalling so that the slow people in front of you get a good head start and then whizzing down (past the men who are hired to sit along the path and yell at people for going too fast or too slow) until you have to stop and wait for them to go again.

There was a group of adults who took a baby on this ride. I found this horrifying.

We also were supposed to take a trip to a museum that ended up being closed, so we ended up in Jingshan park, which is right behind the forbidden city. It's always really beautiful to look at the contrast between the forbidden city architecture and the modern Beijing around it.

We leave on Thursday to go to Nanjing and Shanghai for the weekend and then begin our week of freedom. I'm going with a group that's staying an extra night in Shanghai, then travelling to Hangzhou and then North to Xi'an before we head back to Beijing. It should be fun. I won't have my computer with me, so I'll have to wait to post about it. I hope I have enough room in my camera for all the pictures I'll want to take...

Ok, time to go back to working on my paper. I'll upload some pictures later, since I'll probably be in this cafe for a while and will want another study break.

lame update (so much school!!!)

So, apparently the website has decided that I'm spam... which is really irritating.. I'm hoping they'll get to my review request soon so that I don't get deleted...

But yea... I haven't posted because not much of interest is going on... I have upwards of 4 hours of class every day. Tuesdays I have 7 hours (including Chinese lunch table). I haven't had this much school since high school. plus, like, epic amounts of reading and chinese homework. so much for "if I'm only in 2 classes, It'll be easy to get the work done!"

We're going to the great wall on Saturday... it won't be nearly as crazy as the last time I was there, but that's ok... I don't think I've been to this section before, so it could be cool?

I'm bonding with my roommate... she's a sweetheart. I think I like her because her attitude is less... girly and silly than other Chinese girls I've encountered. I mean, she still has girly elements to her, but she speaks in a mature way and seems to be at least somewhat serious some of the time. it's really nice. She can't come to the great wal with us, but I'm hoping I'll get to hang out with her sometime this weekend... our schedules during the week are kind of different, and we both have work to do.

Mini-trips

Ok, so in the past couple of days, there's been an interesting experience in a massage parlor (The details of which I won't get into, since they're a little embarrassing for the guys. Nothing bad actually happened more than a little awkwardness and some miscommunication), a trip to the Forbidden City, a trip to the Temple of Heaven (Those pictures are still on my camera). Having been to both places before, I didn't really get much out of them the second time... I watched the people mostly. I really want to go to the Summer Palace, since it's supposed to be beautiful and I haven't been there before.
We also went to the park near our dorm and floated on the lake in a boat for a while... it's actually a really nice park. There was also a Bumper cars rink, which we watched for a bit then went one round on since the Chinese people seemed to think the point was to avoid hitting other people. It was fun.
Classes start on Monday, I'm looking forward to have something really mentally absorbing, although we've already had a lecture with our first professor, and his accent is so think that it's basically incomprehensible. But that's ok...

I also got placed into the second highest section of Chinese, and my schedule is pretty sweet. (No classes til the afternoon on Fridays!) We have about a hundred pages of reading for Monday/Tuesday, but that should be ok. I guess I'll start on that now.
(That's our dorm, which also is our classrooms)

EDIT: I had forgotten how much I missed squat toilets. Weird, I know, but they are so much easier than Western public toilets.

Also: There's a website about online censorship and blocking that *isn't* blocked in China. The irony amuses me intensely.

Also: For Nadja, who probably isn't reading this (I can't remember if I even told her about it), They played Walk it Out in one of the dance clubs we went to... Pretty much nobody in China knows how to do the walk it out except me, and I suck at it. I really wished you were there. They also played the song I'm addicted to, Just Dance by Lady Gaga.... it was awesome.

Today was interesting... it started with really delicious bao, progressed through adventures into the world of really gross instant coffee, continued on through the park where there were bumper cars, a motorboat with crazy Chinese children chasing us around the lake, and poorly read classical Chinese poetry.

A big group of us went and got Pizza in Hou Hai tonight, and then ended up in one of the lounges around the lake. It was pretty.... well... embarrassing actually... there ended up being a lot of sort of... stereotypical "American Tourist" behavior and we actually emptied the place of Chinese people. I was sort of ashamed to be there... I guess the owner didn't mind, since he knew one of the guys in our group, but like... I felt uncomfortable knowing I was part of a group that was so loud and rude and probably off-putting to the Chinese people around us. I guess I would just rather try to not validate those kinds of stereotypes if I can avoid it, since they represent a part of American culture that I really don't like very much.

I was in the last cab to leave Hou Hai, and Carey, Shazad and I ended up at the South campus instead of the North campus of Shou Shi Da, which isn't abnormal, since most taxi drivers don't know where or what Shou Shi Da even is. So we were walking along on the way back to the dorm when there's a crunch from down the road and when we turned around, there was a motorcycle lying on it's side. Shazad went over to see what was going on, and I tried to call the emergency number on my cell phone, but my Chinese vocab doesn't really cover "there was a motorcycle accident! please send an ambulance!" (I really only knew the word for motorcycle, and even then I was too stressed out/freaking out to pronounce it properly) and the poilceman kept asking me what I was saying. I finally had to run over to some men who were just walking up and handing one of them my phone and asking him to tell the police what happened.

What was scary was how many people in cars had sort of driven by and just looked at the guy lying there with his face scratched to hell and his leg hurt and not done anything... even as we were standing there waiting, pedestrians and cab drivers who were passing came over to watch. It was interesting to see Shazad's reactions and expectations for the situation... He kept thinking the by-standers were going to try to blame us or somehow get us into trouble. He's from Pakistan, and apparently that's a real danger there.

This was one of those times when I realized my language abilities should be way stronger. I guess it's lucky that there were ways around the language failure to make sure the man got help.

Beginnings

I flew over the North pole on the way to Beijing. Watching the ice floes was so cool. It *did* kind of look like it was melting, though. We also flew over Siberia, which is all I got a picture of. I'll try to post pictures later. The dorm internet is pretty up and down in quality, so I'll try to post pictures when we go to the internet cafe.

EDIT:


It's pretty different this time. I can't tell if it's that I've changed or if it's that the place has changed. I mean, post-olympics Beijing is... cleaner. I guess that's really the only difference... everything is new. they have RFID cards for the subway now! the last time I was here, they gave out little bits of paper.

I keep having really weird feelings like I'm back in high school.

We went to Wang Fu Jing last night, which is the street market in Beijing that has tons of crazy food like centipedes and scorpions on sticks. and vendors who shout "hey! Testicles" or "penis! Penis!" to get you to buy said sheep body parts. I didn't get up the courage to try stuff, but some of the other people did.

EDIT:

I keep thinking I'm over the jetlag, but then I get really tired at, like, 8pm.

I'm really ready for classes to start.