Packed Weekend #2

So as we're counting down our weekends, we realize we have to pack more and more activities

into one. So this weekend, after our test, we headed off to a hutong. These are basically ancient alleyways that create a grid-like pattern in the city of Beijing that have been preserved for hundreds of years. Now many of them range from buzzing shop/restaurant areas to purely residential streets. The ones we went to were mostly lined with one-story houses that seemed to had very minimal plumbing/electricity. Many of these hutongs are inhabited by Beijing's poorest residents. It was kind of strange how this sort of life was literally just a block away from a very developed street with restaurants/hair salons etc...

We decided to pass on the expensive restaurants and adventurously try one off the beaten path. The food was really cheap and the paint was chipping off the walls. But the food was soooo good! Seriously, the best noodles I've had in Beijing all summer. We all packed doggy bags since the portions were so large too. We were so happy with our decision.

Then we headed off to the Olympics Sports Center. Which is basically now just a symbol of overextravagance gone to waste. We went at night because that when all the lights go on and it's pretty. First stop, Bird's nest.

Then water cube! I got hungry and sat down to eat those noodles. My chopsticks were drenched in oil that spilled out so I had to use my hands. But seriously. Worth the effort.

Saturday:

First we go to the Temple of Heaven Park. So not only does it serve as a historical sight, but people often go there just to hang out, dance, sing traditional Beijing Opera, etc...The guy in the middle for example, was using that stick in his hand (which is essentially a giant paintbrush that uses water instead of paint, to draw characters on the ground). He taught me how to more prettily write my Chinese name. He also knew a lot of English which was surprising (even though we just responded to him in Chinese). He told us English and Chinese riddles and was overall one of the coolest people I've randomly met in China. He was also pretty impressed with our Chinese skills.

We eventually pulled ourselves away to go see the sights we paid to see. Below: Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests.

It's always interesting going to places like these that not only have a lot of foreign tourists, but a lot of Chinese tourists from other parts of China. Unlike most of the Beijingers, these people have not seen foreigners. So they often ran up to me asking to take a picture with me. (gotta prepare for the celebrity life somehow...) I was really afraid of Chinese racism before I came to China. But what I've noticed everywhere is that their treatment of colored people isn't negative at all. They simply have not encountered colored people and are more curious than accusatory.

So later that night...we went to the most famous teahouse in Beijing. The walls were lined with pictures of all the world leaders that visited it.

We even had live entertainment.

I'm missing home really hard right now. And I only have one week in New York that I'm already packing with plans. But I know at the same time I'm going to miss China a lot. The wonderful teachers I've been bonding with, the students that I will probably not see nearly as often when we go back to Yale, and all the wonderful places I'm discovering in China. I have only begun a superficial survey of the language and culture and there is so much more left to 了解(deeply understand is my best English translation of that). I'm excited to come back....so many mixed emotions right now.

Start of the Second Semester

So to celebrate our return home, HBA takes us to this acrobatics show. It reeks with pandering to tourists and the show starts off with some the artists in borderline offensively primitive outfits. But as the show goes on I can't help being amazed by all the different stunts and the skills of the performers.

Homework is still as abundant as ever but it's getting a little bit easier to remember new vocab/grammar. Maybe my Chinese mind is working better (knock on wood).

After our first weekly test of the second semester we made dumplings. All of us. Like one insanely large, partially Chinese family. It was cute.

Then I went to Silk Market. Which is now just a giant mall of little booths selling the same bootleg stuff. It was fun haggling but really time-consuming and tiring towards the end.

We literally spend half of our time shopping just arguing about prices. They would first enter some ridiculously high price into their calculator, and then we would erase it and enter what we're willing to pay. The difference was pretty large. A) because they thought we were stupid 外国人(foreigners) who would actually pay 300 yuan for a tshirt. and B) because we were particularly good hagglers who would start off with ridiculously low prices that were often 10% of what they originally asked for. After pretending to be upset and starting to walk away we would usually get the item for pretty close to what we asked for because our "chinese was so good" or in the case of Liz and me because we "are such beautiful girls."

To finish off a fun day we went to Houhai. Which is basically this area by the lake lined with pretty chill bars. It was beautiful and relaxing.

My week in Inner Mongolia

Ok so I've been dreading this wall post simply because I do not have any idea HOW to begin summarizing this week. So instead of just chronologically narrating the week, I think I will just discuss a few points that made this week so interesting. Then you can check out this album of pics. There were wayy too many pictures for me to try to pic a few to put in this blogpost. WARNING: if you don't want to see our dinner being slaughtered, don't look at pics 13-25!

Points of Interest:

1. Yurts. Traditional Mongolian tent-like things. Except they are way sturdier than tents and were actually pretty comfortable to sleep in. We stayed in them the first three days (when we were on grasslands) but we were in hotels after that. It was basically akin to sleeping on the floor. They provided us with cute blankets and everything. It was nice. The real hard part of staying on the grasslands was...

2. Bathrooms. Or really the lack thereof. I'm talking hole in the ground. Sometimes with a little wooden house so that you don't quite feel like you're just going on the ground. But you are. And there are often flies. And we couldn't shower for 3 days.

3. Food. Inner Mongolia had really delicious food. It wasn't as greasy as the food in Beijing so I was very happy. The one thing I won't miss however was their milk tea. Its special quality is the added salt flavor. Yes. Salty tea. Not delicious. Everything else was. Watching them kill the lamb with their bare hands was a little traumatic. But it seemed pretty painless.

4. Farm Life. So our first few days we got to interact with actual farmers. We not only watched them kill things, but we got to ask them about their daily lives and ideals. This was perhaps on of the more stronger impacts this trip had on me. I'm basically writing a paper now about how that older traditions of Inner Mongolia (and really China in general) are disappearing. We saw their folk dance and listened to folk music. We even watched their horse races and wrestling. And we visited a Buddhist temple. But with a very quickly developing China, the current generation is very distanced from these traditions. The people on the farm were not able to go to school during the Cultural Revolution so now they are quickly sending their kids off to school. The children live at school and only come back for brief summer and winter vacations. They all plan to go to college so that they can get jobs and support their parents, most of whom plan to move out of the farms. (A lot of the farms are subsidized by the government and have contracts that will expire in ten years anyway). In interviewing high school and college students, we learned that they all feel extremely worried about the job market because China's insanely large population makes it so hard for people to find jobs. They all study sciences rather than art because that's where the money is at and a lot of them plan to move to America or other countries to attend university and then find jobs. The current generation mostly does not follow the religion of their parents and say they often disagree ideologically with their parents views. Furthermore, they are very interested in American culture (eg Music and movies) and while they respect their traditions as a meaningful to their historical identity, they do not find them currently relevant.

4. "The Stare" So in Beijing people don't particularly stare at me because they have all seen foreigners before and this neighborhood is basically centered around this foreign student's university. But going into the streets of Inner Mongolia, I got the stares I was promised. It was at once amusing and uncomfortable. I walked past the souvenir shops into the streets lined with everyday grocery, hardware, homeware stores. I could immediately tell I was the first Latino (or even generally colored) person these people have ever seen. Some people even slowed down their cars to watch me. But their stares weren't accusatory or unwelcoming, just curious. So occasionally I said "ni hao" and got very happy "ni hao"s in return. I even had a conversation with the family that owned a grocery store. We talked about why I was in China and then they introduced me to their young son. They asked him if he recognized that I was a foreigner. He shyly smiled and ran outside.

5. Random Fun Things. Riding horses, camelriding, motorcar racing, and sandsurfing in the desert, watching a concert, visiting the largest dairy factory in China etc... Overall it was a really fun trip. We spent A LOT of time on the bus going from place to place because nothing was near anything else. But all the places we did go were incredibly fun and helped me learn a lot more about the Chinese way of life than staying in the HBA bubble on campus has.

Packed Weekend: Zoo, BeiHai Park, Beijing Opera...什么的

So Happy Independence Day! Some people are going out to the one BBQ place in all of Beijing to celebrate, but this weekend has depleted all my energy. It's hard having to cram all the things I want to do all in the weekends, especially when we still have homework to prepare for Monday. Oh and did I mention our midterm is coming up? The oral portion of which is a 15 minute skit? So yeah this week along with my regular homework I will be preparing for my midterm (on Friday), packing for my week in Inner Mongolia (we leave on Friday), and preparing the report I'll have to write about Inner Mongolian Folk Dance and Music Traditions (due as soon as I get back).

As full as this weekend was, it was pretty fun. First stop, after our test on Friday we went to the zoo! Because a trip to China just isn't complete without some pandas.

We of course looked at some other animals. There were penguins, a green lake, and it was feeding time for the big cats.

Saturday Morning: We head off to Yale Chinese 110/120's beloved 北海公园 (BeiHai Park). We had a picnic. It was beautiful. But incredibly hot. Like Beijing pretty often tends to be.

This is the view from the 白塔 (White Pagoda). Celia and I were so sweaty at this point that we didn't want to get any closer to each other to take this picture. But the love was still there, don't worry.

After coming home for some 休息 (rest) we went to see Beijing Opera. Ok so Chinese performance is what I'm here for and I was soooo excited to see this. It was great. The Chingrish subtitles were funny, but over all it was a great show. This was our table that we watched the show from.

And this was how the waiter poured hot water into our teacups.

The actors putting on their own makeup before the show.

Beijing Opera was truly great. I'll let these videos speak for themselves. I'm in the process of trying to upload a video of mostly singing. But until then, here are two videos that display acrobatics, which along with music, dance, and singing, is another important feature of Beijing Opera.

After the show, we had a very pleasant dinner. The staff was really impressed with our Chinese. Cab drivers have also been complimenting our Chinese skills. This is a really gratifying feeling, and it's nice how appreciative they all seem of our interest in their culture.

So what am I learning?

A WHOLE LOT OF CHARACTERS.

So I wish I could blog a little more often but every second I spend not studying the ~100 new characters a night makes me feel really stressed out. When I'm not in class, sleeping, or eating, I'm memorizing vocabulary or studying grammar. I knew this program would be intense but now I'm starting to doubt that this amount of learning in such a short time period is actually possible. How much of this will I actually remember? And wouldn't I learn more about China by spending less time with my head in my books and more time in a traditional Beijing Hutong? We are going to hit up a lot of really famous must-sees but I feel like I'm losing out on an authentic (eg. less tourist-infested) Chinese experience.

But as Willy Wonka said: "So shines a light in a dark and dreary world." I had a very uplifting dinner today. Dinners are literally my life saver. Meal times are the only time I have to feel sane, interact with other human beings, and push memorizing characters a little further back in my mind. But today's dinner was especially relieving. Misery surely enjoys company. The rest of my classmates are having the same exact issues: suffering under this insane amount of work and worrying about only visiting tourist sites. We spent a good two hours at dinner just venting. But through that venting we were bonding on a whole new level. We decided as a group on a number of non-HBA excursions that we are going to go on, including a few tourist stops like the zoo and the Bird's Nest (but come on we HAVE to), but also including some journeys into the real China, some of which include simply walking until we find streets that aren't featured in our guide book, oh and we're hitting up a hutong. most definitely.

And in terms of the schoolwork, we're thankful that we're all in the same boat and at least this doesn't factor into our GPA. (Sorry Harvard kids). Not that we aren't going to put effort into our schoolwork, but we don't have to be as hard on ourselves for not recognizing 20 of the 500 characters on our tests. Also we realized that learning Chinese isn't only important to us for our various personal reasons, but it's also incredibly important to the teachers. A lot of them are students here at Beiyu (Beijing Language and Culture University) and we noticed that today was graduation. Were our teachers out walking with their class? No. They were teaching us. They missed their graduation (which was an extravagant affair and a huge deal especially considering the one-child policy) AND the last two weeks of class so that they could have an opportunity to teach us. Saying that they taught English to American college students at the Harvard-Beijing Academy is such an incredibly huge deal, and it just hit me today. Not only does this mean a lot to them in terms of their careers, but they are also doing a great service to their country. So many of our daily dialogues mention "economic reform" or "opening up to the world" and China's growing economy and the increase of foreign interest in Chinese culture, language and politics. I just quickly breeze over these terms when I'm struggling to memorize my new vocabulary, without stopping to think about their weight.

This job means soooo much to our teachers. And even before I made that realization I made a different one. We spend so much time with our teachers including our one-on-one class time, I'm already really saddened by idea of leaving them. It's only been two weeks and there are already a handful of teachers that have made this experience so wonderful for me that the thought of leaving them is already scary. My one-on-one teacher today even told me that she thinks it might be possible for me to act in Chinese films! (not sure how true that is considering all the commercials I see for skin-whitening cream, but considering that one of the most important reasons I'm learning Chinese is to understand more about their performing arts culture, it was certainly nice to hear). Oh yeah and today Li Lei, a well-known Peking Opera actor came to speak to us today. He taught us a bit about the form, techniques and finished it all off by demonstrating the art of face-painting. On his own face and a few students!

I'm very up-and-downy, so let's end with some pictures. Last Saturday we went to Forbidden City. It was really hot. All the buildings looked the same. I took some pictures.