Hannah's China Travel Blog

Final Post

2009-08-19T05:06:00.001-07:00

I promised one more post… here it is!

I'm back in America now, and am slowly adjusting to the time change and to the realization that buying eight stuffed pandas in the Beijing International Airport may not have been a great use of my last 300 kuai. I'm gearing up for next semester and seeing all of my friends from home. I'm eating a lot of pancakes.

As far as summers go, this one has been a pretty great one. The pre-trip to Shanghai/Suzhou/Hangzhou was really cool in a touristy sense, and I also really enjoyed going to the Great Wall, Summer Palace, Olympic square, and other sites. The Yuxian weekend was fascinating, if a little sketchy on the plumbing front, and overall I really feel like I've "done" China.

But the main point of studying in Beijing wasn't to take jumping pictures outside the Lama Temple. I signed up for it knowing that a lot of the academic program would be intense and, quite frankly, not fun.

This proved pretty true. I mean, our teachers were great, the syllabus was really well-constructed, and my classmates were for the most part amazing. But it's hard to sugar-coat daily 70-word vocab quizzes, and I spent a lot of time this summer more than a little stressed out.

However, after eight weeks of that, I'm glad I soldiered through. My Mandarin—spoken, written, read—has improved five-fold. I feel competent, if not fluent, and my new skills gave me a chance to interact with a lot of Beijingers outside of the classroom. Without the knowledge and confidence that my classes gave me, I never would have been able to do cool independent projects like fencing or flute, and I wouldn't have had such a great relationship with Sunny, who's so far been my favorite roommate I've had in college.

So, overall, I'm really pleased with the way this summer turned out. And although I'm not sure I agree with the cliché that Studying Abroad Changes Your Life (especially because most of the people I know who tout this have spent a semester binge-drinking in Europe), I can definitely say that China was a great experience.

I hope you've all enjoyed this blog! As a parting gift, some resources:

CET, the company that arranged the program in Beijing:

http://www.cetacademicprograms.com/

Details of the program on the UNC website:

http://studyabroad.unc.edu/programs.cfm?pk=1049

The Phillips Ambassadors program that funded my trip:

http://studyabroad.unc.edu/phillips/index.cfm

My best photos from the summer:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2047933&id=1398780206&l=5f000d5614

Zai jian! (See you later!)

Day Sixty-Nine

2009-08-16T21:57:00.001-07:00

Hooters last night was, well, a hoot. The waitresses did a dance routine in the middle of dinner that involved sparkly hats.

Short entry now; I'm leaving for the airport in two hours and flying out of China in five. The next (last) post I make I will be able to do from (legally) unblocked blogger!

Days Sixty-Seven and Sixty-Eight

2009-08-16T03:27:00.001-07:00

Days Sixty-Seven and Sixty-Eight:

Yesterday was pretty busy, and I've also caught the 300-level cold (so named because it's already taken down Nate, Brandon, and Chris) so I didn't update.

That morning, I got up kind of late. The night before, a group of us had gone out to Houhai to eat expensive and tasteless pizza and then when we returned to CET, we suddenly realized that we could TALK IN ENGLISH. So what started out with hanging out on the steps turned into a two-hour discussion. Although I stand with what I've said before—the language pledge never made me feel as if I couldn't communicate with my friends—being able to speak our native language certainly made things a lot easier. In the 48 hours or so since the English ban was released, I feel like I've gotten to know some of the CET students better than I have the rest of the summer!

Although the best part about not having to 24-7 speak Chinese is definitely being able to gossip loudly about people on the subway. ("Homeboy to your right is wearing a great Chinglish t-shirt. Check it out!)

I still spoke a lot of Chinese Saturday because I hung out with Sunny most of the day. I helped her move all of her stuff back home and then the two of us went out to lunch at this really cool restaurant that had sofas instead of seats. They also had miraculously good food; I got a club sandwich and Sunny, who was a lot less worried about using her mom's credit card on our meal, ordered a steak.

Afterward, we got our nails done for 20 kuai (almost three dollars) each and took the bus back to CET, where we planned to do a bookstore/movie outing with some friends.

Unfortunately, before we could do that, we somehow all got roped into bringing Jimmy's stuff back to his apartment and then were force-fed fruit and sketchy-looking energy drink that I think contained amphetamines by his tiny mother. Eventually we disentangled ourselves and rushed off to Xi'dan to go see "Up" (Chinese name: "The Flying House Floats Away").

It was in 3-D and I know you've all probably seen it already but it was really great. Highly recommend. Worth the fifty kuai of a student ticket.

We ate dinner at a Chinese fast food place where Emily and I ordered the exact same dish but received very different looking plates. We also did a bookstore run where I bought Peter Hessler's memoir "River Town" for the plane ride back. It's about this guy in the Peace Corps who comes to the Sichuan Province to teach English and yes I did want to buy a book that did not relate to China but the selection was very limited and it was either this or Gossip Girl.

We had to say goodbye to Jimmy and Sunny last night after dinner; the shifu wouldn't even let them stand inside the doorway after they'd moved out! Sad.

This morning, Emily, Brandon, Chris and I went to the zoo (again). The pandas were pretty cute and somehow a litter of white kittens had gotten into their cage so we spent about ten minutes watching the tiny cats sniff the sleeping bears and then meow and run away. We also saw wolves and gorillas and a monkey came very close to pooping on Brandon's head. Fun times.

This afternoon, I went to fencing for the last time. I fenced a couple of saberists that their coach had yelled at to suit up in foil gear to fence "the foreign auntie." I told the coach that I would give him a call if I were ever in Beijing again and he told me when he comes to America he will come to North Carolina first. Overall, fencing this summer's been a really good experience and I'm glad I was able to find a place to do it here.

I haven't started packing yet and probably won't until tomorrow; the gang has decided that on our last night in Beijing, we are going to eat at the Hooters at Sanlitun.

Day Sixty-Six

2009-08-14T00:58:00.000-07:00

Day Sixty Six:

Today's CET commencement was the first graduation ceremony I've attended where I haven't been forced to hear—or play—Pomp and Circumstance. A major plus.

After this morning's koushi (which went very well mostly because my randomly-selected topic turned out to be "Changes after the Open Door Policy" and not "China's Topography" or "Confucian Philosophy"), we all changed into the Chinese equivalent of "semi-formal." For some people (me, Emily, most other girls), this meant wearing our qipaos, nice shoes, and doing our hair. For other people (whose names may or may not rhyme with "Schmrandon"), this meant wearing a *nice* pair of jeans.

We ate "international-themed" food at a hotel buffet—some good stuff (sushi), some bad stuff (Irish lamb?), but mostly okay. After some speeches from each of the classes that progressed in grammatical complexity, we received diplomas and then proceeded to take approximately one million photographs.

300 班, as a gift to our teachers, made t-shirts that say "jia you!" ("add oil (to the fire)!"—it's something you shout at basketball games). Since Nate, Chris, and I had unfair help in the planning process, they are all Carolina blue.

Probably the most fun part of the afternoon was the countdown to English. After we had reached "ling" (zero), the room erupted. Even still it's a little hard to transition and I keep saying mangled half sentences that start out "Hey I was wondering if ni he wo de tongwu yao bu yao…"

Because Picasa has failed me (for the last time), here are a few shots from Photobucket:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v385/parmandiriel/IMG_2496_edited-1.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v385/parmandiriel/IMG_2538.jpg

Day Sixty-Five

2009-08-13T08:20:00.001-07:00

Day Sixty-Five:

After my test today (which did not go too poorly), a group of us took the subway over to the Yehonggan (sp?) Lama Temple. Although it was a lot like the places I visited pre-trip in Shanghai, Suzhou, etc, it was still very cool. Apparently this place holds a Guiness World Record for the largest carving of a Buddha made out of a single tree.

We ate lunch at a very sketchy restaurant. Although I was pretty sure I ordered pork in my noodles, all I could taste was garlic.

This evening, after an afternoon of not-quite preparing for my oral test tomorrow, I watched "Not Another Teen Movie" with Chris and his roommate Jimmy. Which was a poor choice, not only because it was a terrible movie, but also because it was essentially a roller-coaster ride through American pop culture. Jimmy's English is very good, but about every minute we'd have to explain the cultural significance of "The Token Black Guy," or "The Angry Football Coach." The part that really confused Jimmy (and Sunny, when she showed up to watch the end) was the Prom scene. They were both clueless as to why American high schools would hold such a bizarre, expensive function and why the Token Black Guy could dance so well. Oh dear.

Afterward (still procrastinating my oral final), we watched a video of the 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremonies, which was significantly easier for all of us to understand. It was interesting, though—when we got to the part where the little girl lip synched the traditional song, I worked up the courage to ask Sunny what she thought about that. (Remember the whole scandal? They had some other kid pretend to sing because the real singer was supposed to not look "cute enough"?) I usually stay away from politically-sensitive topics, mostly because Sunny has always said she hasn't been interested and because I don't want to seem like I'm imposing my views on her. But this time I kind of wanted to know. "So…do you know what happened?" I asked her. "With the girl singing?"

I don't know what I expected, but Sunny just laughed. "Of course!" she said. "Another child is on stage because the one singing is too ugly! What is your question?"

Anyway, after tomorrow's oral test, no more Chinese class for, like, TWO WEEKS.

Shoutout

2009-08-12T19:48:00.001-07:00

So today was really cool because I got four letters! One from Allison in Chicago, one from May in New York, another from Jay back in Chapel Hill and one from Tim... well, he was biking through Canada when he sent it but there's no telling where he is right now. :)

So a big thanks to you guys!

Day Sixty-Four

2009-08-12T05:56:00.001-07:00

Day Sixty-Four:

If I do poorly on my Chinese final tomorrow, it is probably because my roommate spent the afternoon watching dubbed-over "Yonggan xin" (Braveheart). I was too distracted by the dramatic music and weirdly-translated lines to focus properly on my vocab, which was much less interesting than what was happening on screen. Every time I'd look down at my book, they'd start screaming "ZIIIIII YOUUUUUUUU" (you can guess/translate that yourself). Bizarrely enough, the main character was voiced by someone who sounded just like my fencing coach here.

Not much else going on. I went to Ito Yokado this afternoon to buy gifts for my teachers and I think the florist cheated me when I bought wrapping paper.

Qi mo kao shi tomorrow!

Day Sixty-Two

2009-08-11T07:37:00.001-07:00

Day Sixty-Three:

For some reason, the teachers have organized this week's small classes into two groups of girls and two groups of guys. I guess this makes for an easier teaching environment—the teachers can say stuff like "let's use grammar to talk about an ideal boyfriend" without apologizing to a gender—but we've been joking all day that tomorrow we're going to watch a movie about our changing bodies.

This evening we all went out to dinner for Danielle's roommate's birthday. She was mortified that we treated her to eat instead of the other way around ("In China, you must pay for friends on your birthday!" she kept saying) but seemed really pleased with the cake. It was huge and purple with a bunch of glazed fruit on top.

Today's been pretty boring. Just a lot of studying.

Oh, except we each got a huge copy of the group picture we took yesterday. You can see it hanging above my desk in this picture: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v385/parmandiriel/IMG_2470.jpg

Day Sixty-Two

2009-08-10T07:13:00.001-07:00

Day Sixty-Two:

Today's class was very laid-back. We watched a documentary about Chinese life pre-Open Door Policy, which was interesting but all in Italian (?!?). Also there was a shot of these preschoolers singing a song praising Tiananmen, which was kind of cute if weird until we realized that these same kids were in college in 1989.

Besides that, all I've done is study. And write two of my four ten-minute presentations that have to be memorized by Friday. And eat an entire dragon fruit.

Day Sixty-One

2009-08-09T07:35:00.001-07:00

Day Sixty-One:

Brandon, Chris and I went to Sunny's house tonight to eat dinner. It was surprisingly a lot like the skits we performed in week four about Chinese customs. Like, all of the stuff from our textbook that I'd always thought was probably antiquated—ie, serving everyone fruit and tea and giving the guys cigarettes—came true. And talk about politeness! Even Sunny, who usually poo-poos traditional customs, would not eat a single dumpling until it was clear that the rest of us were full to bursting. So that was interesting.

Sunny's parents and aunts are very nice (although they do not speak as clearly as she does!) and their small apartment was full of interesting things. We watched a lot of CCTV and read through Sunny's old English textbooks, which seemed much more difficult than the stuff we're struggling through in class these days.

Speaking of class, movie day tomorrow!

Day Sixty

2009-08-08T19:33:00.001-07:00

Day Sixty:

China Night, although long, turned out to be really fun. Most of the acts (minus the weird guy who composed an epic poem to his Chinese girlfriend and then forgot it halfway through and started improvising) were good. 100 level was my personal favorite, if only because it made me feel really good about my own Chinese skills (Character one: What… would… you…. Like… to… eat? Character two: I…would…like…chick…en). The roommates did a pretty impressive Peking Opera reenactment and the teachers sang a song called "CET Huanying ni"—a spinoff of the Olympics song "Beijing huanying ni." Our skit somehow pulled itself together and the guy playing Confucius actually showed up so it was all good.

Afterward, I went with Tucker, Nate, Chris, Emily, Anqi, and two roommates to KTV to sing karaoke. We sat in this hotel lobby from 11:00 to 12:30, waiting for a karaoke room to open up, and then took an elevator up to a floor that was full of little soundproof rooms. Our room was not very big, and filled with a large red couch. After spending about fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to work the remote control, we sang a bunch of stuff. Yeah, it was mostly in English, but as I said afterward, I am sure the language pledge does not apply to Rick Astley!

("We're no strangers to aiqing… You know the guidings and so do I…"

Day Fifty-Nine

2009-08-07T03:06:00.001-07:00

Day Fifty-Nine:

Today's debate took four hours and while it was, for the most part, interesting, it was still excruciatingly long. (Also Fu Li Ming, whom everyone has started calling Tool Xiansheng—"Mr. Tool"—was really mean to a bunch of people during cross-examination which left me no choice but to pass around equally rude notes about his personal hygiene habits to the rest of my comrades.) Each member of the two nine-person teams gave a presentation on a different pro-technology or anti-technology point, and then the proctor gave a speech and then we had a really meta discussion about the meaning of "progress."

My melodramatic closing argument ("…because we, as the young people of this generation, cannot fear scientific development; rather, we must promote technological research in order to further our quality of life and protect the beautiful planet we call our home"—actually snippet) went over well and I won second place on our team. My prize was a bottle opener shaped like a Peking Opera mask. This, I feel, will be very useful. None of my friends own bottle openers and last Christmas when confronted with sparkling cider we almost broke several fingers.

After lunch, our class met AGAIN for two hours to pre-rehearse our China Night Skit. This is very typical Chinese education system—today our teacher told us that we have a mandatory dress rehearsal at 7:30 PM. On a Friday. For a mandatory school event that will take up three hours on a Saturday night.

The teachers haven't batted an eye at either of these occurrences; they, too, have to show up after hours to put together this show. I'm constantly reminded of the day before we won the National Championship back in April, when I asked my Chinese teacher if she was going to cancel class. Practically every other professor had flat out told us we could cut in the event of a victory, but my Chinese teacher told us she hadn't even thought about letting us doing that*. In America, the leisure side of school—going out on weekends, jumping over fires on Franklin street when our basketball team wins—is way more emphasized than it is here. Here, school is school, no matter if it's a weekend or an evening or what.

(*To be fair, she let us use our one excused absence to skip class the day after the game.)

One more week of school!

Day Fifty-Eight

2009-08-06T06:41:00.001-07:00

Day Fifty-Eight:

Today has been very busy. Our teachers informed us this morning that we are expected to prepare a full-length formal debate about the spread of technology by tomorrow and I have had to write, prepare, and memorize a ridiculously-long closing statement.

Apart from that, I went to take another flute lesson, which was fun. My teacher gave me a list of famous Chinese pieces to look up when I got home ("Because it seems to me that you do not have much time to practice here," she said after listening to my Griffes Poeme).

Day Fifty-Seven

2009-08-05T05:01:00.001-07:00

Day Fifty-Seven:

Because I didn't have that much homework, I asked my roommate if she wanted to watch an episode of The Office with me last night. I've seen a good bit of Chinese (and Korean) TV that she's watched, so I figured it was only fair to give her an introduction to American stuff. So we saw Season One, Episode Five—the one where the office staff plays basketball with the warehouse guys.

Most of the humor was completely lost on her, even with subtitles, and I also had to explain several times the Jim and Pam "guanxi" (relationship). ("She's been planning to marry Luo Yi—Roy—for a very long time, but it is clear that he is not very friendly!") And although Michael's basketball-playing pratfalls amused her, she REALLY didn't understand his conflict with Stanley and I had to pause it.

Me: So do you understand why Mi Ke Er made Si Tan Li upset?

Sunny: No. He just asked him to be on his basketball team!

Me: Right. He very quickly chose Si Tan Li to be on his basketball team because he wrongly thinks that Si Tan Li is good at playing basketball.

Sunny: Okay.

Me: The reason he thinks Si Tan Li is a good basketball player is just because Si Tan Li is a black person. And lots of black people are good at basketball.

Sunny: Like Kobe!

Me: Exactly. But Mi Ke Er doesn't know if Si Tan Li can play well or not, he just thought that since he is a black person he will be a good player.

Sunny: Then that is a good decision, right?

Oops.

I've spent a lot of time lately watching tv/movies. This morning in class we watched a Chinese film called—and I'm not kidding—"Taking a Shower." It turned out to be about this old guy who ran a bathhouse in a hutong, but for a while beforehand we were all a little apprehensive about watching it.

This afternoon, I went with Sunny, Brandon, and Chris to the planetarium across the street to see a "3-D Dinosaur Adventure." It was literally only six minutes long, and kind of made me seasick, but at least I learned how to say "velociraptor" ("Xun Meng Long").

Today's lesson is the last one in the book! It is about technology, which is very rewarding because if you combine some of its vocabulary words with the ones in the chapter on Sun Yat Sen, you can say "Robot Revolution."

Day Fifty-Six

2009-08-04T06:01:00.001-07:00

Day Fifty-Six:

Every time I fence here, I can see improvement—in my language skills, if not my footwork. The first few times I took lessons, I remember barely understanding anything my coach said; now, I'm able to pick out somewhat advanced dialogue such as "Is your footwork this bad in America, too?"

Oh, I kid. Kind of. Although I like the coach here, he's definitely stricter than I'm used to, and doesn't seem to understand that there are different schools of thought governing various actions. When I try to explain to him that I learned something a different way, or that back home we parry stuff like *this*, he just shakes his head and says, "This summer, you finally learn to correct errors!" His speech is very distinctive, a thick Beijing accent peppered with painfully-pronounced French fencing terms. Every word comes out very quickly until he hits something like "disengagement," and then all hell breaks loose.

Today has been a pretty normal day of class, except that Chris and I went shopping after lunch to buy props for our play. To my surprise, I found a bright pink beret that will work perfectly with my stereotypical stripey shirt. Chris, whose character is a Chinese pop star, will wear a bright pink polo shirt, tight pants, and aviators. These things were sadly readily available in the first stall we looked in. About eighty percent of the young guys here associate popped collars with super-cool western style. :-(

Day Fifty-Five

2009-08-03T06:49:00.001-07:00

Day Fifty-Five:

Today's class seemed shorter than usual because we spent about an hour of it working on our skit for China Night. It is called "CET TV"—after "CCTV," the biggest station here—and includes acts such as… well, it's difficult to say. At this stage of the planning, all I can say is that I will play a bearded Confucian disciple in one scene and then a modern French foreign exchange student in another. A quick costume change will be necessary. Also, I'm now on the lookout for a Chinese-made beret.

Today's homework assignment involved interviewing older Chinese people about their experiences of the effects of the Open-Door Policy. Nate and I first went to ask the doorman, but after ten minutes of "yes, it was very different. Everything was very different. Very different in big ways" dismissive answers (we were not the first people in our thirty-person class to quiz him) we went off to find actual Beijingers.

The only problem is that real-life older Chinese people speak basically a different language and are not very used to our terrible pronunciation. After explaining very clearly that we didn't want to buy egg dumplings to the woman at the shop down the street, she was still very confused about the interview process and told us that we had better talk to her son instead.

"This is about the 1970 Open Door Policy," we told her. "How old is your son?"

"Thirteen," she said. "But he will definitely understand your way of talking!"

Fortunately, her kid was able to find an older man for us to interview; he was sitting in front of the store playing cards and while he didn't seem too pleased to detail his views on China's economic development, his buddies thought that we were hilarious and goaded him every time he didn't answer.

His replies were a little more concrete than the doorman's; he told us about working on a farm as a kid and then moving to the city after 1970. But after a while (once we started getting into the more esoteric questions—"How did the Open Door Policy Affect Chinese Way of Thought?") he got fed up and went back to playing cards.

More vocab, more studying.

rearranged some pix

2009-08-03T00:57:00.001-07:00

So here's stuff from the art gallery and Soong Ching Ling's house: http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China16?authkey=Gv1sRgCO2Cy5H187rO3wE&feat=directlink

still waiting on Summer Palace

Day Fifty Three

2009-08-02T23:47:00.001-07:00

Day Fifty-Four:

I went to the Summer Palace yesterday with Sunny, Chris, and Brandon. It was surprisingly perfect weather: clear skies, sun, hoards of French tourists, etc. The place is really big, built around this lake with a big stone bridge leading to an island in the middle of it. A huge temple is built into the side of the mountain, and from the top of it you can see the whole park. (FYI: The Summer Palace was the Emperors' "Camp David"—since they couldn't visit Southern China in a rickshaw everyday, they built a holiday retreat a lot like it in Beijing.)

Despite an extended ride on Bus #332 (almost an hour) to get there, it was a really fun activity. We ate a lot of ice cream and I horrified several elderly Beijing women when I tried to explain to Chris that we were in the part of the park where the Eunuchs lived.

I'm still trying to figure out a way to get pictures online; my picasa account is apparently full and other methods of photo uploading have been blocked by the government.

Day Fifty-Three Part Two:

2009-08-01T08:47:00.001-07:00

Day Fifty-Three Part Two:

Quick update: Brandon and Sunny and I went to Sanlitun (pronounced by all Beijingers "Sanlituaaaarrrrr") to eat pizza at a place called the Kro's Nest. It was a big ex-pat/tourist destination: the bathrooms even had signs telling us not to flush the toilet paper (I mean, duhhhh! :D). And the pizza was great! Sunny seemed to enjoy it a lot, but Brandon and I spent the entire meal in absolute rapture.

For reasons unknown, the music was exclusively sixties/seventies rock and roll, with an emphasis on Billy Idol. Whose first name, Sunny tells us, would be Bi'er.

Day Fifty-Two and Part of Fifty-Three

2009-08-01T03:10:00.001-07:00

Day Fifty-Two and Part of Fifty-Three:

Yesterday after our test, I went with Chris and Brandon to Xinjiekou. Although the purpose of the visit was ostensibly to purchase dvd's, we spent most of our time trying to get the mynah bird outside of the tea shop to say rude things in Mandarin.

That night, I went with Nate, Seth, Danielle, Ross and Rachel to Houhai, where we rented a paddleboat and laboriously paddled it around the lake for a few hours. The weather was really nice and even though we spent way too much money on off-brand Pringles (25 kuai? Are you kidding me?) it was still lots of fun.

This morning, I woke up really late and after some short flute practice took the bus with the rest of the CET kids to 798, Beijing's modern art district. (The name "789" has been confusing me for the past two weeks. Every time I hear people say it—qi jiu ba—I think they're talking about going to a jiu ba—or bar—named "qi!") It was a really cool place, if big (we didn't get time to see all of it). The first gallery we saw was my favorite: it was a comparison of modern advertisements with real-life photos… kind of hard to explain without showing pictures, but one piece showed an ad for a dollar to Saudi Arabian currency and then had photos of oil drilling areas. Although it was a little politically-slanted, I still found it very interesting.

The whole district was very western: lots of English and expensive gift shop stuff. We took a bunch of pictures which should be up soon.

Four of us took a taxi back to CET this afternoon, where I had the conversation I always have with cab drivers.

Me: I want to go to the Beijing Institute of Education.

Driver: Are you a foreign-exchange student?

Me: Yes. Just this summer.

Driver: Why so short?

Me: We have a lot of classes every day. It is like a year of Chinese!

Driver: Oh. Do you like Beijing!

Me: I love Beijing!

Driver: GOOD. Beijing is the best city in China! Best in the world!

Me: Are you from here?

Driver: Of course! If I were not from here I would not have this good of a job. Tell me more about how you like Beijing.

Me: Well I went to Shanghai before I came here and Beijing's air pollution is a lot less. Have you ever been to Shanghai?

Driver: Why would I ever want to go to Shanghai?

Me: I don't know.

Driver: Did you hate Shanghai?

Me: Of course.

Driver: Why?

Me: It's just not as good as Beijing.

Driver: That is a very good opinion.

Although it's raining cats and dogs, we're heading off in a few minutes to go get pizza.

Day Fifty-One

2009-07-30T06:49:00.001-07:00

Day Fifty-One:

Today's lesson text was about Confucius, which was easier than the one on Sun Yat-Sen but just as boring. I miss the days when the characters in our books had Anglicized names (Si Di-Fu = Steve) and taught us vocab by going shopping together. Oh well.

The biggest achievement of the day—besides staying awake through four hours of ancient philosophy—was my assassination of four mosquitoes in my makeshift practice room. Unfortunately, "A New Chinese Course Book II" is now covered in streaks of blood and mosquito guts, and the walls of the auxiliary gym are decorated likewise. Even the bugs here are different than in America. They are much faster and smarter than the ones back home, probably due to increased parental attention from the one-mosquito policy, rigorous public education, job competition, etc. :-D

Instead of studying for my test today, I have done a number of culturally-enriching things, such as teaching some of my compatriots how to use the facebook proxy and buying a green skirt (18 kuai!). Speaking of clothing, the tailor came back to fit the suits we ordered, and I had to figure out how to mime to him "please take out the shoulder pads."

Back to studying!

Day Fifty

2009-07-29T05:53:00.001-07:00

Day Fifty:

Instead of learning a new lesson text, our class took a field trip today to visit Sun Yat-Sen's wife's former residence. It was a pretty cool museum, although a little heavy on the propaganda. In any case, it beat going to class!

This evening, Sunny brought home with her a brown fuzzy stuffed animal whose shape can only be described as a pile of feces on a stick. With eyes. She calls it "poo poo" and it makes "booiinng" noises when you hit it on stuff. I've shown it to everyone on the hall.

I'm supposed to prepare an explanation of two of Confucius's sayings tonight, but I think I will go to bed instead.

Day Forty-Eight

2009-07-28T06:21:00.001-07:00

Day Forty-Nine:

The Adventure of the Lost Wallet (or maybe Lost Green Slice of Bread? You pick) continued today when I discovered that while I could log in to ATMs using my spare debit card, I couldn't actually withdraw money. And of course the little bank on the corner doesn't accept travelers checks, so this afternoon Sunny, Chris, Nate and I trekked down to Bank of China.

It was 4:10 when the bus dropped us off there, and it took the bankers a while to tell me that I would be unable to cash my checks without my passport. I'd thought I was well-prepared, bringing both my driver's license and student ID, but no dice. So I had to run back to the bus stop, catch a bus, run to my dorm and back, catch another bus, and run from that bus back to the bank before it closed at five. After that, however, things went smoothly and once I had successfully expanded my personal economy ("The open-door policy successfully expanded China's economy" is a homework sentence), Nate, Sunny, and I went walking to buy illegal dvds.

(At that time, Chris took the academic high road and returned to CET for a lecture on Socialism. The rest of us, especially Sunny, who said she'd rather watch traditional opera than attend such a boring lecture, declined.)

We walked down Xinjiekou, a street with a lot of music/musical instrument shops. We walked through a store that sells guzhengs (google image search that; I can't here) and traditional flutes. It was a neat place except for the huge pots of koi and albino frogs, which were kind of creepy. Other stores sold more modern instruments—strings, winds (I saw a green metal flute!), electric guitars…. And, oddly enough, interspaced between the various violin stores and saxophone shops were a number of stalls that sold nothing but frilly underwear.

We ate at Dairy Queen (Just called "DQ" here), which is one of the few food chains that seems almost exactly like its American counterpart (minus, of course, the green tea Blizzards). On a side note, KFCs here sell fried octopus. Eek.

Anyway, after a long trek, we found a dvd store, which was everything I'd dreamed of. For 200 kuai ($30), I bought:

--Seasons 2 and 3 of Dexter (which alone should have cost at least $50)

--Serenity, the Firefly movie

--The new X-men Wolverine movie

--Kung Fu Panda

--The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

--Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

--a Chinese movie Sunny recommended called "A World Without Thieves"

--Burn After Reading

--Wall-E

--The Reader

All of it works and seems legit-ish—at least no people walking in front of the screen! This year, I get to be the person on the fencing team who comes back from Asia with movies to watch on the bus. (Last year, Jess had huge collections of bootleg stuff that she'd brought back from Vietnam.)

We're going to see Sun Yat-Sen's wife's house tomorrow instead of studying a lesson, so tonight I don't have to spend three hours memorizing vocab. Great day.

ETA: Internet update: hai keyi. (Okay).

Day Forty-Seven

2009-07-27T16:44:00.001-07:00

Day Forty-Eight:

A pretty uneventful day, full of class and homework and memorizing the
names of Chinese dynasties. A bunch of us ate dinner at a dumpling
restaurant and when I asked for soy sauce, the waitress looked at me
like I was crazy. And I said it right this time! She was like, "are
you sure you don't want vinegar?" and I was like, "No, JIANG YOU."
And she just shook her head at me, a la Gollum in Return of the King
when Sam tells him that he's going to cook the fish they just caught.
("Spoiling nice fisssh, stupid hobbit!")

Right now I'm trying to finish up some reading but I am repeatedly
distracted by the bizarre television show my roommate is watching.
Right now, three shirtless men with towels wrapped around their heads
are sitting in what looks like a cellar, peeling vegetables. About
three minutes ago, a woman dressed in a French maid's costume was
hitting her boyfriend on the head with an oversized alarm clock. Good
times.

Internet update: slow as molasses.

photos (finally)

2009-07-27T00:20:00.001-07:00

thanks to Matthew for helping me hack my way around the controls.

Photos from Harry Potter showing here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China15?authkey=Gv1sRgCInL167-tqvJLg&feat=directlink

Photos from the Great Wall here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China151?authkey=Gv1sRgCLyRpIva44WFkQE&feat=directlink

Day Forty-Six

2009-07-25T08:29:00.001-07:00

Day Forty-Six:

The Great Wall was AWESOME.

Today's weather was perfect, and the whole ride there was very pleasant. It's so weird to think that after driving for two hours, we're still in Beijing—the city is roughly the size of Maryland!

The trek up to the wall was quite intense (especially after not working out all summer) and made me glad I wasn't a Mongol invader. When we got to the top, we spent a few hours trekking back and forth along the ridges and taking various pictures of people pretending to fall off the wall. I also brought along my flute for a photo op. (I sent that one to my music professor at UNC with the caption "still practicing.") We took a ski-lift back down and headed to the bus.

After we got back, Sunny and I went with Brandon, Chris and Chris's roommate Jimmy to Jimmy's house to eat. He wanted us to help him cook American food, but with little more than a back-alley vegetable market at hand for supplies, it was somewhat difficult. So we made omelets (which is close enough to the egg pancakes we eat here every day) and mashed potatoes. Although the omelets should have been more difficult to make, it took a combined effort to calm Jimmy's mother down that we weren't spoiling the potatoes by cooking them until mushy. Every few minutes she'd tap one of us on the shoulder and be like, "They have definitely cooked long enough. I will remove them now" and poke the rock-hard potatoes with a chopstick.

Jimmy's house was in a cluster of small two-story apartments that he said belonged mostly to government workers. In his living room, there were pictures of his father with Hu Jintao (China's president). "Long Live Mao" and other similar slogans were written in colorful chalk on blackboards outside each building. When we walked out, Jimmy off-handedly mentioned that Deng Xiaoping had lived in the building next to theirs. Wow.

After dinner, we went to Hou Hai, a big cluster of bars and restaurants and shops surrounding a manmade lake. It was very beautiful: people were boating on the lake and all of the restaurants were lit up. Although we just walked around, it was still really fun listening to the music and people watching. I'd always heard Hou Hai was a big tourist spot, but I didn't see as many foreigners there as I did at Sanlitun or Wudaoko.

In other news, I have misplaced my wallet somewhere between the dumpling shop and my dorm room. This would be a much greater dilemma than it seems if I had actually had any money in it; fortunately, I spent almost every kuai on touristy crap at the Great Wall (which is probably just as bad as leaving it in the street, haha). I've already cancelled the debit card that was in it, but I still kind of hope it will turn up. In that vein, I asked the doorman tonight if anyone had turned it in.

Me: Shifu!

Shifu: We haven't gotten any letters since the last time you asked.

Me: No, I have forgotten my mianbao!

Shifu: Forgotten your mianbao?

Me: I mean lost. Sorry. It's green.

Shifu: Your mianbao?

Me: Yeah, has anyone given it to you?

Shifu: Given what to me?

Me: MY GREEN MIANBAO.

Shifu: I can't give you a mianbao. I don't have any.

Me: So no one turned it in? It's green.

Sunny: (pops her head in the door) She's asking you if anyone has turned in a wallet.

Me: Yes. MIANBAO.

Sunny, Shifu: …

Me: What?

Sunny: It's qianbao. "Mianbao" means "slice of bread."

In other, other news, I tried asking this guy at the Great Wall to take our picture and it took me about twenty seconds to remember how to say it in English. Oof.

[pictures from the Great Wall will be up soon, but the internet here is very slow tonight and I can barely access g-mail without it crashing]

Day Forty-Five

2009-07-24T17:25:00.001-07:00

Day Forty-Five:

After our test today (which did not go badly), a group of us went to go see Harry Potter at a movie theatre in Xidan (kind of touristy part of the city near Tiananmen). It was an interesting experience: the tickets they sold us were for specific seats, and the movie started exactly on time—no previews! But besides that, and the subtitles at the bottom, it was a pretty regular movie-watching experience.

On a tangential note, I wasn't a huge fan of this movie. Like all the previous Potters, it was enjoyable and the costumes/props/sweeping vistas of pastoral English countryside were well done; but like the other five films, it stuck to the book so closely that the film itself was unmemorable. My roommate, who hasn't read The Half Blood Prince or The Deathly Hallows, enjoyed it, but was of course horrified when "Dum-bu-li-du bei Sna-pu sha si le!" She also is uncannily fond of Ron, who is probably the first foreign male she hasn't said looks like Harry Potter.

After the movie, we all (Chris, Emily, Anqi, Andrew from 300 class, Sunny, and I) went out to eat at a tiny dumpling restaurant. Where I accidentally requested, repeatedly, that the waitress bring me a bowl of vegetable oil to dip my food in. It was really a mispronunciation of "soy sauce," but I said it so vehemently that the meek little woman rummaged around in back for about fifteen minutes and arrived at our table with a dish of the oil I'd requested. Weird American custom? Anyway, that mishap led Andrew to tell us a joke where a man goes up to a bartender and asks to use his wife (qizi) instead of his bottle opener (qiezi). "Why not?" the customer asks, outraged. "I only want it/her (interchangeable pronouns help the humor) for a minute!"

Tomorrow, Great Wall!

Day Forty-four

2009-07-23T07:24:00.001-07:00

Day Forty-Four:

Not much to report today. The one treadmill in the CET gym has "huai le"d, and I've spent most of the day studying for my test tomorrow.

And by studying, I mean I also walked to the market and bought a skirt and spent about two hours trying to coordinate everyone's Harry Potter-watching plans tomorrow. Which are very complicated.

The Great Wall trip is this weekend!

day forty-three

2009-07-22T16:38:00.001-07:00

Day Forty-Three:

This had better be a quick entry. I can't figure out how I have so much work today; minus a short trip to the gym building and an hour of dinner, I've worked for the past eight hours straight and still haven't finished everything. The teachers here have a habit of springing immense projects (for example, tomorrow's six-minute memorized oral presentation about the topography of your home state) on us the day before they're due.

I finished "Foreign Babes in Beijing" (as my roommate calls it "foreign babies in the city"), and liked it a lot. I talked about the book in my one-on-one today, and my teacher said she'd actually seen some of the episodes mentioned. (For those of you who are unfamiliar, FBIB is a memoir about a girl who comes to Beijing to work for an American PR company and ends up starring in a popular Chinese sitcom about locals who fall in love with foreign exchange students.) So that was cool.

Another interesting note is that "xuanchuan," (sp?) a word I'd never paid much attention to, has quite a different meaning than the one given in our textbook. I've always used it as they have, which is "to disseminate information"—tell people about protecting the environment and educating the masses on stuff like AIDS prevention. I can't tell you how many sentences I've used in essays that say, "In order to prevent [this societal problem], it would be a good idea for the government to xuanchuan info. to encourage quitting smoking/not littering/helping others."

….today I discovered the English meaning for the word: "propaganda"!

It's interesting that the Chinese language doesn't really make a difference, linguistically, between handing out pamphlets about covering your mouth when you sneeze vs. the sort of "disseminating information" that occurred after Tiananmen '89.

Okay, back to work. In other news, I bought a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on the street today for five kuai. It is terrible quality, was obviously filmed in a movie theatre, and has ridiculous dubbed-over voices for Harry and Dumbledore. I love it!

Day Forty-Two

2009-07-21T16:40:00.001-07:00

Day Forty-Two:

Today's class was painfully boring. Although our teachers insist that Peking Opera is widely appreciated by our generation of Beijingers, my roommate begs to differ. ("And it is not just me," she told me at dinner. "My parents also think it is deathly uninteresting. You have to be really old to like that stuff.") So it was a little hard to stay awake as we drilled grammar patterns related to stage directions and makeup.

Dinner was somewhat of a fiasco. Twelve people showed up for our 6:30 meetup time and no one could decide where to go; it's very difficult to tailor to twelve different specifications (ie "less than 12 kuai," "no dumplings," "no beef," "lots of expensive beef dumplings") so after walking around for twenty minutes we ended up back at the noodle place we always eat at. Which is where I wanted to eat anyway, so mei wenti (no problem)!

Studying for tomorrow's class has been going well; the topic ("new Chinese vocabulary") is much more interesting than traditional opera. We're learning about all of the ways Chinese people construct new words, and they seem to fall into three categories. The first is by translating stuff directly from English (or other languages) directly to Mandarin. ie, "Underground subway" is literally "underneath train." The second is kind of related to the way that new English words/portmanteaus are constructed—by mashing stuff together. Like, "color television," which used to be four characters is now only two—kind of like "telecolor." The third way (my favorite) is when stuff is translated phonetically. For example, 三明治 (san ming zhi), literally means "three bright things", but it sounds enough like its English equivalent to mean "sandwich."

Anyway, that's been kind of cool. Sunny and I have been working on my homework together (haha); I have to prepare a speech tomorrow about two new Chinese words. I've picked the "Fuwa" ("Happiness" + "Cute fat babies" = the little chubby Olympics mascots) and the aforementioned "Sanmingzhi."

Oh, so on another note, I got a letter from my teammate Tim today, which is really cool because he's in the middle of a bazillion-mile bike ride across the continent to raise Autism awareness. (The letter was postmarked from Anchorage!) You guys should all check out his blog, because it's probably more interesting than mine and has more Eskimos: http://www.adventureforautism.com.

Sunny showed up at the dorm today bearing gifts. She had bought me a keychain with an extraordinarily realistic rubber dumpling on it. I keep looking at it out of the corner of my eye and wonder who's left food on my desk. In an attempt to repay her, I've put a bunch of American music on her computer, which we are (illegally) (out loud) listening to now. She likes Taylor Swift, so I tried to explain a little about Southern accents, which she calls "dialects." Then, being the bad influence I am, I taught her how to say "y'all." :-)

I think that's about it for the day. Oh, except I bought a box of goldfish crackers to eat this afternoon and they're actually goldfish flavored.

Day Forty-One

2009-07-20T07:15:00.001-07:00

Day Forty-One:

Today has been pretty low-key. Since my 4-year-old iPod mini finally bit the dust, I bought a new one at Carrefour, the store that sells ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. Unfortunately, apple brand stuff is the only thing here that isn't cheaper than in America. Sigh.

Also, a tailor came to the school today to measure everyone who wanted one for a suit—he's giving us a group rate, so we all piled into the activity room this evening to mime the words for "cufflength" and "inseam" and "I know the picture has shoulderpads, but I don't think anyone has worn those in about fifteen years."

Now, I am off to study 59 vocabulary words pertaining to the Beijing opera. Useful, I know.

Pictures

2009-07-20T00:05:00.001-07:00

Yuxian pictures are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China13?authkey=Gv1sRgCJ_V-unZ-M3YAg&feat=directlink

and here: http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China14?authkey=Gv1sRgCLOYzbOF_u_KwQE&feat=directlink

and here:http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China141?authkey=Gv1sRgCOrKiPTf0Oq-nAE&feat=directlink

Day Forty

2009-07-19T06:40:00.001-07:00

Day Forty:

The trip to Yu Xian was really cool. I'll try to get it all down here:

Friday, we boarded two "big busses" out of Beijing. Bus B was definitely the "Bei Ka Da Xue" (UNC) bus; Danielle, Seth, Nate, Rachel, Lanear, and assorted roommates were assigned to that. So naturally Chris and I were a little bummed when we turned out to be the sole light-blue-wearing comrades on Bus A. However, hanging out with him, his roommate ("Jimmy") and my roommate ("Sunny") all weekend was not bad. We four formed a group I referred to as the "Meng Zu"—"Dream Team." (This literally means: "Sleeping Visual Images Group".)

After a four-hour long bus ride, during which I taught my roommate how to play MASH—"Palace/Apartment/Peasant Home/House"—we arrived in Yu Xian to begin the day's activities. Although we had been promised sunny warm weather, and packed accordingly, it drizzled rain all day. My roommate and I spent most of the day huddled in the extra coat Chris had brought.

We spent the next few hours walking around to several Yu Xian historic sites—Temple of the Jade Emperor, Tower of the God of Fortune, Drum Tower, South Gate, Nan An Si Pagoda, and the tiny Yuxian museum. The historic sites were very cool, but more interesting was the town of Yuxian itself. Most of it was completely non-modernized, and the roads we walked through to get to the temples were flanked by houses made out of mud and stones. On the main street itself, which was paved, we were practically a parade: all of the shopkeepers and families crowded at the doors to watch us pass, and I can't tell you how many times we heard the word "waiguoren!" ("foreigners!")

To finish the afternoon, we went to a Chinese papercutting workroom, where women used knifes to trace miniscule designs into paper and then painted them. We were then allowed to try a papercut of our own, which the dream team collectively failed at. ("Ha ha," Chris and I told my roommate and Jimmy, "It's not just because we're waiguoren!")

We got back to the hotel around 7:30 where I managed to incorrectly operate the shower and, in about four seconds, floor the entire room (and all of my clean clothes) in an inch of water. This explains why, in most of the pictures you'll see, I'm wearing clothes that appear to belong to a 5'7" Chinese girl, not a 5'3" girl from North Carolina. (Thanks, Sunny!)

The Meng Zu took a taxi to eat dinner at a place that Jimmy had found. It was a tiny family-owned barbeque restaurant, and when the four of us arrived, we had to carry a table upstairs to eat in a bedroom. The strips of flypaper on the walls were very crowded, and when the family brought seven plates of unidentifiable meat on a stick, Chris and I exchanged a look. But Jimmy and Sunny were unfazed, so we forged ahead, stopping only to look in our dictionary for the word for "cooked tendon."

(On another note, at this restaurant, I was wearing my "Don't Mess with Texas T-shirt," which warranted explaining to the Beijingers. "Texas likes its freedom, even though it is really part of the United States," I told them. "Like Taiwan!" they both said.)

After leaving the "restaurant," we started to walk back to the hotel, but on the way we spotted an arcade. Since it was about 10:00 p.m., there was absolutely no one in there. We spent about an hour playing the claw game (Chris won a stuffed penguin and gave it to Sunny; she calls it "Little Chris"—"Xiao Han Si") and racing games, and Sunny and I sang "Tian Mi Mi" on the Kareoke machine. This place, which was a little bit like Chuck-E-Cheese, but better lit, also had an indoor bumper-car track ("Peng-Peng Che"), which we rammed into each other on for about half an hour. We then went back to the hotel, where we played cards for about an hour before going to bed. (Card games seem pretty much universal. Scum and Egyptian Rat Screw are pretty much the same here as they are in the US.)

Saturday, we got up early to travel to the small village of Nuanquan. And we thought Yuxian was poor! At least they had cobblestones! Getting the tour bus into the narrow, muddy streets was a nightmare, but once we got into the place, it was like being transported back in time. Women were washing clothes in a big lake and drying tofu on big racks outside their houses. The weather was beautiful, and there were a lot of flowers blooming everywhere—very pastoral and idyllic, if not for the mounds of trash and rampant poverty. ("The Hobbiton ghetto," I told Chris, who understood, and Sunny, who did not.)

We climbed into a very cool three-story temple, where I bought a lantern that is far too big to reasonably take back to America with me.

On the way to lunch, we stopped by the public restroom. Which is kind of a misnomer in a town without running water. The building was a hut with holes in the ground—a two seater! The faint-of-heart decided to hold it.

Lunch in the local restaurant was another adventure. Once again, flies swarmed over all of the pickled tofu (roughly the consistency of leather, and about as tasty) and unidentifiable meat. Everyone back home keeps asking me if I've eaten dog yet, and I'd like to take a moment to tell everyone: the answer is probably yes, but how would I know?!

After lunch, we hiked along the Nuanquan reservoir and threw rocks into the shuiku (manmade lake). Sunny, Jimmy, Chris and I went back to the hotel room, and I was so tired I went into "dui dui" mode; everything Sunny asked me, I replied affirmatively and didn't really listen that hard.

Which is why we ended up, thirty minutes later, buying frilly pink bathing suits to go swimming in the local pool.

That was probably one of the strangest experiences of the trip, at least for Chris. You can see the picture of the suit I bought on Picasa; minus the ruffles, it'd pass. However the "trunks"—if you could call them that—that the boys bought were, to say the least, very European. I've never seen someone sprint from the locker room into the pool faster than Chris in what could only be described as "Spandex panties." He broke the language pledge several times in order to employ proper profanity describing his discomfort. ("Wo de… *#*&#$-ing kuzi… @#@#$-ing riding up…")

Anyway, the pool, if cold, was fun. Chris and I taught the roommates how to play "Marco Polo," which is only the most appropriate/ironic thing ever. (Ha ha history joke.) Then we played monkey in the middle with a beach ball until we couldn't stand the water/"waiguoren" shouts/bathing attire anymore.

On another note, at least three guys were smoking in the pool. Like, wading in speedos, holding their cigarettes above the water.

We ate dinner at a fancy-ish place in Yuxian, which was really good. Also no flies. Also real (albeit squat) toilets!

The buses then dropped us off at the entrance to Nuanquan around sundown, where the fifty-odd CETers piled into about six local minivans to trek to an opera performance (the bus didn't want to risk another muddy trip).

The performance was held in the main square, and people were packed in like sardines. If any of you guys have seen clips of Chinese opera, this was the real deal—painted faces and screeching singing and lots of drumming. And, like most English opera performances I've been to, even the native speakers couldn't understand what the performers were saying. After about fifteen minutes of confusion, Sunny and I asked a little village girl what was going on. And she also didn't know. So we stood (no one sat) for about an hour making up our own stories.

Another crammed van ride back to the buses + ensuing bus trip later, Sunny, Chris, Jimmy, and I met up with the other Bei Ka Da Xue-ers to walk around a local square besides our hotel. We bought ice cream (Four times as cheap as Beijing—only half a kuai, about 20 cents!) and jumped rope with some people. Then, in one of our many attempts to set up our roommates (who both like each other but are too shy to do anything), Jimmy and I wandered off alone to walk around the park and I found a kitten! It was very tiny, probably only about a month old, and all of the local kids were playing with it—one girl had it wrapped up in a newspaper like a burrito. After they left it alone, we fed it crackers and named it "small snow"; it fell asleep on Jimmy's leg. There are pictures. It was very cute. We were very tempted to smuggle it back to CET with us, but the "don't adopt animals" rule is almost as strong as the language pledge so we left it alone.

That night, the dream team watched Lilo and Stitch (I love Mandarin-dubbed movies because the actors talk so clearly!).

This morning, we woke up super early to get on the bus, which ended up taking about seven hours to get back (three more than it took getting there) because new roads were being built. Or something. Anyway, after doing some homework, Jimmy and I discussed the differences between American and Chinese detention centers.

Me: I have been in a jail.

Jimmy: What did you do?

Me: It was a government class.

Jimmy: What did your government class do?

Me: *looks up word for field trip*

Jimmy: Ooooh. What was it like?

Me: The facilities were not bad, but it is because it is a big jail for very extremely bad people.

Jimmy: Like what kind of people?

Me: Like people who kill people.

Jimmy: Are they killed?

Me: Um, sometimes.

Jimmy: What do you have to do in order to get killed by the jail?

Me: You have to kill other people. And mean it.

Jimmy: What?

Me: For example, I think about killing, then I prepare [except here I use the word for "to study new characters"], then I kill! First type of murder!

Jimmy: What about people who take money from other people?

Me: They are not killed.

Jimmy: Really? I have heard about this one lady who had a cooking show who stole SO MUCH money from other people.

Me: Martha Stewart? She was not killed.

Jimmy: But she stole so much money!

Me: In America, we call this white shirt crime.

Jimmy: What?

Me: In America, rich people who work for governments and banks and offices wear white shirts and people who are haircutters and shopowners wear blue shirts.

Jimmy: So when white shirt people steal money, they are not killed?

Me: Yeah!

Jimmy: But I thought America was so equal!

I had to quickly explain to him that white-collar referred to the crime, not the criminal.

Anyway, we finally made it back. Right now, Sunny is practicing her English by reading the label on the bottle of Purell that Chris gave her.

"I am using hand sandpaper!" she keeps saying.

"Sanitizer, santizer!" I tell her.

Pictures from Yuxian up tomorrow.

Short Note

2009-07-16T16:48:00.001-07:00

I guess this isn't related to China adventures at all, but it's kind of exciting nonetheless: I got an e-mail this morning confirming my position as an arts columnist for the Daily Tar Heel next year! So look for me on the back page of the paper!

Day Thirty-Six

2009-07-16T05:39:00.001-07:00

Day Thirty-Six:

Today's tests—both oral and written—went very well. I had Liang Laoshi for my oral part (she's the one that only speaks in third-person), so as she said, "Tang Han Na has improved very much!" I got an 87 on my written test and a 90 on my verbal, so not bad!

Because they are terrible friends (and by that I mean because I was dead asleep when they knocked on my door), everyone else left me this afternoon to go shopping. So I had a quiet afternoon with my roommate and her friend. We looked at pictures and (illicitly) played some English songs. The artists they recognized were: Avril Lavigne, NSYNC, and Lady GaGa. The artists they didn't recognize were: absolutely everyone else. :D

This evening, I walked to the park across the street to write, and ended up talking with this Chinese guy and his 11-year-old nephew for about twenty minutes. His accent was very thick, so I didn't understand most of what he was saying, until it seems as if I'd told him we should go visit the Great Wall together and he wanted to set a date. At that point, I kicked into "not interested in you like THAT" mode, which transcends cultural boundaries. (Him: do you have phone? Me: No. Him: It just rang. Me: That wasn't my phone. Just a phone. Him: Do you have QQ (Chinese Myspace)? Me: Ha ha sorry can't understand what you are saying! Him: …oh.) As I was leaving, though, he made his little nephew go buy me a bottle of tea, which is now sitting on my desk. Oh, boys. (Important Chinese phrase of the day: "Wo yijing you nanpeng you"—"I already have boyfriend!")

Tomorrow is our trip to Yu Xian, so no posts til Sunday!

Day Thirty-Five

2009-07-15T07:47:00.001-07:00

Day Thirty-Five:

Today has involved a lot of studying, minus an hour-long informational session about this weekend's trip. I had kind of assumed the meeting would involve what we needed to pack, what we needed to not pack, and how much trouble we'd be in if we spoke English on the bus. Although it did in fact include these elements (answer to last question: a lot), we also sat through a fairly detailed presentation on Yu Xian's history through several dynasties. Which was in Chinese and therefore slightly incomprehensible. (I mean, "Mongols" has never been in my vocabulary.)

At lunch today, Tucker introduced me to one of his fellow 260 classmates. After introducing ourselves, I asked where he was from.

Rando Guy: Yue-han Ho-pu-ka.

Me: Um, John's Hopkins?

Rando Guy: Yeah, very few people can understand the Chinese name.

Me: I see. Hey, I think I know people who go to your college.

Rando Guy: What are their names?

Me: Uh, I only know their last names. But they are fencing people (miming with chopstick). One is a small Asian girl.

Rando Guy: Grace?

Me: Yes! How do you know?

Rando Guy: I am also a fencing person.

So it turns out that this guy is also on the Hopkins saber squad, has gone to about twenty of the same dual meets as I have, and has fenced our men's team on countless occasions. Kind of a weird coincidence; I'll have to remember to say "ni hao" to him the next time both of us spend the weekend in a gymnasium together.

In other news, while I was practicing flute today, one of the campus security guards (who to my eyes appears to be about fifteen years old), came into my room and started talking in a very thick Beijing accent. From what I could discern, he really likes music but doesn't play any instruments. So I let him try to play my flute (which worked about as well as you could imagine) and tried to mime the word "embouchure." He asked me to play something for him, so I did a few bars of the Chaminade Concertino, and by that time, one of the Ayi's ("aunties"—female maintenance staff) had walked in and requested I play "That's Amore" by humming it and gesturing wildly towards my music stand. She thought it was very odd that while I could read music and play stuff from memory, I couldn't imitate pitches. Given the tonality of Mandarin—Chinese people are 10x as likely to have perfect pitch than westerners—I guess it makes sense.

Right now, instead of studying, I am attempting to get on facebook through UNC's VPN client.

Day Thirty-Four

2009-07-14T07:30:00.001-07:00

Day Thirty-Four:

Besides putting on the aforementioned skit, I haven't done much today. Besides, of course, studying. As soon as I came back from my one-on-one at 2:30, I started working on various stuff, and minus a walk across the street to the post office (and maybe a surreptitious English session with Danielle, who wanted to gossip in our native tongue), I didn't stop until 6:30. Around seven, I ate dinner with Chris, Brandon, and my roommate at Ito Yokado's "Mian Ai Mian," which I assume means "Noodles love noodles." (It always reminds me of Enloe's Gay-Straight-Alliance t-shirts, which read something like "women love men/ men love men/ women love women/ it's all cool with me." Too bad no one's sticking up for the rights of Chinese pasta. :( )

After dinner, and a short trip to the Ito Yokado bookstore, where I bought a copy of Spot Goes to the Park in Chinese—I joked that it was exactly my reading level!—I came back and studied about two more hours.

In other news, my roommate, who continues to be adorable, bought a koala puppet (Me: how do you say that kind of animal? Her: ko-a-la. Me: oh) and has been literally prancing around with it for the past three hours. "When I was small, I loved these kinds of toys," she told me, "And now that I am grown up, I have money to buy lots of them!"

Makes sense, doesn't it?

Skit Day

2009-07-14T00:58:00.001-07:00

I know most of you guys won't understand a word we're saying (I for one don't), but here's the video of my group's "cultural customs" skit, which against all odds won us first prize in today's competition. It stars Mumbling Lumberjack Man, Homeschooled Girl from Alaska, Tiny Asian Girl, and yours truly.

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/Sxv0Di0MIjikdajbnoKY-g?authkey=Gv1sRgCPeY09z7zrz3tQE&feat=directlink

Day Thirty-Three

2009-07-13T07:30:00.001-07:00

Day Thirty-Three:

Whooooah, we're halfway there, woooah, zhuzhe zai yi ge qidao! (Bon Jovi was meant for Asian languages.) Somewhere around today marks the midpoint of my stay in China, although not quite the midpoint of my Chinese studies. That unfortunate day falls on Thursday, when we have our "da kao" ("big test"). The four-week "midterm" will cover much more material than any of my previous 19-week semesters' finals have covered—at least 500 vocab words, roughly a hundred grammar structures, and untold surreptitious mentions of the benefits of having a large, bureaucratic government.

In preparation for this event, my one-on-one teacher gave me a progress report today. Although I've been getting pretty much straight B-'s, she seemed very impressed; there's very little grade inflation here, so a B is, actually, above average. Also, oddly, she insisted on giving me the entire progress report in third person. "Tang Han Na does very well on listening comprehension, but her tones are still not very good. However, Tang Han Na improved very much on her homework. Does her roommate help her?"

The answer to that is a wholehearted "yes." Also Tang Han Na's very patient roommate listens to her read her lesson text at snail-pace for about twenty minutes every day.

Speaking of roommates and rooms, I had to "ban jia" AGAIN today. The air conditioner in room 112, which I moved to because my first room did not have AC, had "huai"d (broken). So the shifu gave me the keys to the room across the hall and we had to move all of our stuff into 109 this afternoon. It's not any better or worse, location-wise (although it doesn't share a wall with the breakfast joint so I won't be woken up at four to the sound of whisking eggs anymore), but it was a hassle.

On top of doing homework, preparing 57 new vocab words, and starting to study for the da kao, I had to help write a skit tonight, because the three other people in my small class don't understand the word for "improv." I kept being like, "hey, guys, we're just going to pretend to have dinner together, let's work it out tomorrow before class," but instead we have written a full-length production with props and costumes and stage directions. Tai mafan le! (How troublesome!)

In better news, Harry Potter (pronounced "Ha-Li Bwa-ta") comes out here in a few days and next week my roommate and I are going to go see it. Although she doesn't speak much English, my roommate loves Harry Potter and thinks that every single American guy I've shown her photos of looks just like him (this list includes: Jay, Matthew, Reed, Kevin N., every other guy on the fencing team, Peter K., Corey…). Except for red-headed Simon, who she thinks looks like Ron.

Day Thirty-Two

2009-07-12T08:04:00.001-07:00

Day Thirty-Two:

I went to the zoo today with my roommate and Chris. It's really close to our school (to the point where I tell taxi drivers who can't find our dorms that I just live at the "animal raising place"—they give me weird looks) and was really fun. It was a lot different from the NC zoo, which is very environmentally conscious, with huge natural habitats for each different species. The animals here weren't exactly mistreated, but their concrete tanks weren't quite the pseudo-sahara that I'm used to. Also people kept feeding them, throwing big chunks of bread into the brown bear cage, for example, and no one stopped them.

On a mildly humancentric note, the upside of these things was that the animals were actually up pretty close and walking around instead of sleeping two miles away like they are in NC.

My favorite animals (besides the very popular "North America" exhibit that housed exotic raccoons, chickens, and squirrels!) were of course the pandas. Especially the red ones. Go google search "red panda" now. Seriously. They're like big brown teddy bears with cat ears and bushy tails.

After returning from the zoo and doing a little bit of homework, I headed uptown to my first flute lesson of the summer. I was really proud that I was able to find the place from the directions my teacher had given me over the phone, which involved subways and busses. But I eventually figured it all out and took the elevator up to her 9^th-floor apartment for my lesson.

Although my vocabulary currently doesn't include words like "tempo," "audition" or "breath support," the lesson went very smoothly—I've had enough practice working with different teachers throughout the years that the miming wasn't too difficult to figure out. We worked on scales as well as the two audition pieces that I'd brought, and afterwards talked a little bit about studying music in the US (time number 2039843204 I've lied about being a music major). Afterwards I took a taxi home, half-heartedly studied some vocab, and slowed up the whole school's network by downloading a bunch of photos of red pandas.

Still no facebook, of course.

(PS: Photos from today: http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China11?authkey=Gv1sRgCM6p8cT2nMvSXg&feat=directlink)

Day Thirty-One Part Two

2009-07-11T07:12:00.001-07:00

Day Thirty-One Part Two:

I went to Beijing's Antique Mall today with Brandon, Chris, and Tucker. The area is like a huge flea market where people sell everything from Mao hats to pottery. I bought a bunch of cool stuff (bag, painting, 4 sets of pearl earrings, three books = $30 US) and especially like my Shel Silverstein book. It's the Mandarin version of "A Light in the Attic." (Photo of today's loot here: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v385/parmandiriel/IMG_1573.jpg)

After we rushed back on the subway, the gang went to go see a traditional music performance. Although the auditorium's acoustics were terrible and I had to cover my ears about thirty percent of the time, it was still really neat. I especially liked the "dizi" or flute. :-)

Approximately everyone else is going out tonight, but I've opted to stay home.

more pix

2009-07-10T22:13:00.001-07:00

includes: qipao pictures, grilled cheese sandwich party, Italian restaurant, trip to acrobats:

http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China9?authkey=Gv1sRgCMuOvpPNtun4hQE&feat=directlink

Day Thirty

2009-07-10T08:13:00.001-07:00

Day Thirty:

In lieu of class today, we watched a movie called "Tian Mi Mi," which roughly translates to "Sweet Thing." It is about a guy who moves from China's mainland to Hong Kong in the eighties and falls in love with a Cantonese woman. And then it's very complicated because he's in love with another woman back home and she's not really Cantonese and ends up marrying a mob boss and moving to New York with her husband before he is killed by a bunch of random black teenagers. (Every black person in this movie was packing heat. Given this sort of media coverage, it's no surprise that my roommate asked me the other day if I knew a lot of African Americans who had guns!)

Definitely beats taking an end-of-week test!

This afternoon, after an extended trip to Ito Yokado, where I bought approximately eight $US worth of lychees and ate them on the way home, I went with a big group to see the Chinese acrobats. The show was a little expensive ($20 US) but absolutely worth it. We had fourth-row seats and every act, from plate spinning to contortionism, was awesome. We weren't supposed to take pictures but I did anyway and those should be up soon.

When we were taking the subway home, I talked to this guy for about twenty minutes. He was, as many subway-ers are, very interested in our group and why we were speaking loud broken Chinese to each other. So I explained about the language pledge and why we were here, and he seemed just beside himself with joy. It wasn't the first overwhelmingly positive reaction I've gotten here; a lot of random people I've met have seemed extremely excited that we're here learning their language and culture instead of the other way around. They're always also taken by the females in our group; the guy today kept ignoring Chris, Brandon, and Tucker and telling me how pleased he was that I had decided to take up Mandarin.

(Due to the skewed gender ratio, maybe they want to import more women into the Chinese marriage market? Who knows.)

I'm about to head off, but let me also say that "Foreign Babes in Beijing" is awesome and I'm really enjoying it.

Day Twenty Nine:

2009-07-09T08:04:00.001-07:00

Day Twenty-Nine:

Still got g-mail, skype, and xkcd. Still don't have youtube, blogger, or facebook (the latter being the most important as well as the most recent development). Although the best bets are on the government seeking to control social-networking after the riots, some of my comrades have suggested the CET staff is behind the crackdown. After all, we've all gotten our homework done a lot faster post-"shu mian" (literally "book face").

I had a really good one-on-one session today; I was able to understand absolutely everything my teacher said, even though we were talking about nuancy stuff like specific cultural differences, and she said my tones were much better. ("I look and I see Han Na, but when I listen, it is like new person!" she said.)

This afternoon in lieu of doing my homework (or chatting with people down the hall on mian shu), I went to take a fencing lesson. I got there a lot faster this time and talked with the coach a little while beforehand. He was a lot harder to understand than my one-on-one professor.

Coach: You are very good, very quick. Soon we will move to a faster, better lesson.

Me: Great!

Coach: Would you like faster, better lesson?

Me: Yeah, that would be fine.

Coach: I am so glad you agree! We start saber today!

Me: Um.

Coach: I am much better at saber teaching.

Me: Um.

Coach: Yes?

Me: I just want foil lesson.

Coach: But you are here so long! It will be so easy to change to saber! It is okay if you have not done it before, I am very good at it.

Me: At home I only do foil.

Coach: Then your team will be so proud to know that over the summer you learned a better sword!

Me: Excuse me?

Coach: Faster AND better.

Me: I'm sorry, I just want foil lessons. At home, I am on a special group for foil. I want to keep being in that group.

Coach: You mean your coach will not let you switch groups?

Me: I don't WANT to switch groups! I like foil! I am good at foil! If I went to the special saber group when my team friends take a big bus to go competition, I cannot go because I am not good!

Coach: Not if *I* teach you saber.

Eventually, I just told him that there were special rules in my school and my coach at home had specifically forbidden me from ever touching a saber.

The lesson went well after that; we did footwork for forever and then a lot of bladework. He's charging me next-to-nothing for these, too; about $20 US for an hour and a half lesson. (The UNC rate, which is extremely inexpensive for regular standards, is $10 for 15 minutes. You do the math.) During breaks in my lesson, when he's not barking commands in Chinese at me, he goes out into the hallway to smoke. Oh, Beijing.

Tonight, I went with Danielle, Seth, Nate, and Brandon to a northern Beijing college district to eat dinner. We had pizza and pasta at an Italian place and it was great. On the way there, I bought two books. One is "Foreign Babes in Beijing," a memoir I've been wanting to read, and another is a pocket calendar. It is pink, and has two cats on the cover. The title reads "THE PRINCESS STORY" and below one of the cats, smiling a little with big, soulless eyes, says, "I AM PRINCESS."

That about sums it up.

Day Twenty Eight

2009-07-08T07:45:00.001-07:00

Day Twenty-Eight:

Got another letter today! It was sent June 22^nd, so it was definitely "snail mail!"

Class went well today, and in my one-on-one, I managed to explain to my teacher that one of the downsides to legalizing physician-assisted suicide was the role of insurance companies unfairly affecting peoples' decisions. And it only took ten minutes to do so. Today's session as a whole was actually pretty difficult; after our lengthy debate on right-to-die euthanasia, she asked me to explain how Americans felt about gay marriage. I ended up attempting to play a kind of charades where I acted out terms like "civil union," "the equal protection clause" and "the religious Right."

After class, I went with my roommate, Rachel, and her roommate to buy my qipao. It took us about an hour by bus, subway, and taxi to get to the shopping center by Tiannamen. When we arrived, we met up with my roommate's mom, who had been waiting for us and apparently had picked out several qipaos for me to try on. (Let me note that much of this ordeal was a little embarrassing, since the effort I put into buying my roommate a gift consisted of going to student stores and grabbing a random Carolina tee.) The first one fit really well though, so that's the one we ended up going with. It's a beautiful pink material with gold trim (here's me wearing it: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v385/parmandiriel/IMG_1485.jpg) and I really like it! The four of us ate at Kungfu, a Chinese fast-food place, afterward, and then returned to CET to do our homework.

The internet here has been very strange these past few days. Facebook and other social networking sites (QQ, Twitter) have been down for about twenty-four hours, and absolutely nothing at all would load this afternoon. This is certainly due to the riots in the West, and I wouldn't be surprised if I have more problems with stuff like g-mail later. So, just in case I don't post anything for a few days, that's the reason.

Pictures

2009-07-07T07:27:00.001-07:00

Did I post these?

http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China7?authkey=Gv1sRgCI2gzfHa3OypgQE&feat=directlink

Day Twenty Four, Twenty Five, Twenty Six

2009-07-06T06:20:00.001-07:00

Day 24, 25, & 26:

So the trip to Shanghai was only somewhat of a fiasco.

Saturday's early morning flight was fine; China Air is really cushy and in the two hours that we were in the air, they served us drinks twice (I got coconut juice!) as well as a better lunch than United served me on the 12-hour flight here! Crazy. Emily and I met up with Wyatt, James, and Kayla, the three Phillips Ambassadors working in an entrepreneurship internship in Bejing, as well as their teacher/chaperone Lili. Although it's not like I haven't been speaking English here (what with the Wednesday breaks and phoning home), it was difficult at first to talk to them not in Mandarin. At least three times on the flight, I leaned over to James and started speaking Chinese!

We ate lunch at a big mall downtown at a restaurant that boasted dog meat entries (check out photos of that, plus the rest of the trip, here: )

After that, our group wandered around a big shopping area for a few hours before changing for dinner. (Best part of the trip: in a park, we found a huge display of Chinese personal ads hanging on a tree. They said stuff like, "Wang Peng, 54, wants a well educated woman to make his wife"… and all of these people were gathered around the tree, looking at the ads and writing down phone numbers. Shanghai's Match.com!) We then met Phil Phillips, his family, and several teachers he'd also flown into Shanghai, as well as some other student ambassadors working in China, at M On The Bund.

M on the bund was probably the fanciest place I've ever eaten at. It was on the fifth floor of a building overlooking the Pudong river that runs through Shanghai and on a clear day, I imagine you could see the whole city from there. Our menu, specially printed for the night, included "A salad for spring: soft goat's cheese, juicy crispy pears, and toasted sweet hazelnuts," "Whole roasted leatherjacket, rubbed with cumin and coriander seeds with a fennel, celery, and mint salad" and a "summer pudding" tart filled with berries. I talked with Mr. Phillips, his wife, and some of the other people seated at our table until 11:00 p.m.

The next morning, we took a train from Shanghai to Suzhou at 7:40 (which meant we had to get up at 5:30!) and first went to the Gardens of the Humble Administrator, which I'd gone to two weeks ago with our tour group. Now, however, the lotus were blooming which was cool.

After rounding up stray Phillips Ambassadors from the gardens, which took longer than expected, we went off to a Buddhist temple (also in Suzhou). They had a lot of pagoda-looking temples which people would climb to throw coins off for good luck. If your coin landed on another building's roof, you were destined to keep lots of money.

For reasons unknown, at the temple, a bunch of little kids kept wanting to have their photos taken with Mr. Phillips.

After the temple was lunch, and then after that, we went to my favorite place of the day, a silk museum/factory. Check out the photos on Picasa: there, we watched every step of the silk making process, from feeding the worms to dying and weaving the stuff. Also there was an impromptu fashion show, which I also got video clips of. At the store, I tried on a Qipao (sp?—traditional Chinese dress), but it didn't fit quite right so I think I may buy one in Beijing. Almost every other girl in our group has already bought one, and although I don't exactly know where I'd plan on wearing one, it might be cool to have.

We went to one more garden before the train home. It was pretty cool and had a labyrinth (an actual maze) of imported rock.

We took the train to Shanghai, then the subway to Lili's sister's house, where we'd stashed our stuff for the day, then two taxis to the airport, and by the time we got there, I was pretty tired. I mean, we'd gotten up before six two days in a row after a full week of strenuous classes. Our plane was set to leave at 8:30.

Unfortunately, our plane had come to Shanghai by way of Melbourne. And contained two international passengers who were exhibiting "flu-like symptoms." So we waited for three hours in the Shanghai airport while the 747 was evacuated and fumigated. By the time we got on the plane, it was midnight.

Then we waited an hour more on the Shanghai tarmac for undisclosed reasons. By that time, Emily and I had abandoned our language pledge completely (we had been making a small effort over the weekend to at least speak to each other in Mandarin) and started cracking up. What else could we do? We were 1,000 miles away from our school and our day's worth of classes started in roughly six hours.

We slept a little on the plane, and then waited forever for suitcases and taxis to get back to school. I went to bed around 4:00 a.m. Then I woke up this morning, drank the coke they'd given me on the plane last night, and went to four and a half hours of class. Which I did surprisingly well in, considering I had elected to read the in-flight magazine with Emily in lieu of reading my lesson text. When I got to my one-on-one, though, Lu Laoshi could tell that I was having severe issues thinking and speaking. Probably because we had this conversation:

Lu Laoshi: Do you ever UNDISCERNABLE WORDS?

Me: What?

Lu Laoshi: Do you ever UNDISCERNABLE WORDS?

Me: No.

Lu Laoshi: Really? You've never UNDISCERNABLE WORDS?

Me: Oh, um, well actually I do, yeah, all the time.

Lu Laoshi: That's really good! When was the last time you UNDISCERNABLE WORDS?

Me: Yesterday?

Lu Laoshi: You gave blood in Shanghai?

Me: UNDISCERNABLE WORDS.

Tonight, Rachel made grilled cheese sandwiches for the gang. When I described the creations to my roommate, she told me, "Is not real food, is small snack."

Day Twenty Three

2009-07-03T08:01:00.001-07:00

Day 23:

Today's written test was a lot harder than last week's: there was an extensive reading comprehension section that made little sense (my vocabulary is still not huge), but I plowed through it anyway. When we got grades back this evening, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I'd gotten a 91 on it, and a 90 on the oral part—which was a marked improvement from last week's.

This afternoon, I went with Danielle and a bunch of others to the wholesale clothes market, where I ended up buying a LOT of crap. Although I spent less than fifty dollars, I wound up with a tank top, two wildly colored bras, a fake Louis Vutton wallet, a realistic fake/hopefully not stolen Lacoste bag, and a shirt and heels to wear in Shanghai with the Phillies tomorrow.

Oh, yeah. I'm going to Shanghai tomorrow. :D

The trip (where every Phillips scholar in China meets up with our benefactor over what looks like an insanely expensive dinner) has kind of snuck up on me. I'm excited to be going—I loved Shanghai and it'll be cool to meet up with everyone—but I'm worried about language pledge stuff. No other Phillips Scholar besides Emily (also at CET) can speak Mandarin, so I know I'll have to use some English, but I still don't want to use a lot. But I also don't want to be the antisocial one. Eh.

This evening, a huge group of us went out to dinner at a Thai-fusion restaurant in a touristy section of Beijing. There was a live drumming show and a dance contest (jumping quickly over pieces of bamboo) which Tucker (CET REPRESENT, UNC ALSO) won. After walking back from the subway, we all bought fruit juices at McDonalds, which were very good—mine was a combo of fizzy water, blueberry pulp, and a lot of high-fructose corn syrup.

Day Twenty Two Part Two

2009-07-02T07:00:00.001-07:00

Day 22 Part Two:

I know I already posted today, but I just wanted to say that my roommate is "tebie" (especially) cute/awesome. She showed up right after dinner and insisted that as soon as I finished studying, we go buy fruit. For the hall. So we walked until we found a fruit stand and she haggled with the woman until we were laden with bananas and these half-plum/half-grape things. Brandon and Chris seemed a little surprised when we knocked on their doors (after washing the grape things vigorously in the hall "dathroom"), especially since she'd brought them cake yesterday, but everyone loved it.

After the fruit party (and a short amount of time where she wanted to listen to Chris play his guitar), she and I returned to the room to chat. I can't stress enough how cool it is that we can talk together—not just like "my family has five people in it, I like today's weather," but that we can actually communicate about stuff that's relevant or funny.

For example, this 70-year-old possibly-crazy woman who followed Chris into the dorms tonight shouting "I want you to make me girlfriend!" and had to be shooed out by the shifu (doorman).

Day Twenty Two

2009-07-02T02:15:00.001-07:00

Day 22:

So Ta Nan Ha or someone else with a similar name to mine has been getting my mail—she gave it to me today but if you guys send me stuff in the future, it might be a good idea to put “Tang Han Na” or 汤汉娜if you can write it next to my English name.

Besides finally getting my mail, nothing much exciting has happened today. I’ve been feeling kind of sick today (likely a cold; likely not H1N1) and I’ve also done a lot of studying. Test tomorrow!

Day Twenty One

2009-07-01T07:57:00.001-07:00

Day 21:

So today in my one-on-one session, my teacher asked me to describe a movie. Since I'd just learned the word for "WWII," I figured I would do "The Reader:" (Spoiler alert)

Me: After WW2 in Texas--

Teacher: Texas?

Me: Oops, Germany. They sound very similar.

Teacher: ... continue.

Me: After WW2 in Germany, there is a boy. He is fifteen. He makes a very big love with a big woman.

Teacher: ... you cannot say "makes a very big love."

Me: Fine. He and a woman love. She is so much taller than him!

Teacher: You mean older?

Me: That too! Anyway, he is only fifteen but she is thirty. How strange!

Teacher: In China, we would not call that strange. A lot of men like older women. Is this common in the US?

Me: Oh, not at all.

Teacher: So you've never heard of an older woman dating a younger guy?

Me: No, never.

Teacher: And so you would never date someone who was younger than you?

Me: ...oh. Wait.

Teacher: ...??

Me: Anyway they make a very big love.

Teacher: (sigh)

Me: But it is so bad! They go away! Ten years later, the woman is in a trial room and the boy sees her!

Teacher: Why is she on trial?

Me: Because she has done so many bad things! She made other people die! So bad!

Teacher: Okay.

Me: And so the head boss of the trial also says that she has made a paper that killed so many people!

Teacher: What?

Me: She wrote something on this piece of paper, and people died!

Teacher: ...okay.

Me: But she didn't!

Teacher: You just said she did.

Me: She didn't because she doesn't want to read!

Teacher: You mean she can't read?

Me: Yeah, that too. And the boy knows because she would make him read with her after they, um, made very big love.

Teacher: ...

Me: Anyway, the boy doesn't tell anyone and the trial boss man tells her that she has to go be put in a place with other bad people. And she has to stay there for thirty years.

Teacher: Such a long time.

Me: I know. But when she is in the bad people place, the boy makes her listening comprehension homework!

Teacher: What?

Me: He puts himself on a recording. Then she reads! Then she successfully studies reading!

Teacher: That's good.

Me: Except then people say that she can go out of the bad people place and the boy comes to pick her up and she has herself dead! *mimes hanging* Blleeuuurrrrcchchhhhhh!

Teacher: ... I understand.

Me: The end.

Teacher: I think this is not a movie I will see.

Me: It was very good to look at.

In other news, our morning assignment was to go to a nearby park and interview old people about their post-retirement life. After Brandon (my partner in interviewing, not so much crime) and I talked with our guy about his life of Tai Chi and calligraphy, this random old guy came up to us and talked for fifteen straight minutes. I didn't quite catch all of the stuff through his accent, but he gave us a very specific list of instructions to give president Obama when we return. ("Don't trade with Japan. We don't like them. We like you guys, though!")

I returned to my room tonight to find my roommate had bought a cake for our hall. She continues to be adorable; after looking at my photos of recent stuff from college (library rave, beach trip, etc), she declared American life "So pleasant!"

Day Twenty

2009-06-30T08:06:00.001-07:00

Day 20:

Very quick post here: the gang went to a Mexican restaurant tonight. We all found it hilarious that when we ordered, the waitress repeated, "yi ge burrito, ranhou lian ge quesadillas"…

Day Nineteen

2009-06-29T08:08:00.001-07:00

Day Nineteen:

So in 300, every week the big class and small class gets shuffled around so different people are in them and different teachers teach. When I got to big class this morning, I was annoyed to discover that Fi Lei Ming, a classmate who is perennially snobby, was also there. He spent the next two hours (as he usually does) making vigorous head gestures when other people were talking. When the teacher would ask someone to give an example, if he thought it was correct, he would bob up and down furiously; if he deemed it incorrect, he would sigh and shake his head. He's a little more advanced than most of us, but certainly not the best in the class—not that that would be an excuse for being a dick—and after he had given me the full shaking-and-sighing treatment after I'd stumbled over a word, I whispered to Chris (Han Si) that he was a know-it-all (new vocab word!). I'm pretty sure he heard (it's very hard to do tones without raising your voice), but he continued to silently comment on everyone's responses.

After two hours of class, I raced out only to find that he was also in my four-person two-hour recitation. Which was even worse, because the two other guys in recitation with me had pretty terrible speaking skills—Fi Lei Ming gesticulated so hard for the next 120 minutes that I thought (hoped?) he would wrench his neck. At one point in time when I was giving an example, I caught him shaking his head furiously, but I finished anyway. The teacher looked at him first and then me and said, "Is actually correct." I didn't have the vocabulary so I looked at him and gave him a "oh, yeah?" face. He sat still, for once.

The rest of the day was pretty boring; Emily and I are arranging this weekend's trip to Shanghai (The Phillips Scholarship people are flying us there to meet the guy who's paying for us to be in China this summer) and she's doing all of the work. Like, I'd help if I could, but every time I walk by her door, she says something like, "Han Na! I've booked a hotel!" or "Han Na! I looked up all of the subway stops we need to use!"

In other news, I've still not gotten mail here. My postcards to America took about ten days, but none of the stuff people have said they sent weeks ago has arrived. Bleh.

In other, other news, I think I broke the CET printer.

Day Eighteen

2009-06-28T08:19:00.001-07:00

Day Eighteen:

This is how I got to fencing club today:

1) walked ten minutes

2) waited for the bus

3) rode for forty minutes

4) realized my stop was twenty minutes ago and that we were in the fifth, not the third, ring of Beijing

5) flagged a bike-rickshaw guy, who told me he can't take me two rings back, but will call a taxi for me

6) waited forever for the taxi

7) realized when the taxi shows up that it's not an actual taxi but the rickshaw driver's buddy in a beat-up car who says he will charge me 70 kuai (way too much) for the trip

8) told the bike-rickshaw guy repeatedly that I will give him ten kuai for his trouble but I want an "authentic taxi" and left

9) flagged an actual taxi, drive back two rings

10) tried to give the taxi driver a 100 kuai note for the 24 kuai trip. He only had 50 kuai in change.

11) argued with taxi driver for five minutes to tell him that honestly, he can just keep the other 26 kuai (roughly $2.50 US), I'm not going to call the police on him, etc.

12) located building C on campus (the club is situated at Beijing's film school and everyone there is walking around with video cameras, smoking)

13) located room 110

This is how I got back from fencing club today:

1) took the subway

Honestly, there's no reason to use buses here unless there's not a subway line. They're hot and slow and confusing. Knock on wood but I've never had problems getting lost underground.

Anyway, fencing here is really interesting. When I showed up, there were six or seven people in saber lames, either practicing or smoking between bouts (!). When I showed up, I talked with a guy who knew UNC alums in the area, but after a few minutes of conversation, I had to admit that we needed to start speaking in Mandarin because of the pledge so that limited us a bit. (Afterwards, we talked about the weather, buying things, and going to the post office. Only kidding a little.)

The coach, Wu Laoshi, came in a few minutes later (I'd called him when I'd realized my bus mistake to tell him I'd be late). He looks a lot like Coach would look if he were Chinese—kind of thick, and a little hard of hearing. He asked me if I wanted a lesson and I said yes.

The lesson he gave was a lot like a typical basic US lesson, practicing attacks and parries and stuff, and would have reminded me of a lesson at UNC if it weren't for the absolute silence in the room. As soon as the coach and I started working, every other person in the gym stopped smoking and sabering and lined up against the wall to watch our every move. That was kind of weird; I'm not quite sure if they do that for every lesson or if it was just me.

After the lesson, one of the guys changed lames to fence foil with me, which also was apparently a group effort. I kind of figured we'd just mess around, but suddenly people were directing and spectating and scorekeeping for a fifteen touch bout. Which I was terribly out of shape for. The guy fenced (obviously) a lot like his coach, and had very clean but predictable actions, so I was able to beat him 15-3. Every time I would get a touch though, the coach would yell like crazy at my opponent in rapidfire Beijinger Mandarin. The only words I could catch were "So stupid! Die! Die!" He was pretty strict during my lesson as well, which was interesting—I've never experienced one of the traditional (although usually Eastern European) hardcore coaches…. (Although I have had a few who thought they were!)

Anyway, despite the bus ride, fencing today was a really good experience. Afterwards, I came back to my dorm to have dinner with the gang and then study a lot/write my essay. I also had the most confusing Chinese conversation yet with Nate, who for five straight minutes appeared to be telling me that tonight I was going to dress up in a costume made out of soda bottles and box with him. Turns out that I had misheard him when he had said "Last night I had a very strange dream."

More class tomorrow. Zhun bei hao le ma?

Day Seventeen

2009-06-27T05:18:00.001-07:00

Day Seventeen:

I'm pretty tired: we stayed out until around 1:00 last night (riiiight before curfew). The club was pretty fun and I remembered my earplugs this time and we all broke the language pledge (sssh, don't tell anyone) teaching some Chinese guys how to sing "Low." ("She hit te flo, neck thing you no, sortie got low low low low…"—honestly, probably a lot better than my pronunciation of their language. J)

This morning, my roommate showed up at eight (!!) for game day. This part of my stay here was the most reminiscent of summer camp. We played "trainwreck" ("everyone switch seats if you are a brown-hair-having person") and other icebreakers and then formed groups for a four-hour citywide scavenger hunt. This was a lot of fun, if hot: we walked and bused and subwayed all around the city, collecting items from Tiannamen and Fuxingmen and a bunch of other places. One of our only unsuccessful trips was to the international hospital, where we were supposed to collect a business card. But as soon as a group of white foreigners walked in, everyone put on their masks and in the small pandemonium that ensued we couldn't get a card. (H "yi" N "yi"!)

This evening, we watched a largely unintelligible performance by these two guys dressed in long red coats who spoke with such a thick Beijing accent that they sounded a bit like pirates. (Beijingers tend to tack on "arrrr"s to the end of most words. "Yi dian"—"Yi diarrrrr") Tonight, the UNC group has rented a Chinese movie and then I think I'll head to bed.

Day Sixteen

2009-06-26T02:02:00.001-07:00

Day Sixteen:

So I didn't read the directions for our oral exam today. I figured that I'd show up, state my opinion on the topic ("Your Ideal Love"), and spend the rest of the five minutes having a discussion with the teacher where I was very careful to use correct tones.

Unfortunately, the oral exam turned out to be a monologue, so after I'd finished my 45-second spiel, the teacher looked at me expectantly. And I looked at her. And we just kind of stared at each other for a while until she said, "You must keep talking."

More unfortunately, there is only so much one can say in any language regarding ideal love, and I had run out of ideas. So for the rest of the four minutes, I gave my teacher a very haphazard speech that covered a range of topics including my hobbies, my family's hobbies, my pets, my boyfriend's pets, my friends' pets, and how I liked the weather in Beijing.

This afternoon, I discovered that I'd gotten a B- on the thing. Ahahahaha.

We also had a two-hour written test today, which was not so much difficult as it was long. I thought we almost weren't going to have it because right before the teacher handed out the test papers, I told her that Michael Jackson (apparently loved by all Chinese), had "si le"d and she freaked out.

Danielle and I went shopping at two wholesale clothing marts today. Crazy! Although we're getting pretty good at communicating things with regard to price, size, color, etc, I miss being able to speak English—before the language pledge, we could discuss how much we were willing to buy the stuff for and if the other person thought we should haggle more.

I bought an amazing Chinglish t-shirt that says:

"pandapanda

ILike Fishing!

fishing panda

enjoy a GOOD DAY fishing"

On the front there is, as one might suspect, a fishing pandapanda. I talked the saleswoman down from 35 kuai to 20 (a little over $2). I also bought a shirt to wear out tonight (25 kuai); Danielle, Seth, Nate, and assorted roommates are going to a club called "Babyface." (Before the language pledge, every time we'd pass it, we'd say 'b-b-b-babyface-b-b-babyface, MO MO MO MO'.)

My roommate just phoned me and said something unintelligible about coming back to the dorm really early tomorrow morning. But I can't figure out if she was saying 9 a.m. or 5 a.m., so it will be a surprise.

pix

2009-06-25T23:06:00.001-07:00

Here are pix from the olympics and some other stuff, including the Pizza hut excursion and the "family photo" Danielle, Seth, Nate and I took afterward. (Since they gave Nate a father's day present, we figured it was only fair...)

http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China4?authkey=Gv1sRgCI75_qeNnsil4AE&feat=directlink

Day Fifteen

2009-06-25T07:58:00.001-07:00

Day Fifteen:

Our roommates came today! Mine is really fun and really cute. I gave her a UNC t-shirt as a meeting present and she immediately put it on and wanted a picture of the two of us. Then she asked me about a billion questions about America which I was pleased to discover I could understand and answer—my listening comprehension is getting a lot better, even if my tones still suck.

We went out to dinner with the UNC group and roommates, which was really fun. Most of us are at least vaguely able to communicate, so we spent a few hours talking about movies and all sorts of other stuff.

It's getting late and I need to go to bed because I have a test tomorrow, but instead I'm gchatting with Matthew and complaining that neither of us can watch stuff on Youtube this summer. (He's in Morocco.)

Day Fourteen

2009-06-24T08:37:00.001-07:00

Day Fourteen:

I hope people haven't been commenting on these posts. You guys know I can't read comments, right? Just checking.

Anyway, today was a much-needed break. In three out of the four hours of class, we watched a Chinese movie that was a lot like "Love, Actually" (different interconnected stories about couples) except with much stricter parental characters. My one-on-one session today was a little harder than yesterday's: Lu Laoshi was very strict with my pronunciation and constantly made me repeat my tones—I guess this is what speech therapy is like. (Hi mom!)

Since we didn't study a text, I didn't have any homework or vocab words and therefore had a lot of free time this afternoon. I used it to go with Brandon, Chris, and Nate to the Olympic site. (I'll upload photos later ). There was a lot of cool architecture and some great examples of Chinglish, but it was mostly deserted. They wouldn't let us into the swimming cube or the gymnastics building, but for 50 kuai (more than twice the cost of our dinner of dumplings!) we went into the main stadium and walked around.

Oh, speaking of Olympics speaking of Olympic sports speaking of fencing, I made some phone calls today and found a place where I can practice. I also talked to a flute teacher for approximately one billion hours to set up a lesson time, so I'm all phone'd out for the day. It was pretty cool though, that I could talk to these people I'd never spoken to before and wrangle complicated requests (ie, "I only fence foil, I don't want group lessons, the only gear I brought with me is a chest protector…").

However, I'm sure I destroyed all of my speaking skills during tonight's Language Pledge Break. At 8:30, the UNC group counted down in the activity lounge and then deconstructed the past week together. It felt a little bit strange to speak English so loudly (as opposed to hushed tones on skype or the occasional whispered word in the halls—"zenme shuo 'soy sauce?'"

Day Thirteen

2009-06-23T07:46:00.001-07:00

Day Thirteen:

I'm definitely in the right class. Although we had a different small group teacher today who talked a million miles a minute, I felt much more comfortable in both the large group session as well as the one-on-one. Since I didn't waste three hours trekking to Tiannamen and back today, I was able to do all of my homework and studying pretty easily.

I did, however, waste an hour moving all of my stuff downstairs, because room 415 hai meiyou kong tiao. (Still does not have air conditioning.) I had spoken to one of the shifus (maintenance men) about this three days ago, but all he had said was, "Wo zhidao." ("I know.") Nothing happened until today when he met me in the hall and said I must "move house." So I'm now in 112, which is nice because it a) has kong tiao, b) isn't up four flights of stairs and c) is closer to Rachel, Chris, Nate, and Brandon. However, I'm now farther away from the activity room as well as Danielle, who has been my backup alarm clock, so I had to go to Ito Yokado, the local mall, to pick up an actual alarm. For 10 kuai ($1.20), the clock is bright silver plastic with rhinestones, and ticks extremely loudly. Zao gao!

Today was Tucker's birthday, so we all got pizza with him. We went to a Pizza Hut knockoff, where they served us garlic bread, pasta, onion rings, pepsi, pizza and tiramisu (it was a package deal) for roughly $8 US each. Despite the fact that most of us are functionally mute, dinner was fun: we hummed along to the pop music and tried to translate some of the lyrics into Chinese. Katy Perry works particularly well:

"You're 're' and you're 'leng,'

You're 'xia' and you're 'shang'

You're 'nei' and you're 'wai'

You're 'hei' and you're 'wai'"…

After dinner, I read through tomorrow's lesson text, which goes something like this:

Dian Zhong Ping: Did you know that the world is teemingly overpopulated?

Dian Zhong Ping's roommate: I did know that! It is disastrous!

Dian Zhong Ping: And just think, some people have this silly notion that THEY should be the ones to decide how many children they have!

Dian Zhong Ping's roommate: How wrong they are! This is a problem for the government.

Dian Zhong Ping: I couldn't agree with you more.

Day Twelve

2009-06-22T07:18:00.001-07:00

Day Twelve:

It feels a little bit weird to be typing in English because all day I've been censoring myself from using it. It's very strange: although I can communicate pretty well in Chinese, I need to focus a lot harder than usual, and it's kind of exhausting.

Classes didn't help: the first two hours of lecture today were fast-paced but not too overwhelming. I'm definitely in the bottom half of the class, which also feels strange, because at home I'm usually one of the more advanced students in Chinese. The speaking "recitation" was a lot easier; I'm more on-par orally and aurally than I am written-wise with the rest of my classmates.

The whole program (I keep wanting to say "camp," because it's in the summer and we have a dining hall, but as Nate said, it's more of a "concentration camp") had a mildly frustrating lunch today. It's hard enough to talk to people in my class, but some of my friends here have a lot less Chinese experience than the rest of us and can barely communicate.

After lunch and a little bit of flute practice, Chris and Nate and I took an endless journey back to Tiannamen plaza to buy dictionaries. We're becoming quite good at the subway now. It was kind of a strange trip. Although we're all able to communicate fairly effectively in Mandarin, we didn't want to expend the extra energy on smalltalk and rode the hour there and the hour back mostly in silence. Chris zoned out and accidentally broke the language pledge when he asked if we were on the right train, and I laughed at him until I did the exact same thing twenty minutes later. (Without thinking, I yelled, "race you guys up the stairs!")

More homework, more studying. People have made up a chant that goes: "xing qi san! Ba dian ban!" (Wednesday! Eight thirty!), because that's the first language pledge break.

Xing qi san! Ba dian ban!

PS: How did I live without this for two years? http://www.nciku.com/ Check out the character-recognition part.

Day Eleven

2009-06-21T07:22:00.001-07:00

Day Eleven:

Chinese is hard. I just finished learning fifty-five new words (pronunciations, meanings, characters) for tomorrow's first day of classes, which may or may not be way over my head. At our academic orientation today, I could understand the teacher and some of my classmates had studied the same amount as I had, but now that Tucker has dropped down to 260, I'm the only UNC student with only four semesters in 300. Oh, well. Nate has promised I can use him as a dictionary, which I did today when I read the first chapter. It was about the changing nature of families around the world, which is a little step up from my past class, which tended to focus on topics like "campus life," "going to the post office," and "eating at a Chinese restaurant."

Classes start tomorrow on regular schedule, which means that, starting at 8:30 a.m., we have two hours of written coursework and two hours of small group oral practice. Then lunch, then a one-on-one session with our professor. Oh, and the language pledge will be in effect. Zao gao!

I'll be a little sad to take the pledge, actually. When I signed up for this program, I kind of figured I'd meet people and make friends as we went through the Chinese-only classes together; but I've already made such great friends with people from the pre-trip tour that it will be hard to limit our communication from now on. Oh, well. It just gives me an excuse to learn gossip-related words in Mandarin.

Tonight, as a farewell-to-our-native-tongue dinner, Seth, Danielle, Nate and I went to Pizza Hut. Which was, oddly enough, a fancy sit down restaurant that cost us 130 kuai for a pizza. They also gave Nate a present at the end of the meal because it was father's day (and he has a beard? Which makes him, at 21, the father of our group?). It was a picture frame that says "Pizza Hut" on it.

Day Ten

2009-06-20T07:21:00.001-07:00

Day Ten:

We were out kind of late last night (getting to the club, waiting around at the club when we were the only people there, dancing for a long time to Chinese re-mixes of Britney Spears) so a bunch of the UNC crowd did not go to early morning Tai Chi as per our schedule. Instead, we figured out how to take the subway to the Forbidden City and Tiannamen Square. (The subways here are pretty uncomplicated, clean, and full of strange advertisments. On our way over, we watched a video of a guy getting burned alive in a subway fire…unclear what that was supposed to make us buy.)

Anyway, Tiannamen and the Forbidden City were really awesome. I never knew exactly how big the latter was… we spent about two hours walking all the way around it. It was really awe-inspiring how grand and intricate it was, although it was rather hot out and I got pretty sunburned, spent about a dozen kuai on bottled water, and got coconut popsicle all over myself.

After that, we walked to a mall where we ate at a chain restaurant called "Real Kung Fu." It was pretty awful and expensive, so at least we know not to eat there again.

In contrast, dinner was really good and also cheap. After relaxing for the rest of the afternoon, we ate at a noodle place down the street. Then we all went to this huge plaza/park in front of the Tourism Expo where a bunch of locals gather around dusk. Teenagers play Chinese hacky-sack with a ball that looks kind of a like a badmitton birdie, older guys drum and dance, and a bunch of people do line dancing to piped-in music. We wandered around there for a long time and played hacky-sack with a local guy. Tucker was great at it, Chris B. and I not so much.

We got our test scores back from the placement exam, and I was excited to learn I placed into the 300 level. Almost all of my classmates who came out of four semesters of Chinese were placed into the level below, 260, but I think I'll be able to handle 300. At that level, I get to take a language elective as well, either business or newspaper or literature Chinese. We have our academic orientation tomorrow.

photos

2009-06-20T03:56:00.001-07:00

Here are some more photos, mostly of Tianamen square... I'll update more about that later:

http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China3?authkey=Gv1sRgCJO-iuPx-YmNbQ&feat=directlink

Day Nine

2009-06-19T05:41:00.001-07:00

Day Nine:

Two days 'til the language pledge! We took our written and oral placement tests today to see what class we're going to be put in. I think I did pretty well on both, but I don't think it matters that much, as long as I'm able to place into 407 when I get back to UNC.

We had another loooong informational session after lunch, covering daily routines and the language pledge (interesting fact: although you can listen to English music, you have to wear headphones), then a group of UNC kids went out to wander around. We found a seven-story mall and a pastry shop, among other things. The weather outside is the clearest it's been this whole time, and it was very strange to be able to see further than a few feet away. It was the first blue sky I've seen since America, too.

The group went out to dinner at a jiaozi place, where we ordered approximately a million dumplings and ended up paying less than $2.50 each. On the way home, I bought a purple strapless dress for 25 kuai—Seth, Nate, and Danielle want to go out tonight, so we are going to (and I'm not making this up) a Beijing gay bar/dance club. (Thanks, Seth and Nate!) I'm sure it will be an interesting cultural experience, and, as Danielle pointed out, the overzealous clapping Chinese men won't be interested in us!

Day Eight

2009-06-18T02:49:00.001-07:00

Day Eight:

I think I'm the one who's been shorting out the electricity in three floors by using Western appliances in the sockets. Don't tell anyone.

In unrelated news, I need to buy a new power strip.

Today has been largely filled with informational sessions. I grumbled about the length of them at first (a few one-hour ones today, two tomorrow) until I realized that I had probably sat through almost as much logistical stuff in the first few days of Interlochen. Which was not quite as much of a foreign country as China.

This morning, we had a largely unintelligible one by school officials (Beijing Institute of Ed, not CET) telling us that none of us could leave campus for seven days due to swine flu. Immediately afterward, we had a much more coherent one from the CET directors telling us that we could ignore the previous session. We've all been given thermometers to report our temperature each morning, but since the UNC group has already been in China for a week, we're exempt.

After a walking tour of the surrounding area, we had lunch at CET's cafeteria. Pretty good stuff, especially these little apple/peach fruits, whose Chinese name I can't remember right now.

I then went shopping with Chris, Tucker, and Rachel. We got kind of lost a few blocks from school, but this Chinese guy walked for twenty minutes to show us what bus to get on. Chris bought a guitar and Rachel and Tucker bought bikes, which they rode home. I bought clothes hangers (5 kuai), a music stand (30 kuai) and Love Actually, "Limited Unrate Edition" (15) and Gattaca (15). Altogether, I spent about ten dollars, if you count the bus fees there and back.

I'm about to go to dinner with Danielle and the girl across the hall, Marley. It's kind of cool having all of the other students in the dorm, but after the Shanghai trip, I'm much closer to the UNC-ers so I've mostly stuck around with them.

Also! If anyone has an online copy of the Piazzola Tango for flute and guitar, or wants to snail mail me their copy for the summer, I'll buy you any fake dvds you want.

Day Seven

2009-06-17T07:17:00.001-07:00

Day Seven:

We arrived in Beijing this morning very early. (The zealous train stewardess popped into our cabin at 6:00 AM to demand our "piao"s—tickets.) Since our group was the first to arrive at CET's campus, we spent the morning getting settled into our rooms. They're quite nice facilities, and we get them to ourselves for the next week: our roommates don't move in until next weekend for fear of the ubiquitous Swine Flu.

A group of us took a taxi down to the American Embassy to register, and while we waited until it opened at two (so said the guard), we ate at a little noodle place (one heaping plate = 8 kuai = $1.10) and went to buy cell phones in an underground market. Although the place was a little seedy, full of fake iPhones and cheap silk stuff, we managed to get some outdated cell phones for really cheap. Mine ended up costing only 100 kuai ($15), but the Sim card and 20 minutes of calls brought me up to 180 (still not bad). It was kind of difficult to convince the salespeople to set the phones up for us, though: the guys at the sim-card-selling station were unwilling to program mine until the saleswoman at the booth next door yelled at them. The only words I caught were: "How could you think she would be able to set it up herself? She cannot communicate!"

Then we went back to the embassy, which turned out to have closed, not opened, at two. Oops.

I practiced flute this afternoon in the semi-gym in the basement of the dorm next door. Terrible acoustics, but oh well.

More, non-UNC, CET people arrived around dinner time and we all went to a shopping mall together where we bought outlet converters (mine has already broken). We ate at a fast food place that translates to "Scent of the South Land" and walked through a huge park/plaza where people were doing musical Tai Chi.

Classes, as well as the language pledge, don't start until Monday.

pix 2

2009-06-16T18:13:00.000-07:00

http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China2?authkey=Gv1sRgCITS9JSIweCHQQ&feat=directlink

Day Six

2009-06-16T17:47:00.001-07:00

Day Six:

Last night, after I updated this journal, our tour guide went with the group to a place in Hangzhou called "Club G." It was quite the place—something straight out of Firefly. There were a lot of strobe lights and colorful visual effects blinking around the place, and there was a bouncing dance floor (!) in front of DJ "Peng." A big screen on the wall showed footage of different people dancing. It was ridiculously loud; if Carlie hadn't taught me the napkin-earplug trick, I would have been really worried about my hearing.

Anyway, even though we got there at 9:30 on a Monday night, it was hopping. The ten of us (nine plus our guide Jade) started dancing on the bouncing platform, which evidently really pleased DJ Peng and his sidekick, a tiny girl with long bangs, a toboggan, and a midriff-baring vest. They would point to us and clap, and eventually started playing American remixes.

First came "Low." Since we were all in a group, and since we all knew the basic dance (or at least could translate and mimic the "hit the floor" part), everyone was really into that and started copying us. Things got a little bit crazier when they struck up "Jump Around"—we had been doing that in the Dean Dome all year, and by the chorus, the platform was bouncing like a trampoline. Some of the guys danced with the Chinese girls, and one Chinese guy kept trying to dance with me by clapping his hands over my head, but mostly we just danced in our group.

After the boys caused a commotion by freestyling on the tables to the side of the dance stage (where a few professional dancers, who were dressed identically in the semi-anime-cute-schoolgirl-outfit of the rest of the patrons, had been dancing), we all sat down to rest. Then the boys got up again and for a while we couldn't figure out where they'd gone. We were almost ready to get up and look for them when we saw the screen on the side of the room.

The boys had gone up to the second floor of the club, a huge balcony that ran the length of one side, and were performing an enthusiastic if corny disco dance to "Stayin' Alive." The four of them mimicked Elvis and did the Macarena and threw an imaginary football to each other—all of which was being displayed for the whole club on the wall. People were loving it, and they got a few Chinese guys up there with them.

Eventually, the whole group got up on the balcony, where we ended the night (around 11:30) by leading the club in the YMCA song.

Today was pretty low-key. In the morning, we went to see a Chinese traditional medicine museum, which was un-air-conditioned and extremely hot. After lunch, we went to one of Hanzhou's tea farming villages, where a very persistent "tea expert" led the group in a ceremony and then convinced us to buy many yuan of crumpled leaves. (Danielle and I agreed that the people we've met here are very effective salesmen: by the end of the afternoon, we were all fully convinced of the medicinal power of tea.) A group of us then went off on a hike up the mountain where the tea was grown. It was very steep and unlike any other hike I'd gone on. The closest I can compare the scenery to is Northern California: very lush, agricultural slopes.

After a stop at a Chinese KFC, we got on the train for Beijing (where I'm writing this right now). Danielle, Seth, and I are sharing a four-bed room with a Chinese college student whose English name is Amanda. We've been practicing our Chinese by playing BS. ("I will put down yi ge san!" "Bu dui!" "Zao gao!") We arrive at our dorms tomorrow and take the language pledge—don't worry, this blog will continue to be in English!

pictures

2009-06-15T09:15:00.001-07:00

So far, all of my pictures are here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahThurman/China?authkey=Gv1sRgCOK73KbTwbCL5AE&feat=directlink

photos and day five

2009-06-15T06:32:00.001-07:00

Today, we drove to Hangzhou and went to a Buddhist temple. It was very cool. The woods surrounding the temple had a lot of Buddhist carvings in it and there were a bunch of monks walking around. I bought a jade necklace and took a lot of pictures.

Next we went for a boat tour on the Hangzhou river. We talked to some little Chinese kids who were sitting with us, but our tones weren't great and they kept saying "ting bu dong!" ("we don't understand!)

After wandering around the area around our hotel this afternoon (the boys bought stuff from a McDonalds), we went out to another fancy Chinese dinner.

Sorry this is a short update... I'm in the process of trying to upload a bunch of photos to Picasa, so hopefully I'll post them later. (I have over 300!)

repost

2009-06-15T01:43:00.001-07:00

Props to Alex C. for teaching me how to get around the Chinese block on blogger. I'll put up another thing tonight, but here are my posts so far:

Day One:

I've been up for over thirty hours, minus some Ambien-induced naps on the flight over (during which I had to turn around and groggily tell the little girl behind me to stop kicking my seat—in Mandarin!) so I'm tired. We got to Shanghai around 2 p.m. today but then were held on the runway for at least an hour and a half while the whole plane got tested for swine flu. Six officials in full-body contamination suits pointed radar thermometers at everyones' foreheads and detained four rows of passengers when one kid turned out to have a temperature.

However, my row was (thankfully) uncontaminated and around 4 p.m., our group of six students took the CET bus to our hotel. The hotel, called "The Silk Road" is very fancy—lots of gold painted trim and a huge jade statue of Buddha in the lobby. The group, plus our talkative tour guide Jade, went to dinner around six. There, a waitress served us tea out of a pot with a two-foot-long pointy spout. There was a bunch of really good food—twelve or thirteen different dishes from pickled celery to fish to watermelon soup.

Day Two:

I'm pretty well-adjusted to the time difference right now, although it seems weird that everyone I know back home is waking up around this time… I'm ready to go to sleep!

Today has been a very long day. Our tour guide packed in a lot of sight-seeing, so I'll try to cover it all.

After a huge breakfast at the buffet at the hotel (featuring bao—dumplings—and baked beans, among other things), our tour guide took us to Shanghai's Urban Planning Museum. Very cool, had a huge model of the entire city that took up the whole top floor.

Then, we went to the site of the first national congress of China's communist party—another museum, NO PICTURES ALLOWED. Some of us took them anyway. Lots of guards.

After that, we walked around the French Concession, where I tried to haggle with a vendor:

Me: How much is that box?

Vendor: 15 kuai.

Me: That is very expensive.

Vendor: …

Me: I will give you 10 kuai.

Vendor: (dirty look) NO.

(This was in stark contrast to my friend Tucker's bargaining later in the day with a guy selling fake Rolexs:

Vendor: Have this watch! 100 kuai!

Tucker: How about 35?

Vendor: Okay.)

Next, we went to the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre, which was housed in the basement of one of the many high-rise tenements. It was this guy's private collection of all of the propaganda posters he'd found from the '50s to the '70's. Very cool, some were actually very beautiful. I bought several post-cards, so if you're on my list, look for Mao heading your way!

Then, lunch in the Radisson hotel. Lots more yummy Chinese food, including a delicious make-your-own noodles bar.

(About this time, we collected the two remaining members of our tour group, who had been released from quarantine. Our tour guide asked us: "you call it swine flu, but isn't it actually from the pig?")

Afterward, we went to the former residence of Sun Yat-sen. Outside, Tucker and I bought these fruits called "yan mei" berries. We washed them in bottled water on the bus and everyone ate a bunch of them—they're really good! And apparently only can be found in Shanghai at this specific time of year.

Then, we walked down a very busy commercial street for a few hours. Traffic here is crazy. I bought a purple jacket (139 kuai = 20 bucks) and Lanear bought a silk dress.

We ate dinner at a very fancy place that served us waaaay too much food. By the time dumplings came (course fifteen or sixteen), I couldn't eat any more! Also the restaurant did not have "squat toilets," a plus!

After dinner, we drove to take an hour-long cruise on the Huangpu river. The buildings on either side were all lit up (remember the scene in Serenity when they're landing on that planet with all of the animated billboards?)—very cool.

It's around 10 p.m. here now and we're back in the hotel (which is very nice, btw, except for the beds—they're about as soft as plywood). Another busy day tomorrow!

Day Three:

(I switched over to this url because the government blocked blogger, but I may be able to find a way around it and be back on my original site soon. I'll keep you all posted.)

I'm just as tired (if not more) after day three. We started the morning by touring the Shanghai Museum. It had a lot of different types of traditional art: pottery, calligraphy, painting, etc.

For lunch, we ate yet another buffet of enormous proportions. I especially liked the pickled jellyfish!

After that, we spent most of the afternoon shopping. We went to "the Chinatown of Shanghai," where people bought jade and traditional dresses, and then a few of us took a taxi to another urban center with a bunch of malls. I was a bit overwhelmed by the haggling process and only bought candy. Shopping etiquette is a lot different out here: you can turn down overzealous sellers by telling them "BU YAO" ("don't want!") and then walking away. Also, very few people here have any concept of lining up for things and there's a lot of jostling.

We went to a "hot pot" place for dinner, which I didn't like quite as much as the other meals. Our table had a vat of boiling oil in the middle of our table, which we boiled noodles, meat, and veggies in. It was all right, but the oil gave the food a sort of fishy taste.

Tonight is our last night in Shanghai. Some people are going out, but I'm pretty tired and might just eat the rest of my yan mei in the hotel room.

Day Four:

Today we took the bus from Shanghai to Sunzhou and went to the gardens of the Humble Administrator. Those were very cool—lots of stone and big ponds. It was very humid and steamy.

We went to lunch at a place that served (among lots of Chinese food) French fries and then went to a museum where women were making beautiful silk embroideries. The finished pieces were photograph-like intricate, and some of them were two-sided… like, one side would be a brown cat and on the other would be a white one. They were really incredible and I wanted to buy some from the gift shop, but they were really expensive.

Next came the Suzhou museum, whose main attraction was a huge koi pond and rows of tiny cute Asian kids looking at the fish. Until around age five, kids here wear pants with a split down the middle, and it's kind of strange to see. Also, as an experiment, I counted the kids I saw at a museum the other day: nine boys and three girls. I know that it wasn't a huge sampling size, but it's at least anecdotal evidence of the distorted gender ratio (supposedly 51% to 49% due to preference for sons).

After that, we headed off to another garden, the Garden of the Master of Nets. There, we ran into an older man who was learning English. He wanted to know how to say "transsexual" and told Greg that he looked like a "ladyboy" because he had a pretty face. Greg taught him how to say "bullshit."

Dinner tonight was the best one yet. Although the food was very similar to stuff we'd had previously, it seemed a little higher in quality. I especially liked the meat-filled mooncakes.

2009-06-12T08:54:00.001-07:00

Hi, Hannah here (thanks to Alex for posting this!). The Chinese government has blocked blogger (and after I made that cool layout and everything!), so my travel blog will be kept at http://travelblog.com/hotel/hannahthurman/. Zai Jian!