Strip English

My International Finance class was canceled tonight, and so I asked Tram if I could go with her to help her teach tonight. Last night we taught, as a team, the adult class, and it was lots of fun. MUCH more fun than teaching kids (though they were cute). Because our teaching styles are so different and yet seemingly complimentary, we decided that we would just teach with each other whenever we could and split the pay. This may seem like I'm dividing my pay in half for no reason, but I'd rather spend twice as long doing something that's actually fun than spend half the time sweating bullets in front of an expectant class.

The adults pretty much know all the English vocabulary that one would need to get around, so we spent our class talking about colloquialisms. You know- "beat around the bush," "let someone down," "make fun of someone," "feel like a million bucks," and the like. They absolutely love learning things that they think real Americans say, and it's the greatest classroom environment you could imagine. They listen, they ask intelligent questions, they laugh at the right times, etc.... we even got applause at the end of both nights that we have taught.

And are there funny stories? You bet there are! I have to warn my readership that the following stories result from language misunderstandings and honest intellectual curiosity, and as such are mostly funny in a slightly inappropriate way (I'm sure that most of you that know me well are shocked).

So the first one (which is sort of my favorite) started when I inadvertently used the word "strip," as defined by a small piece/slice of something. A very confused Chinese man raised his hand in the front and said "is that all that word means? I think it have different meaning."

"ummm" I replied.

"What is the meaning of this word?" another Chinese woman asked, innocently. I looked at Tram, who was already laughing. I looked at the 35 adults in front of me, eagerly searching for an answer that only I possessed.

"Well it's a noun... like this piece of paper here. If I take scissors and cut this piece off, this is a strip of paper.... and it's also a verb. And the noun associated with the verb is 'stripper,' and a 'stripper' is someone who 'strips.' And what that means is that she takes her clothes off for money." I pause. "and I guess it could be a guy, too."

A man in the middle row who has very long hair raised his hand. "Why would someone want to cut off her clothes?" There was a murmur of agreement in the group.

"Well you see, the two meanings of the word really don't have anything to do with one another. Tram?" Tram was not helpful. "A stripper just takes her clothes off. She doesn't cut them. She just... removes them." I looked out and saw that great confusion was still rampant, though one or two of the more knowledgeable students were giggling.

"Well they dance and there's music, and they take their clothes off." I offer.

"Do they take the clothes off before or after they dance?"

"... I... would guess probably during... do you understand?" And I could tell from the laughter that they did. And if they didn't, I wasn't going to explain further.

After class, another guy told me that he watched "Friends" a lot, and he understood most of it, but he didn't understand one phrase. He seemed a very serious guy, and his English was very good. I asked what the phrase was. He said: "nice butt, great rack." I paused, and then explained as technically I could. I then excused myself to go laugh for a few solid minutes. Maybe you had to be there to see why this was funny, but even after the last story I just didn't see that coming.

The students were very nice to Tram and I after the class was over, and about fifteen stayed afterwards to sit and talk with us at the bar while we ate (because Peng fed us again). In the best compliment since I've been in China, one of the guys (I say guys, they're all 30-40 years old) asked what days we were teaching, so that he could be sure to come back for those days. He said Tram and I taught the best English classes that he'd had since he started coming to the bar for English lessons (and if you ignore the part of the sentence that says "since he started coming to the BAR for English lessons" it's really a great compliment).

Mike Laoshi

Only in China could the following story have taken place.

Yep, I'm a part time English teacher. At a bar. An "English Study Singles Bar," run by a guy named Peng who graduated from Johns Hopkins two years ago, bought an unsuccessful club, and turned it into a popular place for all ages to learn English and Mandarin, and then go on dates and get drunk. From a business point of view, this is absolutely brilliant for a variety of reasons.

I found the place because Tram came to me yesterday and said "Mike, I'm going to go get a job teaching English. Want to come?" and I wasn't doing anything else at the time.

We got there, and Peng came out, greeted us warmly, and offered us free drinks. Indeed, this is a wondrous place. Our friend Jordan arrived to teach a group of children, and as this was her first time with children, she begged one of us to teach with her. Tram had to go, so that made me a working teacher within 10 minutes of my interview.

The kids all had cute American names like Jenny, Carol, Lory, Cathy, and, I kid you not, Tom and Jerry (best friends who DID name themselves after the cartoon). They were surprisingly advanced in their English, though they did drive me to madness a few times hitting each other and not paying attention. The problem with teaching children whose native language you do not speak is that when they yell loudly at each other, it is impossible to tell whether they are saying "the teacher is dumb" or "please be quiet and listen to the teacher, I'm enjoying his lesson very much." I've found that calling them by name when they're acting up works very well, but only for about ten seconds at a time. My teaching style can best be summed up by:

Me- "Salad. Sa. Lad."

Them- "Sellud"

Me- "ae. Ae. Like cat. Salad."

Jerry- "meow! CAT CAT CAT!"

Tom- "Teacher teacher Jerry hit me!"

Me- "Tom, Jerry. Listen." (while I'm saying this, Cathy and Lory start playing with a tamogachi or something like that.)

Me- "Salad."

Everyone except Cathy and Lory- "Salad."

Me- "Cathy, Lory. Salad."

Cathy and Lory- "Salad." (Jenny puts her head down)

Me- "Are you tired?"

Jenny- "Yes."

Tom- "Jerry hit me!"

Me- "Tom, Jerry. Stop."

Tom- "Teacher can we play a game?!"

Me- "You need to learn at least five words."

Tom- "Cathy is very big."

Me- "Why... why would you even say that?"

I could go on... for about two hours, but I feel as though that's enough for now. I get to teach adults tonight, and needless to say, I'm thrilled. We get paid 100RMB per hour, so if I teach three or four hours a week that will pretty much cover all of my expenses. Yay!

Here's a random picture inside the bar. At the time, these students were doing skits. I didn't understand them, but everyone else thought they were hysterical.

In other news, we have plane tickets to Harbin and all is go for the ice festival. I've been getting some great e-mails from several of you containing lots of different pictures of Harbin- thanks so much! The more I see of it, the more I want to go. There's even a Great Wall Ice Luge!

Karaoke and Duck (and Frog)

Yesterday we went to another hot pot place, and this time I got pictures so as to demonstrate what a hot pot is.

I think we're both supposed to be looking at the camera. Oh well. That's Jenn on the left. She's Tram's roommate. Will and I often eat lunch with them. As you can see, the hot pot is powered by an inverted metal funnel filled with hot coals, or, as we would call it in America, a "lawsuit waiting to happen." There is a sort of broth filling the rest of the container, and you throw all manner of meats and vegetables and noodles into it, wait 30 seconds, and take them out. Eat, repeat, and enjoy.

Last night I was lucky enough to fall in with a group of people who were being led by a guy who had been here for a semester and brought along his Chinese girlfriend. She was extremely nice and spoke fairly good English, and she knew all the best places to go in Beijing.

Before I talk about dinner, just as a side note I wanted to mention that the guy who had been here last semester (I forgot his name, but I think it was Dan...) gave us a really great idea for something fun to do once we've been here a while. Once he had been in Beijing for a few months, he said, he would play a game where he would put 10RMB ($1.3) into his wallet, hop on a bus, and then after an hour or so on the bus, get off and try to make his way back to campus. I'm not sure I would do this alone, but in a small group this could be a fun game. You could even send out multiple groups and make it a competition. Nothing like getting completely lost in a foreign city to learn your way around.

For dinner we had the goal of Peking Duck, and so we went to a restaurant that specialized in that and we were seated in the back room, as usual (I think it's because we're a large group, not because we're Americans...). The decorations in the room were all very large posters of Mao, farm workers taking up the cause, and various communist propaganda that started looking more and more attractive as our democratic system of meal selection became tiresome. In the end, we decided to let our Chinese friend become benevolent dictator and decide what the rest of us would eat.

We enjoyed a feast of duck, noodles, tofu, frog soup (Glenn explained to me that frogs tasted so much like chickens because they are really very genetically close, having both descended from the velociraptor, or something like that.), barbecued pork (at least that's what I'm calling it), thin strings of fried potatoes ("potato made better" as Jordan said), and various other rices and noodles. It was a delicious night, and I'll admit we splurged a little, spending a whopping $5 US per person. Mom, Dad- I'm sorry. I'll try mightily to curb my rampant spending.

I'm not sure I see the connection.

After dinner we went to a Karaoke club! These things are big deals here- four floors with a hundred rooms at least, each containing a lounge area and a stage and a massive TV, not to mention a song library with just about everything you'd want (they didn't have Meatloaf. I guess they'd do anything else for their customers, but they won't do that.)

We spent about three hours singing everything from the Beatles to Aladdin, and my throat still hurts today. I apologize to Mr. Hornady for not even attempting to sing in a healthy way.

But come on, doesn't it look fun?
From left to right: Junta, Jordan, Glenn, Tram, Jenn

Roommate Bonding

I'm sure that there are videos of me singing "Billie Jean" floating out there somewhere. I didn't get any on my camera, though.

Today has been a relaxing laundry/blog/homework day, with the homework, of course, coming last. We went to the Medicine House with Tram and Jenn for lunch and ordered the best dessert that I've had so far in China. It's so easy you could even do it at home! Here's what you need:

One Banana (or two)
One pot full of molten sugar (or two)

Heat banana(s), pour pot of molten sugar onto bananas. Serve with ice cold water to harden into crunchy candy shell around very hot banana(s). Eat until you go into sugar-shock. Stop.

Those Wild Northerners

So we (Hillary and I) have been working for the past couple of days on this Harbin thing. We've been working on it so much, in fact, that I haven't actually done anything of note. Oh! Except I did have my first conversation with a Chinese person. It went (translated) a little something like this:

Me- "I want that. Five."

Chinese Person- "(something incomprehensible) Five?"

Me- "Correct. Five."

And I received five large dumplings on a plate. Success!

I also think I did well on my first test, but I was more excited about the dumpling ordering. Before the test, we played a game in class. I'm not sure I told you about the last game we played, but it involved saying numbers in sequence, and whoever screwed up got extra homework. Really. So after having played a few of Chinese classroom games, I've decided that a great game to invent and sell in the US would be something called "Terrible, Terrible Consequences." In it, you wouldn't receive anything good for doing well, but you would be punished with writing and memorization if you messed up. I think it would sell millions.

Anyway, back to the frozen wasteland that is Harbin. The more research I did, the more magical this place has become, and the more certain I am that, no matter what common sense is thrown at me, I will go there. I have five main reasons.

1. Harbin is basically a Russian town. It's only been Chinese since 1946. So it's sort of like visiting Russia.

2. The Harbin Ice Festival looks AWESOME.

It's a castle made of ice! How can we NOT go?

3. The Harbin Snow Festival also seems cool. There are snowmen. Enormous, enormous snowmen.

4. If I go to Harbin, I'm going to tell everyone I went to Siberia. It's not exactly Siberia, but it's close enough. If people doubt that I went to Siberia, I'll show them a picture of a frozen castle and say that's what the Siberian royalty live in.

5. While I was reading about Harbin, I came across an article that said "in the winter, you can access Sun Island by walking across the frozen river, or you can hire a go-cart to take you across." That's right. Go-cart.

We were originally going to try to get to Harbin by train, but when we ran the idea past Dr. Sun and Dr. Li, they gave us that "oh you silly Americans" look that you get used to if you travel in a foreign country. First, Dr. Li showed us this picture of people getting tickets at the Beijing train station around the time we would be trying to go...

We decided to fly instead.

Then Dr. Sun started telling us about the wild people up North. Here's the example he used (paraphrased):

"The people here... when you talk... when you have a fight, you talk. You talk for a while, and this is how we do things. The people in the North, they will say maybe two sentences and then they will punch each other."

We left the office undeterred, though with the new plan that if we meet an angry Northerner we will run before the second sentence.

Business Strategies 2

Finally, the blog posts the actual time that I write the blog instead of some random number. This is very important to me. Anyway, this will be a quick post.

Total number of Chinese characters learned: 35
Total number of words learned... 45?

And now a recap of Business Strategies Class (all numbers in 24 hour time, because that's what my phone displays):

Today's Strategem: Openly repair the walkway, secretly march to Chen Cang.

This was a pretty straightforward assignment, and it involved knowing when to fool your enemy into thinking that you're doing an obvious thing, while the whole time you're doing something completely unorthodox. Here are my notes from the class, written in real-time.

13:02- Setting up powerpoint

13:10- Still setting up powerpoint

13:14- Teacher begins class by essentially reading what we were supposed to read for class out loud to us.

13:22- Finishes our assigned reading repeat and tells us the story of Chinese startup alibaba.com.

13:23- Business advice! "getting investors is important." ...

13:33- Continues reading out loud straight from the powerpoint- currently rehashing information stated ten minutes ago. Wow, I guess investors ARE important.

13:38- Repeatedly refers to a number on the powerpoint which reads "82 million" as "84 million." No idea what is lost in the translation.

13:40- States "so that was a brief view of the company's history"

13:41- "And now for a view of their business model..."

14:00-"in 2005..." "it helps to get media attention"

14:05- Tenuous connection is finally made between strategem and business case study.

14:07- Break.

14:20- Assignment for group debate/discussion given. We (team 1) receive: "You are the senior managers of Alibaba. You believe that Alibaba's strategy has been_____. Back up your points with examples."

14:25- I convince the group that a really good demonstration of the Strategem would be to stand up and tell nothing but lies about the company to confuse the class.

14:26- My team tells me that this is unrealistic because everyone has all the facts about the company in his/her hands.

14:30- For lack of a better idea, my idea wins out.

14:50- I deliver a speech about how, even though Alibaba.com is making tons of money and has very bright prospects, the arrival at this position was entirely through luck and as such we, the senior management, wish to sell off all of our subsidiaries to our competitors.

14:55- During question and answer our competitors express a desire to purchase one of our subsidiaries. We agree to talks.

15:00- The teacher asks if any group has anything more to share. We say "HA! We're not going to sell our subsidiaries! We arbitrarily built five more websites while you were fooled by our deception! We totally Chen Canged you!"

15:01- Anarchy.


Ok, so most of that might have just been a diversion from the obvious statement that class was boring... Chen Cang!

Projects, Planning, and Plotting

Now that everything has settled into what I might call a routine here, I've decided to lay out some of my best plans and see how that goes. I don't expect to have anything to do on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because I have still not been contacted by my internship about a time to come work. Oh well.

Project #1- I'm going to make use of the 2GB flash drive in my camera and make a video about an average day here at Beida and in Beijing. I'm enlisting the help of all my friends here to help me. I hope to have it posted within a few weeks.

Plan #1- I received an e-mail from my Mom this morning which was a forward from Aunty Deb. It had to do with an ice festival held in the northern province of China that happens every year between January 5th and February 5th. As it just so happens, we have a break for Chinese New Year on February 1st and nothing to do until the 6th. As it also so happens, Beijing is the transportation hub of China and a round trip to Harbin, the capital of the northern province, is only about $120 American. As it also also so happens, my friends and I are impulsive and reckless college students, so I'm going to spend the next few days trying to plan a trip to Harbin. In addition to an ice city, they also have Siberian Tigers. Yay!

And now for the news... (except not from CNN. Do I seem bitter?)

Tram and Will at the Medicine House

After a week and a bit here, we may have finally figured out how to order the food that we want. We went to the Medicine House last night and, for the first time, everything we ordered was just the way we wanted it. The iron plates that look like fajitas without the tortillas are exactly that, with delicious eel and beef and potatoes (I like eel, so it's not like an antballs thing again). We also got an enormous plate of fried rice and some broccoli (that's for you, Mom).

Afterwards Tram and I took a long walk towards Wudaokou to find a stationary store that Will told us about so that we could buy flashcards. On the way we got to walk over a cool overpass and Tram took a picture!

Which would have been better if I had turned flash off, because there are lots of cool cars and buildings and lights in the background.

We found the stationary store and bought our flashcards, and then we went into a Chinese grocery/clothing store. I bought some pineapple beers (wouldn't you if you saw something called "pineapple beer"?) and then went upstairs to look at some clothes. But I found something else instead...

Never let go. Seriously.

If anyone has $30 that they want to give me, I will buy this for you.

It's like Outback- We're Closer to Australia, so It'll Taste Better

OK, so tonight is my mega-update since I've been slacking the past few days. It isn't because I haven't tried to update the blog, but random things have been happening that have kept me from doing so. I'll include bits of the blog that I HAD written, and then reasons that I was interrupted.

01/18/08

Today I officially received my Chinese name: Jiang Jun, which means soldier and, more specifically, “General.” It’s the closest approximation Li Laoshi could find for “Johnson.”

I didn’t post yesterday because yesterday was painfully boring and all I did was find a Western Union to get money. Oh, and I ate walnut balls covered in fried ants. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was a little sweet and actually sort of tasty, but whenever I started enjoying it, the phrase “you’re eating ants!” would pop into my mind, and I would have to suppress gagging.

INTERRUPTION

1. Laundry- Here's a picture that should explain why laundry may have delayed my blogging.

But it's CHEAP! (and that's what's important)

2. "C(h)risis"- As I had finished hanging up my laundry, I received two simultaneous calls... one on my room phone, and one on my cell phone. It was Dr. Sun and Dr. Li, the directors of our program, and they wanted me to know that there was a "crisis" and Will and I needed to go to Dr. Sun's office right away. Of course, we assumed that William and Mary had screwed up on some crucial study abroad thing and we were no longer students (or something to that effect). As it turned out, however, once we got to the office Dr. Sun asked us if we would possibly be willing to move.

"Why?" We asked. He explained to us that a guy from Va. Tech had failed to show up in a room down the hall, and now the two guys in that room had to move to building number 9 (which is for doubles). We failed to see how this involved us in any way. We were soon informed that it didn't, but the guys who should move were fussing about it. Chris, especially, was very unhappy about the move. Luckily, I had talked to Chris before (he's the guy I got lost at the airport with) and I happened to know that he's one of those who just loves to argue for argument's sake. We told Dr. Sun that we'd be happy to move if it was a last resort and the other guys were going to leave the program or have some sort of fit over it, because it's really not a big deal. Which is especially why it annoyed me that such a small thing would take me away from blogging AND manage to do it in a really heart-racingly-scary way. So, after that episode (we're still on Friday) I returned to some writing...

(Friday night)

Walking around, I also found this great sign that I wanted to share with all my trumpet playing friends back home (especially Tornello because it’s her birthday). (Saturday note- it WAS her birthday)

No Trumpets Allowed in China

And right after I uploaded that image, Chinese internet decided to die. No one knew what had happened, but we DID know that we had to reset our internet, which our friend Matt, who was here last semester, kindly did for us the first time. Now, he wasn't around, so I decided to fix the internet myself. This involved wading through about ten pages that looked exactly like this-

-with me yelling out sort of what different the characters looked like, and Nell and Alice offering translation suggestions. Every few hours I would grow impatient and click randomly, which would invariably reset or fatal-error the entire system, requiring us to start over at the very beginning. Eventually, I continued to not fix it.

Later, we went out to various clubs and almost saw a fight. And by fight, I mean eight guys ran outside of a bar and nearly simultaneously broke their beer bottles in half and started brandishing them as weapons. We decided not to go to that particular establishment.

(Saturday)
01/19/08

Today we woke up and went to the Beijing City Museum, which is a fun super-huge structure on the outside.

Maybe you can't tell from the picture. SUPER-HUGE

And the least exhibition space of any museum I've ever been to on the inside. Which is OK, because the exhibits they did have were pretty cool. They had a whole section devoted to Buddhist statues constructed in the past few thousand years. I tried to be cool, interesting, and helpful all at the same time by giving Tram, my new Vietnamese friend who lives in Texas, a lesson on everything that I remembered from Intro to Buddhism (Fall '05). About halfway through my speech, she mentioned that she was, herself, Buddhist. So that was good.

This is in the museum. I wanted to position the picture so that it would look like I saw playing ball with the dog/lion/thing, but everyone said that would look dorky so I didn't.

The museum had some great exhibits, like I said, but they also had some weird things happening. I didn't get a picture of it, but one display had ancient Chinese glasses and candle holders next to a "Mitsubishi Electric Fan, Circa 1920's." And in another part of the museum, just kind of sitting out in the open, there was a "Planing Machine, British, Circa 1920's." I did get one of my favorites in a picture, though, in an exhibit about the historical Beijing Opera instruments.

The caption reads: "Saxophone- Modern Times"

Obviously I got my internet working this evening (by randomly clicking- score!) and then we went out to dinner for a hot pot, which is a distinctly Beijing thing that is actually just really good fondue. If you ever come visit, I can highly recommend them. The title of the blog comes from a comment that Will made over our hot-pot, after he said "I bet Indian food here is a lot better than in the US, because we're closer to India."

So I have to go to Outback, now, sometime before I leave.

Between 1368 and 1912...

I received word today that I have money waiting for me at one of the banks, but by the time I got out of class the English speaking banks were closed.

Speaking of class, today we learned the words for "mother" "father" "older brother" and "younger brother," among an array of adverbs, adjectives, and verbs. Sorry Rachel, but I can't reference you in Chinese yet.

I had my first "Business Strategies" class today, which utilizes the little-known Chinese text "The 36 Stratagems," which was written by an anonymous author sometime in either the Ming or Qing dynasty. As our teacher informed us later, the Ming and Qing dynasties cover a period of time from 1368 to 1912. So... that's helpful.

It contains 36 mantras that aid in any given situation, whether you are in an advantageous position (loot the house while it is on fire) or a disadvantageous position (beat the grass to startle the snake) or a confusing position (shut the door to catch the thief) or whatever other position you can imagine (borrow the knife to kill your enemy).

Today we discussed "create something out of nothing," in a business and historical context. It originated when a Chinese ruler tried to trick a subordinate into certain death by telling him to make 100,000 arrows in ten days, or else. The subordinate, obviously unable to make 100,000 arrows so quickly, instead borrowed 30 boats from his friend. He then hired 30 soldiers to man the boats, and stayed up for seven days and nights creating straw men to place in the boats along with the soldiers. On the eighth day, the "fleet" appeared out of nowhere outside of an enemy army settlement, and arrows from 20,000 archers rained down on the boats. When they returned to their homeland, there were 100,000 arrows attached that were removed and presented to the ruler, who was suitably impressed and did not have the subordinate killed.

My group decided that the best application of this story in modern business was Apple computers. Though "Snakes on a Plane" was a close second.

THIS

... is CNN?

No, not the whole building. Just an apartment on the 16th floor. There are about eight people in small cubicles in the main room, and Mr. Florcruz (the bureau chief) has a side apartment thing. The only reason they are cramped is because the other apartment that they own is getting painted, or something like that.

Anyway, my taxi pulled into this gated complex and then dropped me off. CNN, as I could see in my intern packet, was in building 12. However, the buildings in the complex ranged in number from one to ten. Obviously, this was a problem. I spotted an African woman coming towards me and, reasonably sure that she was not a native Chinese speaker either, I asked if she spoke English. "No," she said, but she did speak

FRENCH!

I've never felt so fluent in French in my LIFE. I'm certain that there were a lot of things that I was trying to say that didn't really come across as making sense, but I had such a feeling of real conversation and understanding. A stark contrast to my daily struggle to order rice in any given cafeteria here.

She helped me find the correct building, and I went up to the sixteenth floor and spent about five minutes talking to Mr. Florcruz before leaving the building, because all he wanted was a resume. He said he'd send it out and hopefully find something for me to do. It was fun getting the taxi there and back, though.

Instead of doing homework, my new friend Alice came over and we decided to tour the campus. I'd have pictures, but my battery died. I'll try to describe them in fewer than a thousand words:

(Insert picture of stereotypical Chinese tower here)

(Insert picture of frozen lake with ice-skaters here)

etc. etc...

After seeing what campus had to offer, we decided to go off the beaten path and leave campus. We walked around the edge of the wall and then across the street. There was a gate that led to a dirt road, so we went down that. Eventually we arrived at a dirt road that resembled a post-apocalyptic zombie-movie setting. Rubble lined the roads. Still, we journied on. Journied should be a word.

Eventually we came a frozen pond, an empty fountain with a stone fish in the center, and strange porcelain tiling under the dirt on the road. I have no idea what the deal with that was. Anyway, across the frozen pond was a very long, single story building, which seemed to be alone in the otherwise desolate landscape. There was a light on, and a few men were walking in, and a few were walking about. Behind us, two men walking the opposite direction on the path started yelling something at us and pointing at the house. They kept walking. I asked Alice what they were saying.

She said that, as they pointed at the building, they simply yelled "good fun."

I'm going to wonder for a long time what that meant.

Tiny Shrimp

01/13/08

Yesterday Will and I decided to rearrange our room so as to counterbalance the hotel-roominess of it all. We plundered Junta's room, which we referred to as his "single room penalty" and created a large open space in ours, where we were able to place a coffee table surrounded by eight or so chairs, a tea table, and a mini-fridge. After dinner, we had a tea-party. This was a great idea, except that all we had were loose, dry tea-pellet-things and no strainer. We thought of purchasing some stockings, but then decided that might be weird for two guys to do at 9PM.

For dinner we went back to the dumpling place because they were serving soup, and our friend Tram said she knew how to order so we wouldn't have to. That was all we needed to hear.

At first glance, the soup consisted of wontons and greens- like spinach- with tiny little spices and things floating around. I would have gone on happily believing this until someone said "this is good seaweed" and I thought "well... OK" and then someone else said "no, it's moss" and I thought "fine..." and then someone ELSE said "and aren't these tiny shrimp and crab cute?" and I thought "...." Then I looked down and saw that, indeed, there were itty bitty shrimp and crabs floating in the soup. I picked up a shrimp and looked it in its tiny little beady eyes. I'm sure it would have been happy to know that it was delicious, if a little salty. Next to me, Will found a baby squid.

01/14/08

This morning was our first day of classes. I'm in a small class of seven with a younger instructor, Li Laoshi (Laoshi isn't a name, but the word for teacher. At least something like that. I haven't done my homework yet). She is very nice and patient, and gives lots of positive feedback when we get things right. Today we learned "hello," "goodbye," "sorry," "how are you?" "I'm doing well," "cool," and "I don't speak Chinese." We were also introduced to 12 of the 38 Chinese "finals," which are better known as "weird noises that we as Americans have never had to make before," and the four tones that can be used on any syllable. We spent a good hour on the difference between one that goes up, and one that goes down a little and then up, but lower. I think the guy from "Jaws" said it best: "we're gonna need a bigger boat."

I have my first day of internship at CNN tomorrow. I have to make my way across half the city and find a random building I've never seen before. I'm placing my hopes and dreams on the assumption that there will be a large "CNN" in neon lights over the front.

Noodles!

01/12/08

Noodle House- Revisited

I woke up this morning at 7, because I went to bed at 9. As you can tell, I was a Friday night party animal. Will was asleep, but Junta was up and we had a lovely cup of tea together (because they bring us hot water and tea every morning outside our door) and then tried to go to the bank to exchange his traveler’s checks and my hundred bucks.

The first bank that we hit was the Agricultural Bank of China, and they didn’t exchange money and referred us to the Bank of China, which was just off campus and just a hop across the sign-ignoring highway of death and despair™. Once we got there, though, we were told that the Bank of China only exchanged money Monday through Friday.

A quick side note- next to the Bank of China was a two-story KFC Select. This is the third KFC that I’ve seen since I arrived in Beijing. I have yet to see a single McDonalds, but the lines at every single KFC were of Disney-worldly proportions. I don’t get it.

For lunch we went back to the Noodle-house, where Junta helped me order spicy noodles (do-dao-mein, or something like that). It was considerably easier than the previous Noodle-house experience, except for the whole chop-stick-to-eat-soupy-noodles thing. There’s a guy in our group named Steve, and he can’t use chop-sticks at all. I tried to teach him. He’s probably going to starve.

After lunch, the entire group took a trip to the Forbidden City, right in the middle of Beijing. It took about an hour to get there by bus- and we aren’t even at the edge of the city. The palace complex was impressive, with every gate holding behind it another, larger courtyard with another, larger temple-pagoda-house-thing. Here’s a picture of what I mean. I’m standing at the gate of a very similar building to what is behind me.

See?

There were some neat places, though, like extensive rock gardens. In one place we found an elevated stone table with stone seats. We figured it was for tea or paper rock scissors. That was supposed to be amusing because we’re playing paper rock scissors, but you can’t really tell in this picture. Oh well.

(From left to right- Me, Jennifer, and Will)

I really appreciated the English subtitles that they had on every gate- “Gate of Tranquility,” “Gate of Respectable Thoughts,” “Gate of Martial Valor,” etc… but my favorite sign was this one:

(The more you care for the palace,

the more the palace shows its splendour.)

I appreciate the sentiment.

After walking through the Forbidden City (which was a long, long walk) we arrived at Tiananmen Square (“where nothing bad has ever happened™”). It was a very, very large square… there’s not really much more I can say, aesthetically, about a giant slab of concrete. It was worth seeing, though.

This evening I’m going out with Jordan and Glen, who live across the hall and are very good at Chinese, to get some hamburgers. At first I felt bad because I was abandoning the local food so quickly, but honestly, I think hamburgers might be healthier than all the delicious grease I’ve been putting in my system.

Finally, as promised, here are some pictures of “Hotel California”

Building 5, sweet Building 5.

My bed is on the left. See? It’s a hotel. Except without anywhere to put your clothes. Mine currently live in the TV cabinet.

Pictures Coming Soon-ish!

01/11/08- Evening

Of Yolk Cake and Dumplings

In the afternoon we went to find food. We needed first, though, to get a fan ka (meal card) so that we could join the ranks of supreme efficiency. A student here at Beida who spoke a little English helped us out, which is good because, when they give you your meal card, they also give you a numerical password to the meal card. But only in Chinese. I would be very hungry tonight if not for that kind translator.

We first tried to go to “noodle house” for lunch. We walked through the doors, which, like most doors at Beida, are large, heavy-ish clear flaps that hang down from the door frame, giving one the impression of walking through a car wash. We stood in the long line (as one student informed us, there are always long queues) and when we got up to the front, we realized that no one in our group, not even the guys who had taken three and four semesters of Chinese, could even order the simplest of noodly dishes. Not wanting to hold up the line any longer than we did, we beat a retreat to “dumpling house,” where I fully utilized my skill of pointing at large vats of dumplings to indicate which ones I wanted. Now, I didn’t know which dumplings were in which vat, but I didn’t really care. The woman helping me then said something in Chinese, and, taking an educated guess, I put my hands into a medium sized plate. My friend Will, who speaks Chinese, ended up with a giant serving platter full of at least a hundred dumplings- so I think I got lucky.

I noticed at this time that no one in the entire restaurant had anything to drink with his or her meal. No one. If you are aware of my love of drinking copious amounts of water/sweet tea/whatever at the table, you may have some idea as to the extent of my thirsty sorrow.

(update- I found out later that, after you point at a type of dumpling, the lady asked “how many?” and in the case of dumplings, “one” equals six. So Will ordered 10 dumplings and ended up with 60)

Earlier in the day (I just remembered what I did before lunch!), after the language test had so completely disheartened me, I found the one other person in my group who also had no knowledge whatsoever of Chinese. Her name is Anna, and she is of Russian descent but lives in Denver and goes to a college there, and apparently she hadn’t eaten since the plane ride the day before. I felt superior, having been to the mini-mart already, and so I took her there. While looking around, I came across a couple of items that I wanted to share-

• Wrigley’s Coffee Flavored Gum (do we have this in the US?)
• Steak Flavored Cheetos (I am assuming it is steak flavored because the other package had a picture of cheese on it and this one had a picture of a t-bone)
• Chocolate Chip and Red Bean Cookies… (I have no idea what the “red beans” actually are. I might find out by semester’s end) and, my personal favorite…
• Egg-Yolk Filled Mini-Cakes. Right next to the chocolate-filled cakes in your friendly pastry isle.

An update on the ATM situation- APPARENTLY I was supposed to tell my bank that I was going to China. I didn’t think I had to because it had always worked in Europe without prior notification. Anyway, my impression is that they canceled my card, so I have to get a new one sent to me. In the meantime I’ll skip on over to the bank of China and just hand them all the American money that I brought.

Obviously, I finally found the internet and I am allowed to post. An interesting side note, however, is that though I can post to my blog, I can not view it myself. Yay!

28 Hours Without Sleep Later

Today's a double-issue since I didn't have internet access yesterday to post anything.

01-10-08

I don’t have internet right now to post this, but trust me that I’m writing this the evening that I arrived in China. I met a good number of my group at Newark, including Will, my roommate who’s also from William and Mary, and Chris, my new friend from American University with whom I had fun and exciting adventures.

• The North Pole is beautiful right as you cross the boundary where night stretches on for months at a time. It’s also a frighteningly vast amount of ice.
• Thirteen hours on a plane isn’t so bad when you have movies starring The Rock on constant replay.
• Arriving in Beijing was odd, in that it seemed exactly like the place we took off- New Jersey
• My bank refused to give me Chinese money through the ATM. This was a slight source of frustration.
• After being picked up by our group in the airport, we were told to go down the escalator. As Chris and I faithfully did just this, apparently our group leader said “oh wait, no, upstairs” and marched everyone off. Chris and I waited at the bottom of the escalator for a few minutes, wondering what was taking everyone so long, and finally we set out looking for them. As it turns out, they were looking for us too, but we never did manage to find each other. We just wandered around the airport for about half an hour. Luckily, Chris had some money and I had the address of Peking University written in Chinese characters. With this power between us, we hailed a black-market taxi and proceeded on the most terrifying cab ride ever. What was perhaps most terrifying was that the city never seemed to end, the sky never seemed to yield its smoggy grey coat, and Batman never materialized in this Gotham/Sin City cross-breed. In Beijing the traffic seems to have taken all the best from Italy, New York, and driving behind a tractor trailer. When the driver dropped us off, we weren’t REALLY sure that we were at the university. We were just happy to get out.
• We found a very nice student who spoke just enough English to understand that we wanted her to read the Chinese directions to the place for foreign students and tell us where that was. She didn’t know, but she entertained us by accosting every other person on the pathway and getting them to tell her where it was so that she could lead us there. I asked her if she was on her way to meet friends, because I didn’t want to inconvenience her. I think she misunderstood me, because her reply was “I have a boyfriend.”
• Dr. Sun enjoyed our tale of abandonment.
• After hauling our enormous suitcases up the five flights of stairs to our rooms, we realized that we were in a hotel. I’ll put up pictures, because I don’t think I can really explain it properly. We’ve dubbed our hall “Hotel California.”
• Two of the students who were here last semester, Matt and Jessie, took us out to a mini-market and then to dinner. I bought a bottle of water for the equivalent of 40 cents. Then we bought dinner for four for an equivalent of one dollar. Pork and vegetable dumplings. Yum.

01/11/08

It’s Five o Clock Somewhere

Woke up this morning at 6AM Beijing time, which is 5PM EST. The goal of the morning is to find a phone to call home and inform those at home to call the bank so that I can retrieve money. Right now I’m borrowing 250 Kuai from Chris, and I’m sure that his goodwill, though bountiful, will eventually run out.

Upon waking up I went to our roommate Junta’s room (he has a single, Will and I are sharing a double for now) and took a crash course in the various pronunciations of a few words in Chinese. I am now 100% confident that I will call someone’s mother a horse before I leave.

Today we take our language placement tests. I wonder if I should just hand them a blank sheet of paper or sit down, spend some time looking at it in a display of effort and concentration, and then hand in a blank sheet of paper.

(update) I insisted I knew no Chinese whatsoever, and they made me write my name down at the top. The guy then took it, looked at it, and wrote a big zero on it. Which made me feel good.

Tomorrow- look for the tale of the noodle house!

Phrases learned-
"Thank You"

28 Hours Later

I promise I didn't stay up until 3AM just to retain title continuity. But it is true that in 24 hours I will be... at least in an airport. Which, with airport security as it is, is basically detached from American soil anyway.

My next post will be from China. Slight difficulty- I've been reading around about various national Chinese firewalls that block all sorts of websites, including certain google sites, of which this blog is one. I guess building one insurmountable wall wasn't enough.

Anyway, I don't think that will stop this blog, but if it does... whoops? Until then, however, a quick survey of where I stand right now.

Bags Packed- 0

Books Purchased- 0

Phrases Learned- 1 ... still....

Facts About China That Don't Come From the Disney Movie "Mulan"- 0


I prefer surprises. I keep telling myself that.