Advertisement
Published: September 25th 2012
Edit Blog Post
Hello out there!
The past two weeks have been all about getting used to living in Beijing! After our Silk Road Trip we had about two days to get re-settled (get food, toiletries, and school supplies) before our classes started! The Beijing Center held a reception for all of the students (about 60 of us) to meet all of the faculty. We introduced ourselves to our professors and some of mine immediately gave me reading to do for the following day! Four out of five of my teachers are native Chinese citizens that went to school in the United States. They know enough English to teach the class but that doesn't mean we can understand them all of the time!
One of my favorite classes is Buddhism which is held once a week from 7:30-10:15 at night. Normally this would be way too late for me to learn anything but the professor is surprisingly hilarious! Most of the Chinese students and people that I've met have a very different sense of humor so it's hard to crack jokes or be sarcastic with them. But this professor makes the class so interesting because he knows how to grab our attention!
Another interesting class I'm taking is Chinese Medicine. The professor is from Kentucky and has such an interesting background. She studied in Taiwan after high school and returned to the states to study Chinese medicine. She worked at a corrections facility in California where Chinese women were being held for drug abuse. She served not only as a translator but an acupuncturist. Acupuncture helped relieve them of their addiction! Now she lives in Beijing, working on her dissertation and practicing Chinese medicine. So far in the class we have tested a kind of therapy that uses tuning forks to manipulate acupoints. You hit the fork so it vibrates and then press it on a certain acupoint. Honestly, it felt funny to me but I'm not sure that it did anything!
In addition to those classes and a few others every student takes Chinese language. This is the only class we have more than once a week and it is exhausting! We all feel like we're in preschool again. We started out by learning the sounds of the letters. We have to exaggerate the shape of our mouths and the sounds we make. It goes a little something like this:
baaaaa, moooo, keeeee, fiiiiii, luuuu! Mandarin is a language of tones which makes it extremely difficult. The word "mao" can mean five different things, each one said with a different tone. We've just started to learn how to write characters as well. So far I can count and write the numbers 1-10! It's slow going, but it's really fun to apply the language outside of class! I can now order food (with some pointing at pictures) and ask "Where is the toilet?" (Very important.)
Speaking of toilets...there is a difference between a "western" toilet and just a toilet (cesuo in Mandarin). The bathrooms here are raised platforms with holes in the ground called "squatters". Needless to say you get a workout when you need to go and a western toilet is like a gift from heaven!
Other than class and searching for normal toilets, my friends and I are doing our best to explore Beijing! Last weekend we took the subway to Tian'an Men Square. The subways are always packed but cleaner than in New York! When we exited the station we immediately saw the famous picture of Mao on the walls outside the Forbidden city. The picture
hangs above the steps where Mao proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949. October 1 is now a national holiday that extends into a week long vacation for EVERYONE in China. Beijing gets extremely crowded! The photo of Mao looks towards the square. To the right is the Great Hall of the People where the Chinese legislature meets. This October there will be a change in administration that usually happens only once a decade. Right now there are a lot of police everywhere to ensure a smooth transition. To the left of Mao is the China National Museum. Inside is a GIANT sculpture of Mao's head in addition to an entire hall of portraits of him. By the end of our day trip we were "mao-ed out". Mao's mausoleum is also within Tian'an Men square where his embalmbed body lies in a casket that is raised from a refrigerated chamber on mornings and afternoons.
I also took a small trip with a friend to a big shopping market near our university. We took a cab and while at a red light two vendors approached us with some interesting products...they were each trying to
sell us either a pilates ring, an iphone charger or a turtle. Yes, a live, wiggling turtle. After I took a photo of this, we told them "bu yao, xie xie" and drove away once the light turned green. You really don't know China until someone tries to sell you a turtle I guess! The market was really interesting- there was an area that was so packed with random household goods that it could have passed as a horder's home. We also walked through the food market. I wanted to buy all of the fruits, even the exotic ones like the spiky dragonfruit! Then we passed by the spice and tea section which smelled great until we hit the seafood and raw meat section...huge animals and slabs of meat hang from hooks at various stands while women are chopping and sawing through other articles of food. The seafood area has live fish that are splashing water out of their tanks. There's also turtles, crabs, octopus, eels, clams and oysters all raw, some still living and ready to eat up! We also saw cartons of live bugs. We thought they were all dead until some started moving! We did not have
the pleasure of eating any of these things but I think taking pictures was probably the safer way to go!
This past weekend we visted HouHai lake. It is a pretty area surrounded by hutongs, which are very old, traditional Chinese houses. The multi-level houses are surrounded by an outer wall and inside there are courtyards. It seems like a giant maze when you're walking among them but once you're inside a hutong it's really quaint and cute! We found a microbrewery in one and a restaurant in another. Around the lake are many restaurants and bars as well. The area is a lot more authentic, unlike the restaurants around the embassies in Sanlitun. Many open bars look out onto the lake and the music is good (a mix of some American and Chinese- I heard some Avril Levine, Taylor Swift and Adele!) There are also boats on the lake that you can rent out and eat dinner on. There are also paddle boats that you yourself peddle while someone plays an instrument for you (but you're the one pushing them around on the boat!) There are a lot of fun things to do on the "boardwalk" around the
lake such as buy HUGE cotton candy, fruit covered in sugar on a stick or scorpians. My friends and I bought the scorpians for the heck of it and tried them! I was only going to just take a picture with them at first but someone said it tasted like popcorn so I gave it a shot. It wasn't that bad! It tasted really salty but you can feel what it looks like when you're eating it so it was creepy too! Now I can say I've eaten scorpians!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.08s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 7; qc: 44; dbt: 0.054s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb