The Roomie

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And I'm back. So when I last left off, I had just done orientation, walked a marathon that was the forbidden city, and saw racism in a club. And one other thing. A lot of these are being written in very limited spare time, so any typos I apologize for, but I really don't have a ton of editing time (not that that would help anyway, but it's still something to hide behind)

Sat, June 18: Woke up, went to orientation where I found out I was put in ... class level 260! And since that means almost nothing to y'all, it basically means I'm the fourth level from the top possible class. So this summer will be a mix of learning new words/grammar as well as some review of stuff I never get to use, and thus have forgotten. Perfect. After a few extra class rules and an explanation of the grading system (where you basically have to try to not get class credit) we split up into our sections and met out teachers. Since my class level is the biggest in number of students, we have 7 teachers for about 20 kids. I will describe a normal class schedule hopefully in this blog, if not the next. After we met out teachers and got our text books, we went out to have traditional beijing roasted duck, which is Beijing's most famous dish (and generally one of the pricier things on the menu). It's normally put into a wrap (which you do yourself) with a plum sauce, but honestly, I thought it was better to eat the duck plain, and the skin is so good, it's like eating straight fat, only you feel like your eating flavored water of awesome. The other thing I should mention is a lot of (and I mean 95%) of non-fast food restaurants are family style meals, with a huge lazy susan in the middle of the table for a big group. We went out and had a huge feast of a lunch, paid for by the university. In which I once again, got to stuff my face and be very happy about it. I also was able to talk a little bit to my teacher which was encouraging. We then had a nice little reintroduction of all the teachers in each class level and see (again) what students were in what section. Afterword, we went back to the dorms and chilled for a little bit while waiting for our roommates to arrive. They did not come on time. So me and a friend went back to Jia-la-fu (the french wal-mart) and when I returned I finally got to meet my roommate.
His name is Qi Jian Qiang (and for those of you unfamiliar with Chinese names, Qi is his family name.) His nickname is DaXiong (Bear) and so far I've said hello to his Mother, Little sister, and his cousin via videochatting. After some basic introductions... reality set in on how bad my chinese was. I could hardly understand him. At all. And I looked like a fool and a half. Plus his English isn't that good, so the fact that I wasn't under the language pledge yet didn't really matter (although this was for the better in the long run). We went to dinner at the jiaozi (dumpling place) place from Wednesday and ordered a few baskets of dumplings. After a semi-awkward and quieter dinner than he (or I) would have wanted, we took the bus to his university. He's a media design student within the art department at his university. We walked over to the art building and sat down in an art room with some of his classmates and talked. One of them, a rather older guy was taking English classes and of course wanted to practice his English, while I elected to stay in Chinese as best as I could, though it was nice to have him go as a two way translator sometimes. So I got asked a lot about America, how I liked China, Beijing, etc. How long I've been studying. Also one girl asked me about bands that I liked, and so I gave her a diverse (and small) list of rock bands from All Time Low to Disturbed. She'll find what she likes I figure... right? On top of talking to his classmates, I got to see his classmates art (very modern, incredibly well done) and then I got to see some of my roommates work (Chinese water color paintings). On top of the paintings, he also does a lot of movie work, and showed me a film he directed about 2 kids in a dispute and a claymation his department did about an old man who is a traditional communist faithful, and after 7 minutes of normal life, you see him go to his underground layer to work on his rocket, and after 5 min of that, you see him look at a map of asia, with an arrow pointing from Beijing to Taiwan, specifically Taipei. It was really well done (though I saw this later in the week). Afterwords we grabbed the bus back to the dorm and I slept on the thought that a) my Chinese is awful, and b) reaffirmed every reason why I'm at CET.

Sun, June 19: So we woke up, and went outside to do some team building exercises with our roommates, which was a lot of fun, all in chinese. First we went on a map hunt, and found some important things like the pharmacy, barbers, photo shop, etc. Afterwords, we did more of the traditional team building games and learned (well, remembered for me) the hand gestures for 6-10 in Chinese (which is different to to american system of using another hand, or the lazy boat way of just dropping your hand to the side like it's paralyzed). So after some awesome team building, a chinese street performer came in and demonstrated a few things. Her main "object" or whatever you would like to call it was a Chinese yo-yo, or some people know it as a diablo - google it for an image. So she preformed some cool tricks for us and then invited some of us to try. The kicker is that I've been taught to use one before (thank you Circus class in middle school PE) so when I went up, I could actually do some stuff, and more importantly, got to show off a bit (yeah! nothing like an ego boost to start off your day). After that, she brought out something similar. So if you look at a diablo/chinese yo-yo on google images, you should see 2 sticks attached with string and what looks like a ball cut in half and then attached together backwards more or less. Her other object was the 2 halves of a ball thing, attached to a long loop of string, with a cloth dragon attached to the back. She basically hoola-hooped the thing, only she could use her hands too and was able to spin it around in all different ways. It was really cool, and when I tried, I failed, then did ok until I got too dizzy and had to stop. Even still, it was fun. We then had lunch, and played a little basketball afterwords. I'm not going to lie, It's really fun to play center and be the tallest guy by at least 2 inches (and there were other white people there too). 6' - I'm sure that's a starting height for an NBA center right? No? Maybe in China, I'll look into it. After that, it was a quick shower and then hitting the books, which I'll get into in the next blog.

Well, that's it for this one (since I'm running out of words) but I'm going to try to post a normal study week today as well in a different entry.

Things to think about:
Chinese Basketball Center: I would pwn
Speaking Chinese in America is not even close to speaking Chinese in China
I'm not hating on UNC's art system, but what I saw at Jian Qiang's college was a lot better than what I've seen back home, and I spent a lot of calligraphy time last semester in Hanes Art.

--Robby

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