Sino-Japanese Relations... not so good still.

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And I'm back. Well, not mentally, but not like that ever happened in the first place. Last time I was on, I a) Had Korean BBQ for the first time (which is kinda surprising, since I have an aunt who is Korean), b) climbed some wall in China, I'm pretty sure it's not super famous or anything. Not like you can see it from space or anything* and c) left y'all on a super cliff hanger of what I did a few fridays ago!

*Note: Can't actually see the Great Wall from space without a super telescope unless your name is Robby Hanckel

And now for the thrilling conclusion of what happened last fridays ago!
But first a word from our sponsors (aka: me)

So yeah, I realized in the last blog I forgot to mention the day before we saw the Great Wall, we went to go see the Temple of Heaven, so this blog is going to back track slightly and then we will continue on with my life.

June 24th: So after our test, we went off and saw the Temple of Heaven (ToH) with Tommy's roommate. For those of you who don't know what the ToH was, it's a) a fairly spiritual place with a lot of ceremonies and b) a place for the royal family to get away/Chill in the park when the 720,000 sq meters of Forbidden City was not enough room. We took the metro over there, paid our fee, and headed into the park. Now I should mention that part of the Temple of Heaven is this huge, and really nice park that surrounds the ToH. This is free, but to see all the buildings around the actual Temple cost a bit of money (about 5 US dollars). We slowly strolled through the park and it was really cool to see everything. There were a bunch of people (most of the older generation) playing cards/board games. Kids were playing with toys, there were some people singing, and a group of people in the distance doing some traditional dance. It was just a really nice place to chill. But we were not there to chill, we were there to bravely go where we had not gone before. So we went through the gates and saw the ToH. Now the ToH has a bunch of different sections (so make sure to buy the all inclusive ticket.) The main 3 are the Hall of Prayer (prayers were harvest related), Imperial Vault of Heaven, and the the Circular Mound Alter. There is also a really really long bridge between the Hall of Prayer and the other two locations, but besides the impressiveness of size (a constant theme here in China) not much else to say about the bridge. The Hall of Prayer had a very similar feel to the Forbidden City, as if someone finished the Forbidden city and realized they forgot a building and decided "Hey, why don't we go put it in the Temple of Heaven? It could use a 3 super-story building." Next was the Imperial Vault of Heaven, which I thought was the coolest part of the ToH. The Imperial vault is famous for the echo wall: A perfectly circular wall that surrounds the few buildings inside that was build specifically for voice amplification. Was pretty cool, and one of the buildings inside was also designed to echo when you spoke/shouted into it. Finally we Went to the Circular Mound alter, which was also build for voice amplification as well as ceremonial whatevers. There were some other bits of metaphorical significance that was complicated (it involved math, and that wasn't about to happen. This is Chinese camp, not math camp. I'll save that for whenever I see Greece.) I know I haven't really ranted about the Temple of Heaven as much as the other places, and part of that is cause I wasn't as impressed as some other parts of Beijing, but mainly because as I mentioned before, The purpose of the ToH was for the royal family to do ceremonies and to take a chill pill. It really is an awesome place to chill, take an afternoon, chill in the park and just enjoy life. So while this might not be the most eye popping thing in my blogs, it's definitely worth seeing, especially if you want a day to do something physically easy and easy going.

June 26th: So in course of being truly honest with this blog, I must write that I got the first language warning at CET. Calm Down Mom and Dad, I'm not spraying English left and right. Let me break it down. So me and my roomie were chilling in the room, and he started beat-boxing (which he's good at) which lead to him dancing (which he's also good at). So the guy next door walks by, sees our mini impromptu dance party, and joins in. Jian Qiang grabs his compy and starts to play some music, English music. However, all he had were ballads (cause that's how China rolls) so the guy next door grabs his laptop real quick and plays some Biggie Smalls (a rapper for those who don't know). So we're having our little dance party and the academic director walks by, smiles, waves, and continues on. So we wave back, and continue w/ our fun. He comes back from whatever he went to do, realizes that the music was english music and slaps us all with a warning (in a 4 strikes your out system. The first one is just a verbal warning so it's not the end of the world or anything.) Now you the reader at home might be saying "Well duh Robby, it's a full emersion program where you can't speak any English, course you can't play English music." And to that argument there is a point. The program is designed to nullify (or all but) any chance to hear the English language. But that being said, it's a full emersion program. And even Chinese students aren't this immersed. 99.9% of Chinese music is ballads, which you can't really dance to. So whenever Chinese students want to dance, or hear not ballads, they listen to ENGLISH music. Whenever you go to a club, or heck, even in the mall you hear American songs. So if we want to have an impromptu dance party, there's no Chinese music to jam to. And I'd also like to note that none of us were even singing, just dancing. But either way, we got hit with the first warnings of the semester, learned our lesson, and have been fine ever since.

June 29th: So this might be my favorite story so far. A little background history: right before and during WWII, Japan invaded the Koreas and China, and they weren't nice about it. There's this incident called the Rape of Nanjing, where the Japanese came through and went wild. To condense (and censor) the event, Japanese solders went to Nanjing and burnt the place down, pillaged everything, killed any male they could find, and the title of the event should tell you what happened to the females. (again, this is the censored version of the story.) And this happened everywhere Japanese solders went (Koreas got hit the worse), but Nanjing gets the title, cause it was the largest scale of Japanese pillaging. As you can imagine, China was not pleased with any of this and has never forgiven Japan for this travesty. Mainly because not only has Japan never apologized, but they've barely (if at all) recognized the event even happening. The closest Japan has ever come to apologizing was a Japanese porn star saying she'd sleep with any Chinese college student to make up for her country's previous actions (This is actually a true story, I don't think I could make something like that up if I'd tried.) So needless to say, China (and Korea) still have a huge grudge against Japan.
So now that the history is layed out, onto the story: So I was in my 1 on 1 session and the teacher was pushing me a bit that day and hitting me with some harder questions. After calling her out on it (not that I had a problem with it) the following conversation occurred (translated into English). Starting with the teacher speaking:
"Sorry!"
-"You're not sorry."
"What? I'm not the Japanese!"
There have been very few times my jaw has unwillingly dropped, but this was one of them. Daniel Tosh could match this level of shock comedy. I started laughing for the next 5 minutes uncontrollably - partially cause that was really funny, partially cause this was the first time I got hit with a blatant real Chinese opinion of their neighbors, and partially cause I was still in absolute shock of what I just heard. As I said before, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

June 30th - July 1st: I'd also like to throw in this little tidbit. So on the 30th, my body caught up with me and I got sick. Which I'm partially going to blame on traveling sickness, and part on Chinese fast food. After spending my classes struggling to pay attention/not die in my chair (to the point where my 1 on 1 teacher let me out 10 minutes early cause I was at the point where I couldn't process a basic chinese sentence) I curled up in bed and died. I swallowed some (miracle) antibiotics that were prescribed to me for this very occasion and literally could not move for the rest of the day. I couldn't even open a text book. Which is a problem, seeing as I had a test the next morning. So in a feat of super-Robby-awesomeness/stupidness. I woke up at 3:30 AM, went to the study room and studied non-stop until 8:30 AM (when my test started) on a so-so stomach. I didn't do fantastic on the test, but under the conditions, I'm lucky I got up to study at all. So in case anyone had any questions on my dedication to this program (not that I do, but I need a lead in to the second part of the sentence), I'm taking this program as seriously as I can. Moral of the story? I'm a boss.

And now I'm running out of words in this blog, so I'm going to go ahead and post this one. Look forward to Chinese acrobatics, the Drum and Bell Towers, and the mystery of what I did Friday night on the 1st!
And now some thoughts to leave you on:

Being more immersed in Chinese than an actual Chinese student is really really hard.
There's a metaphor somewhere about ToH's theme of voice amplification and China's growing influence in the world.
While it's awful that Japan doesn't recognize the Rape of Nanjing, you'd probably forget things too if you had a few nukes dropped on you (that's a joke btw.)

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