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Published: March 24th 2010
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tea ceremony The title of this blog pretty much sums up my life this semester. Although I'm super busy, I really have improved my Chinese. I'm really going to miss having people teaching me Chinese all day, and always having people to ask questions about Chinese. Help with Chinese is a lot harder to come by in Minnesota. As I said in the last blog about Beijing, I mainly just have other immersion students as friends, but that’s not bad, they are pretty cool. On weekends I hang out with the other people in the program and it's been a lot of fun.
One friend I have that is not in immersion is named Katie. She’s probably my closest non-immersion friend. The reason I randomly brought her up is because she recently helped me out. I’ve lived in China a total of almost six months now, and I have yet to get my haircut. Last semester my Chinese wasn’t good enough to explain what I wanted, so I just went home with long dirtball hair. This semester I’m pretty confident I could tell them what I want, but to be honest I’m still scared to go get my haircut. Barbershops in China
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watching the cute tea girl are a weird situation. There are basically two options when choosing a barbershop: option number one is a sketchy back-alley barbershop with a red light, I think I’ve mentioned this before. Although they would probably be willing to cut my hair for a pretty good price, I’m not really interested in the other services they have to offer, so I choose to stay away from those establishments. The other type of Chinese barbershop is usually pretty trendy, colorful decoration and sometimes loud music. Most of the people who work at those places are some of the most metro looking Chinese guys you have ever seen, they often have bleached hair that is somehow huge, reminiscent of 80s and 90s women’s hairstyles. Every time I walk by a place like that, I don’t dare to walk in for fear that I will come out looking like the employees. This is where Katie comes in. My hair was getting too long, and I had no way of cutting it comfortably. I heard that Katie had cut a couple other guys’ hair during the New Year break, so I asked her, and of course she agreed to cut my hair too. The rest
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4th and 5th level immersion classes of the story isn’t too exciting, she cut my hair in her tub in the dorms, she’s never been officially trained, but I’m not picky, and it actually looked pretty good when she was done.
As you can guess after seeing my first story is about a haircut, this semester isn’t quite as exciting as last semester, but I actually like it more since I feel like I’m actually accomplishing something by learning Chinese. While I’m talking about random cultural things, I guess I’ll talk about something I’ve been noticing more and more. I’ve talked about the Chinese “dry glass” culture before. The Chinese word for cheers “干杯” literally means “dry glass.” For this reason, beer glasses are usually small and the table shares a few big bottles of beer together. As far as I can tell beer probably isn’t a big problem, the real problem is the white rice liquor they drink. It is 56% alcohol, 112 proof, it’s no joke. Going out with people from work for dinner in China usually means drinking this liquor. I don’t know how I didn’t notice this last semester, but every time I have gone out this semester I see multiple
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zach's head, pretty tea girl and the lady who explained everything groups of middle age men drinking beer and white liquor, usually a few of them have clearly had enough to drink, but are still “drying their glasses.” I’ve read in the paper here that many people have died because of this, even a few government officials, so it’s clearly a problem. I’ll try not to be too gross, but it’s not uncommon while eating out on a weekday to hear sick people in the bathroom stalls when you go to the bathroom. While walking past restaurants in the morning I also often see evidence of someone who drank too much the night before. I won’t say anymore on the subject, other than hopefully China can figure out a way to change the “dry glass” mentality. Every country has problems, as we all know, the US has its fair share.
On a more positive note, I am posting a couple more sets of pictures at teachers’ houses. One party was all the immersion students, it was a good time, and most of the immersion teachers came so it was really fun to hang out all together outside of class. Another time was with my favorite of my three teachers, I’m
not sure what her English name is, but her family name is Yang. She is very sweet, and I like her teaching style better than our other two teachers, although they are all pretty good. Last Friday the weather was very good, so my class and Yang went for a walk around campus. After our walk she asked us if we wanted to come to her house that night and she’d make us food. We already had plans to eat 10 kuai burritos at La Bamba’s but this was a much better option, so we agreed. She drove us in her very nice car, and despite her kind of silly usual attitude she was a very serious and good driver, unlike most Chinese people I’ve driven with. Her apartment was extremely nice, I’m not sure what her boyfriend does, but it’s something pretty impressive. At that time he was out of town on business. She has a little dog that was actually really good; it was one of the smartest dogs I’ve ever met. We played fetch with is, and unlike labs, who run halfway across the room if you pretend to throw it, there was no fooling this dog.
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passing out tea, the worst picture of Orit ever haha Yang made us some delicious dinner and then we headed back to Wudaokou for the night to have some fun.
That’s all I have for now, I don’t know when my next blog will be now that I’m caught up to the present, nothing too exciting planned in the near future. Peace and God Bless.
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