Bu Hao Yisi!

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Hello!!

My grand intentions of writing about the past month didn't quite come to fruition.. whoops! But I put the pictures up, and you know what they say.. a picture's worth a thousand words! I will try to do these past few weeks justice.. at some point. Right now, I'm sitting in a cafe down the street from my apartment, listening to a piano version of My Heart Will Go On. Yes, the song from Titanic. It's quite popular here, actually. It seems to be a staple at karaoke and several people I've talked to have named it as their favorite movie. I should be studying for an exam tomorrow, but I thought a study break was in order =).

"Bu Hao Yisi" is what you say when you're embarrassed, or you inconvenience someone.. kind of. If you have to step over someone in a tight spot to get somewhere (ie, anyplace in Beijing ever. Subway, bus, on the street, line for anything.. I kid you not. I've been here two months and I am still surprised at how many people live here! Or there are in China, for that matter. I think there are about 14 million people living in Beijing. Crazy!) you can say "Bu hao yisi" and it functions as "excuse me". The more entertaining application can be found in our classroom, where we frequently elicit a "bu hao yisi" from our professors. Sometimes our class discussions or questions veer in "embarrassing" territory, at least from our relatively modest professors' viewpoint, and they'll say, "Bu hao yisi! Bu hao yisi!" For example, we learned how to say "bra" (I'm not sure how we got onto that topic) and telling us how to say it in Chinese prompted our professor to say "Bu hao yisi!" right and left. Our professors are under 30 and all female, and they are all so sweet! There are only 5 people in my class, so our classroom has a different atmosphere from a regular college class. It's a lot of fun though-- and thank goodness! My four other classmates and I spend at the very least 25 hours a week together, so if we didn't like each other that would be a problem.

Now for my attempt at quickly recapping the past month. Li Laoshi's home was fun, and it was definitely eye-opening. We were always a spectacle, by virtue of our foreignness, and even though everyone was super nice and hospitable, it was still kind of exhausting. It made me realize that living in a big city like Beijing was a good choice for my first visit to China. We saw some of the nongcun (the country) and the agriculture, and even learned (kind of) how to make some Chinese dishes! We unfortunately didn't bao jiaozi, but I survived =). We observed how to make fried dates and some vegetable dishes with meat. Northern and northeast Chinese cuisine has a lot of oil. And MSG. Jars of MSG are sold as a spice/cooking ingredient, no fuss. Also, ovens are not common in China. A few households/apartments might have them, but they're definitely not the norm. And, most Chinese people cook with just chopsticks, and maybe a spatula for eggs or similar foods. That's it! How industrious! Also, someone told me that my chopstick skills were good!! I was so excited to hear that! =)

We came back to Beijing on a semi-hellish train ride that left at 5am from Suizhong. There are many varieties of trains in China, ones with hard or soft beds for long rides, then fast ones, and then slower ones, and for some trains you may not get a seat. We were lucky enough to be on a slow train, and we didn't have seats. (Although that may sound like a bitter tone, enough time has passed that I can reflect on that ride with amusement.) =) Seats were done on a first come first serve basis, and we were not first. The aisles were narrow and the train crowded, and the first time I was actually hot in China in the winter was on this train, with about a square foot of aisle space I had to call my own. The six hour train ride back to Beijing was punctuated by people stepping over each other to get down the aisle, and at one point they even broadcast radio commercials over the loudspeaker, at roughly 8am or so. Which, as one might guess, was too early for my liking. I was slightly disheartened to see cars on the road beside the train tracks traveling faster than the train, but thankfully around 11am we arrived back in Beijing. Hallelujah!

We got back into the swing of classes, and as of now we've progressed to having about 50-60 characters to memorize a day. I forget if I've said this or not, but every other Friday we have an exam, and the Fridays we don't have exams we go on an excursion to practice our language. The pictures of the WuLongWuShi I posted are from such an excursion. The Friday after our trip to Suizhong, our class went to Qianmen, where people performed this "dancing dragons dancing lions" performance. There were red lanterns everywhere and we arrived just in time to see the whole hour-long performance. The dragons, made up by 10 ish people each, moved and danced to the rhythm of two drums and their respective drum players, who were clad in, of course, red. The four lions were made up of two people, each, who were pretty talented and athletic! They had a lion tamer, and the lions chased the ball. I'm not doing it justice, but it was cool and I enjoyed watching it!

One Saturday, we went to the Great Wall at Mutianyu! Of course, it was a really cold day, after a spell of slightly warmer weather. I can't figure out Beijing weather. Apparently last year it didn't snow at all, but it's snowed at least three times since I've been here. And it just snowed this past weekend! The program organized the trip, and we took buses for the 1.5hour trip to Mutianyu. We had to go up lots of stairs just to get to the Wall itself, and it was pretty chilly! There were no guard rails or railings to be seen and there was a dusting of snow on the ground that made the stones kind of slippery. My apartment mates and I made it to the Great Wall, and we got ahead of the rest of our program and hiked to our hearts' content (about 2 hours). It was definitely good exercise, and I wasn't cold for long! At some point, it started to flurry, and it was gorgeous!! The mountains were pretty impressive, and if you looked out at the mountaintops you could distinguish the little outposts from the mountaintop silhouette. We had lunch on the steps of one of the outposts, and it was so peaceful because there were no hikers in the vicinity, and we watched the snow and listened to the birds in the pine trees on the mountain side. It was so refreshing to experience nature and see trees and mountains and hear birds, especially after being in a big city for so long! We hiked part of the way back and met up with the rest of the group. That's when we took the slide to where we first began! It was fun!! It was a metal or aluminum, or something, track and you rode in your own plastic sled thing that had a throttle-like handle. The track was pretty long and it was quite an expedient way to get back!

One Saturday my friends and I went to the Old Summer Palace, the one that was destroyed by European/Western forces in the 1840s (or so) during the Opium Wars. It's only about a 40 minute walk from our apartment. There were a lot of lakes and more recent bridges, but little except for some stones remained of the original Palace. I think I posted a picture of the one bridge that survived from the invasion. The rest of the buildings that once stood were only recognizable because of the stone foundation, and some rubble lying scattered in the vicinity. We ventured over a bridge to the small island that the Empress Dowager Cixi lived on, and it was literally just a little island with assorted white stones around the perimeter. We didn't stay very long, since it was a cold and windy afternoon, so I think there were some actual ruins that we didn't see. But if you were wondering, the Westerners did a number on the old Palace.

Last Friday, my class went to a tea ceremony! We watched the women that worked in the tea house (I'm not sure what exactly it's called) steep different types of tea, and we saw the dried tea leaves of several different kinds of tea. We then got to steep our own tea! There's a type of tea that smells exactly like hickory/barbeque! I was not expecting that smell! The taste was kind of bitter, though. When we were walking out, we heard this insect-like chirping, and sure enough, there were these two huge cricket things in wooden cages, like in Mulan! I'm not sure if they were cicadas or some huge cricket, but I would not want them as a pet!

I should probably get back to studying, but I hope all of you are doing well! I'm doing well and learning lots --- and I can understand people on the street/subway/on the phone/in a cafe when they're speaking!! It's so exciting!!!

Lots of love!!!

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