Life Developments

A few general updates on my life here, as I think of them. Caution: This post will be devoid of all insight on the country, the language, etc.; I'll save some observations for the weekend.

• I need to stop bringing up my frustration with my Chinese ability and the way the curriculum is arranged. A few days ago it won me a long explanation by the director, also the writer of our textbook (oops) of why his curriculum is so awesome, and then an overly sympathetic e-mail from a teacher. My semi-native-speaking friend, upon discovering my obsessive concern with my Chinese ability, has also taken to telling me that my Chinese is really good; but all that is quite the opposite of what I need. What I need is people to correct my errors. That said, what I've been dreading for a long time finally happened: a visiting professor publicly called me out for mispronouncing my own name. It's an awesome name, but the last character (龙) happens to include one of the two Chinese sounds that I find hardest to pronounce, and it's a continual source of embarrassment for me.
• College-age girls are ridiculous. Or maybe it's just the Harvard kids. Out of our friend group (2 Yale guys, 2 Harvard girls), the one girl just broke up with her boyfriend of two years (a process that's been hinted at for weeks) and I'm suspecting more and more that the other has an eating disorder. Only Quan De and I seem to be living relatively placid, reasonable lives at this point.
• At this point, I'm pretty sure I'm dating that girl I met in Vics. It's no big thing and it's markedly different from dating someone who fluently speaks the same language as you, but I'm quite happy about it and the way our relationship has progressed. I think she's a lovely girl and I need to stop telling her (albeit mostly truthfully) that I'm studying when she calls.
• I am trying, belatedly, to further cut down on my communications with people, particularly in English. I still send and receive way too many e-mails on a daily basis.
• My visa situation has worsened. ACC, the fall Chinese program here in Beijing, is switching campuses; their office is still at the old campus, and the people at the new campus have already gone on break. This means that I can't get a reprint of my invitation to attend as a foreign student. The reason I'd need it reprinted is that they used my American name, whereas it ended up that I got my Chinese visa on my Spanish passport. Basically it's a huge mess and I have to spend all afternoon trekking to the opposite side of Beijing to sort it out. (Un?)fortunately the worst-case, and most likely, scenario is that I'll have to cut short my inter-program break because my visa is set to expire about a week before ACC starts. I guess it's not as bad as having to leave the country, but I'm particularly annoyed because I have/had some vague but wonderful plans to be on the other side of the country at that time.
• After a week of largely eating lamb and packaged, sweet-ish bread in Inner Mongolia, I am now back to eating like a healthy human being. This includes a glass or two of milk and a few fruits a day, bought specially to balance my diet.
• A few teachers and students are going to "Taiwantown" on Saturday! I'm super excited because 1) I like all of the people who are going, especially the teachers, and 2) it's been almost a year since I've eaten 刈包  (guabao). 
• I found a few MP3s from Firefly recently and I've been listening to them over and over. I really need to watch some episodes, posthaste. If all goes as planned, I think the four of us here are going to watch the pilot in my room on Saturday night. I've also been listening to a lot of the Star Wars soundtrack, which I just discovered I have (it's in WMA format so it never showed up in iTunes). John Williams... what a man.

And now for bed. I've barely studied for tomorrow's test, as one of the teachers took a liking to my report on Inner Mongolia and decided to re-correct it to a level that would pass for a real Chinese university essay. This involved fixing about something like 50 errors or strange constructions/diction that the previous teacher to correct my report had decided not to deal with. Then the "McDonald's is half-price between 10 and 12!" midnight snack run, and now all of a sudden it's time for bed.

Advice from Mao Zedong that I should probably heed a bit more closely: 好好学习，天天上上。"Study well, improve every day."

~E

Lamb, Camels, and Genghis Khan

内蒙古! Inner Mongolia! I don't know where to start, so let's run through some memorable experiences first:

1. I rode a horse; and later, a camel
2. I ate a piece of raw liver from a freshly killed lamb.
3. I spoke at length with herders, tour guides, a female worker at a textile factory, and both high school and university students.
4. I may or may not have bought ~50 movies and 20 TV episodes of pretty solid quality for the equivalent of $5 USD. My favorite collection title: "Pirates Nuclear Ships Movie Collect."

Overall, the trip could have been better planned: I've probably spent more hours on a bus in the last week than I've ever spent in my entire life, and it's more of a shame because this has likely been my first and last trip to the area.

That said, now for the interesting things:

First of all, it turned out that our interviews, set up with locals by HBA, were much more of a highlight of the trip than I had originally expected. I came to relax and ride horses, but I ended up really appreciating the opportunity to talk to people, particularly the herders. I learned that fewer and fewer Mongolian children speak Mongolian; that the Chinese government actually treats them surprisingly well (no one-child policy for Mongolians, choice of free education at either a Mongolian-speaking or Chinese-speaking institution, etc); and that the best-tasting lamb comes from a 6-year-old grass-fed animal slaughtered during the winter months.

I also heard a lot about my topic - the barrenification of the grassland. Unfortunately my essay isn't going to be as awesome as I imagined: I need more info and statistics and a better understanding of how the hydrogen cycle works on a local level. Also, my interviews with the herders brought out some views and experiences that conflict with certain aspects what the artist and NGO leader had told me, and there's no chance to go back and forth between them to ask for responses and discover who's right. Basically, my conclusion is this: In most areas, the grasslands (the ones that haven't been turned into fields) aren't nearly what they once were a mere few decades ago, and in fact it's hard to call the place 'grassland' or 'steppe' any more. (Instead, it looks kind of like my front yard back home.) The cause is in question: local herders say it's the weather, but possible deeper (or unrelated & other) causes include nearby farming and manufacturing activities. Government policy encouraging/compelling fixed dwellings and divided plots of land may also be to blame, but my information on the subject is incomplete, and to their credit recent government policy seems aimed at conserving what little grass is left. To sum it up, unfortunately, i must resort to what I'm told is an oft-used phrase in Chinese academia: "有待研究." I.e., "There is still research to be done."

The day-by-day:

• Night 0: Worst traffic jam ever. Why? A bus driver up ahead fell asleep and the road was narrow. We were behind a trailer full of pigs. Got into the hotel in Hohhot (呼和浩特) at something like 4:00 AM. The power was out.

• Day 1: Woke up at ~8:00 A.M. Bus ride to the grasslands. Interviewed a herder, saw a lamb slaughtered (for future reference: you put a hole in its side, reach in, and pinch the aorta to stop blood flow), ate the aforementioned liver (mm delicious. but, with a nosebleed aftertaste.), and had an "everything inside the lamb" dinner. Saw a performance, including singing and wrestling (the latter is one of the three sports of Mongolian men, the other two being horse racing and archery). Did some singing and wrestling myself (win? & epic fail, respectively).
  
  
  
  
  
• Day 2: Bus ride to a different, much more touristy set of Mongolian tents (yurts), though to be fair nobody but tourists use them any more. Walked about; discovered some cows and horses (parents and two littl'uns) and part of a lamb(?) spine. Rode horses - a first-time experience which definitely depends on the horse (my first was a terror, my second, fantastic). Belted out "草原上升起不落的太阳" ("Upon the Steppe Rises the Unsetting Sun") as I rode.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Day 3: More interviewing of herders. Completely-not-worth-it bus riding. Arrive in our hotel near Oordos (?尔多斯).

• Day 4: Interviewing of Oordos textile factory workers. The conditions, hours, etc seemed to be pretty good, though one can never be too sure about these things. Visit to the memorial to Genghis Khan (成吉思汗), where I discovered that Mongols too have long used the savvastika (which you know as the swastika and the Mongols call by another name), specifically in the same orientation that Hitler adopted but with the meaning of "harmony." I''m not certain, but I'd be willing to bet it entered Mongol culture from ancient Hinduism/Buddhism. I'm also curious as to where Hitler/Hitler's people got it from - I used to think it was straight from the Indian/Chinese religious usage, but I'm now thinking it was from something like Genghis Khan's bow.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Day 5: Party in the desert. We went west a bit to some legitimate desert (a piece of the Gobi? I should know this but I don't); besides getting sand in every nook and cranny of our bodies we also had the opportunity to ride camels, "sand surf" (aka sand sled), and drive sizeable go-karts. Returned to Hohhot and ate an excellent hot-pot dinner (oh! Inner Mongolian lamb on the bone! how I will miss you!), followed by a very brief beer-drinking competition with the extremely friendly locals at the next table over. Approximately 60% of the restaurant was openly staring at us.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Day 6: Tour of one of the facilities of 蒙牛, a massive dairy company that simultaneously seems incredibly modern/professional/quality-oriented and is also known to be responsible for multiple 'tainted milk' scandals in China. (Rest easy: they do very little exporting.) Visit to a temple, which a few of us decided not to visit in favor of shopping. I bought an awesome knife, which has no practical use and will be sent home with a friend because I can't take it on trains here. Sitting down outside to "write our reports" was a failure - apparently the area only rarely gets Western tourists, and we were very clearly turning heads. (By "we," I mean me, because the friend I was with is of Chinese descent while I on the other hand am white.) Eventually we accumulated a crowd of the braver Inner Mongolians and satisfied their curiosity by offering our opinions on Bill Gates and the American political system. Spent a fantastically excessive evening with two of my three best friends at HBA (the third didn't come to Inner Mongolia), playing "国王游戏" (better known as Kings) and watching pieces of the movies we'd bought. ("Every time you hear 'Doctor Jones,' 干杯...")
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Day 7: Interviewing of students at (one of?) the best middle-high school(s) in Inner Mongolia; then interviewing of students at the best university in Inner Mongolia. 9-hour bus ride back.

And now we're here! Back to the daily grind. If I have time later this weekend, I'll write again on another topic to make up for not having time to update the blog last week.

~Ethan

日子过得真转眼即逝

As evidenced by my failure to blog on Sunday, the weeks are now flashing by.

A brief recap of my life since last I wrote, in no reasonable order:

1. I'm researching the desertification of Inner Mongolia. The fifth week of every summer program, HBA plans 'social study' trips to several locations - most notably to the Shaolin Temple (in Hunan Province) and to Inner Mongolia, but students and teachers will also be in places like Qingdao, Shanghai, Beijing, and the Hebei countryside. Each student picks a topic, and I chose desertification because someone last year did it/it seemed interesting/I don't know nearly enough about Inner Mongolia to pick my own topic. I never really intended to take the social study project very seriously, as I'm pretty sure the reason why Louis has repeatedly described last year's trip as "the best week of my life" had more to do with riding horses and sand-surfing than with writing the report at the end. (And after all, at this point 1,500 characters, or ~900 English words, seems like nothing given an entire week to produce. More on that later.)

It appears, though, that forces completely within my control have another fate in store for me. Last night I was doing some really quick background research on desertification and Inner Mongolia (another reason why the social study project shouldn't be a big deal: we don't have the time to do any solid, objective research to supplement our interviews), and I came across an article (in English, of course) that mentioned a 60-some-year-old artist named Chen Jiqun. Apparently he, like many young people at the time, was sent to the countryside (for "re-education," "learning from the people," "gain agricultural experience," etc.) instead of attending college as part of the "Down to the Countryside"/"Work in the Fields" Movement (上山下乡运动) of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. Chen ended up living in Inner Mongolia for over 20 years, and upon returning to Beijing has in recent years published a few articles on desertification in Inner Mongolia; besides this, he has also started an NGO (not exactly the most common practice in China) with the aim of educating Inner Mongolian herdsmen and helping them to protect the few areas of grassland that remain.

I didn't know if Chen was still in Beijing, or even still alive, but last night I found his old art web site with a Google search and decided to e-mail him. Surprisingly, he got back to me this morning, and we've set up an interview for tomorrow! I'm incredibly excited and also very nervous. I will definitely be bringing my iTouch and its lovely Chinese-English dictionary app for all of the complicated words he's bound to use, along with the hope that he's patient and speaks clearly. (On the phone, my greatest weakness, I could understand him very well, so I think the odds are good.) In truth I have my doubts that he is a true expert - in the sense of the science of desertification, the broader significance for China, etc - and I'm also worried that because the HBA trip will be heading to a different part of Inner Mongolia (which is vast), our focal points will be a bit mismatched; that said, I'm really looking forward to getting some background from him, and to conducting my first legitimate Chinese interview, with a pretty legitimate guy to boot.


2. We went to see Peking Opera on Saturday. Bright, funny, acrobatic, and musical, Peking Opera is very much a performance for the common people, which I had heard but never really internalized until I finally saw it. Thankfully they had both the Chinese and English text on digital screens to either side of the stage. I'm told that as foreign interest in Peking Opera is waxing, Chinese interest is waning. Although it was definitely fun, I can understand that: I have to say that except for the old man and his elaborate pantomime of tying up a boat (on stage, he carried only a paddle), I was more impressed by the incredibly talented guys who poured tea for us before the show began, and if you're paying top dollar for what has historically been the entertainment of the lower classes then it may just not be worth it. If I can borrow pictures from someone, I'll post them.


3. On Friday, I went out with the local girl I had met a few weeks back and two of her friends; it was my first time singing karaoke on the mainland. It's little different from Taiwan, except that in Taiwan it's more expensive but nobody tries to give you an unwanted backrub while you're in the bathroom and then demand payment. I also learned a very simple drinking game, played with dice, called 七八酒, which I played with my apple vinegar instead of actual 酒. (Note: the first two syllables of the game's name are the words for "7" and "8," and the last syllable, "jiu3," is a pun in that when spoken it can mean either "9" or "liquor"). More importantly, I put my new knowledge of Chinese songs to good use - I'm learning about one a week - as well as my ability to read traditional characters, as the lyrics of nearly all karaoke "MTV"s (i.e. music videos) are written in traditional characters.


4. Also on Friday, I got the first of a 3-part rabies vaccine series, which will 'hopefully' immunize me for life. It's kind of a strange vaccine to get because it's not actual immunization - one still needs treatment very soon after being bitten or scratched by an animal. However, it does remove one of the post-exposure treatment requirements, immunoglobulin, which is apparently fairly hard to come by on short notice, particularly when you're coming from rural China. (Even the U.S. had a shortage a few years back, and it's not like we've had nationwide rabies outbreaks recently.) At the hospital, an English-speaking establishment staffed by Western-trained doctors and recommended by the HTH Worldwide (my insurance carrier this year), I noticed that some of the patients were Chinese, which I thought was a bit surprising. When I asked the nurse, she said that 90% of the patients were foreigners and the other 10% were wealthy nationals; apparently good Western-trained doctors are also hard to come by in China. Mine happened to be Mr. International: from Iran, studied in the U.S., lived in Haiti/Dominican Republic/Honduras, and is now here; speaks Spanish, English, and (I assume) Farsi fluently, and sounds like his Chinese is good enough to at least pass muster in daily life here.


5. Happy 4th of July: Our program secretary made Friday's 'Chinese table' into a pizza lunch for us, and I ate some surprisingly delicious slices of yummy... this following Thursday's embarrassing but satisfying trip to McDonald's. On Sunday, I had a mini-fete in my room with a cake I had ordered at the campus store - shoutout here to David Demres, who did the same on a much larger scale last year in Taiwan - and the cake, too, was surprisingly delicious.


6. This weekend, I had a few hours to kill and wanted to get out of the room, so I visited Peiking University, known to everyone here as BeiDa. It's really an amazing sight, and I can also see why it's said to be home to the most lovers per square mile in all of Beijing: the campus is 1/10 beautiful buildings (china-style; pagoda roofs and all) and 9/10 gorgeous grounds, something like a 15,000-student version of the "small liberal arts college" model. If the campus itself isn't park-like enough, you can visit the large Yuanmingyuan Park just to the north. What most impressed me, though, as I walked past the massive library to and down toward the lake, past graduation photos and small tour groups and students studying on rocks, was the sense that this place trains the best of the best. By some measures BeiDa is one of the hardest schools in the world to get into - everyone who takes the national test has a shot, and even if you discount the poorly educated competition you're still left with a huge pool of well-trained competitors who have been studying 8 hours a day outside of regular class time for the past four years. When I wasn't aimlessly leaning against a staircase and thinking about the movie "Summer Palace" or how I would get to the roof of the library if I had some guts/parkour skills, I was busy being so impressed that I've even started to regret, a bit, turning down the opportunity to study at BeiDa for the year in favor of what I hope to be better language programs at other universities in Beijing and Taipei. But then again, perhaps - either because of my Chinese ability or because of the program itself - I would never have actually gotten to integrate into the BeiDa community, and it would have been a waste to attend; I'll never know.


7. To get to BeiDa, I rode my bike; this is the second trip I've taken of any length, so like everyone else I must of course offer my two cents on Chinese traffic. It's not that there are no rules, per se, so much as it is that different modes of transport bend/break those rules to varying degrees. Cars are the scariest (the whole 'turn whenever!' policy is, I think, the one good example of a lack of traffic laws, but I'm not 100% sure of this), but they're also the most likely to follow the rules of the road, most notably not going forward through a red light. Now and then, a car will use the bike lane, but hey. Mopeds, motorcycles, and motor scooters, on the other hand, often do whatever they want, including using the sidewalks and driving the wrong way down the bike lanes. Bikes always do whatever they want, weaving through traffic like it's nobody's business, and pedestrians are the same but with more mobility. No one group really yields to another - on a bike or on foot one watches traffic, not the lights or pedestrian crossing signals - but nobody really wants to kill anyone else either, and they won't run you over if you're assertive enough and give them enough time to stop. It's actually, perversely, a lot of fun, and not that much of a step up from someone who cut his teeth biking like a madman on the mean streets of New Haven; the only thing I regret about the situation is that I can't spare enough concentration to read most of the Chinese signs that I pass so I'm not getting a very good idea of what businesses are lining the streets that I'm biking.


8. Speaking of traffic, here's the list: i.e., the set of calamities that, given my absentminded nature, I've been expecting for some time now.

• Lock self out of room. (check)
• Bicycle breaks down. (check)
• Lose a lot of stuff. (check: hat on day 2, something else I can't even remember on day 5 or so.)
• Crash bicycle.
• Get sunburned. (It's been over 100 semi-regularly this past week.)
• Oversleep --> late for class.
• Think I boiled the water when I really didn't --> diarrhea.

Well, I'm 3 for 6... not bad, so far. Knowing me, though, the rest are just a matter of time...



Anyway, on Friday afternoon we leave for Inner Mongolia. I'm pumped! Un(?)fortunately, that means I won't be blogging again until I get back the following weekend, but fear not: I'll probably double-blog it up (I've been saving a few special topics for such an occasion) to meet with Light Fellowship reporting requirements, and of course the petitions of my many fans.


In the not very relevant words of Gandalf: "Look to my coming, at first light, on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the east."

Until then, most truly yours,
~Ethan

Why I'm Here

Another week's gone by. This week I simply muddled through -- 得过且过 in Chinese, in case anyone was interested -- as I was sick with a cold for most of it and didn't have much opportunity to get better due to HBA's ridiculous policy: "If you're not in the hospital, you're in class." Anyway, I'm now on the mend and all is set aright, though I'm not sure how much I'll retain from these past few lessons. More on my recent adventures after I treat with the topics at hand.


Why I'm Here

I'm taking an entire year off, and when people hear that they often ask why. There are a lot of answers that I can and do give depending on the situation and how much time I have to explain (and what I'm applying to - say, the Light Fellowship), and they're actually all true. In fact, it's hard to describe how crushed I would have been if this year-long plan, whose idea was hatched not quite a year ago as I was finishing up studying Chinese at ICLP in Taiwan, had for some reason or another not worked out. I'm not going to try to list reasons in order of importance, because I would give them all a rating of 'very high.'

1. I've started Chinese, and I'm going to finish it. "Finish" means different things to different people, but I simply can't imagine bowing out now as some of my classmates are doing. A weird combination of the ability to order food and get around, plus the ability to talk more in-depth about very specific topics of politics/economics/culture, just isn't enough for me after putting so much time and effort into this language. And believe me, I have: for those who know me from yesteryear, I just realized recently, and belatedly, that Chinese is my new Phoenix.
   
   Back when I read The Count of Monte Cristo, I was already interested in languages, and I was completely blown away by the idea of an old man who could speak twelve language, and a young Count who learned them all to the point where - and I still remember the gist of this line - 'When he spoke Spanish, Spaniards believed he was born in Spain; when he spoke with Arabs, they believed he was one of them' etc. I resolved to match that, and though I've now set my sights a little lower (six languages, 'relatively fluent but not to be mistaken for a native speaker'), I still think it's something I can do before I die.
   
   
2. I need to learn other things while I'm at Yale. At some point, this become a serious problem: I always put Chinese first, and because it was so time-consuming (for me, at least, as I'm clearly not the brightest crayon in the box when it comes to learning Chinese), I often ended up shunting other, perfectly good courses off to the side. Fortunately "East Asian Philosophy" in the fall was a joke, albeit a somewhat perverse and twisted one, and it turned out that one could get by handily in the spring semester's "East Asian Capitalism" by only reading two weeks' worth of the readings. (Oh dear, that doesn't reflect well on our EAS department, now does it?) My point is this: When I get back to Yale for my junior and senior years, I don't want to be studying Chinese. I might make an exception for classical, or an easier lit class, but I want my focus to lie elsewhere.
   
   
3. I have Chinese-speaking friends, and I want to meet more. Not so secretly, my biggest reason for picking Chinese as my 'non-Romance language' of choice when I got to Yale was that so many people speak it. I want to talk to those people. In particular, I want to go back to Taiwan and hang out with Jun Xiang (my former language exchange partner; we still keep in touch regularly) and his friends, talk to his older sister about health insurance, actually have conversations with my buildingmates, etc. Here, I want to be able to have a relatively unbroken conversation with the girl I met at Vic's (more on that later), go back to Jinan and eat many wonderful lunches and dinners with Chengliang, etc.
   
   
4. I think I want my career to involve Chinese. I'm looking at the State Department right now -- I'll be trying for their summer internship again this year, hopefully in Taipei as I'll be there anyway -- but I also really love translating; besides those two, there will also be plenty of NGO/BigBusiness(TM) opportunities for Chinese-speaking graduates of a place like Yale.
   
   
5. My academics will be so much more interesting if I can read Chinese sources. The Yale library alone has a ton of untranslated Chinese texts, and they could be fantastic for my thesis research or even for East Asian Studies courses in general, particularly the grad-level ones I plan to take while pursuing the simultaneous BA/MA.

Will just one year in China put me where I want to be? I really don't know.  When people ask, I tell them that I hope to come back "proficient" - I hope to be able to hold regular conversations without getting a blank look on my face every 30 seconds, and I hope to be able to read books and articles, albeit probably pretty slowly. Writing is something I care less about; I believe that's a skill that comes with a lot of reading. Which brings me to my real benchmark for success: When I leave China, will I be an independent learner of Chinese?

When reading, I want to be at a point where word banks and lists of grammar/sentence patterns are efficiently replaced by context clues and/or some flipping through a (Chinese) dictionary. When conversing, I want to be able to pick out the words and phrases I don't know and ask people what they mean (as opposed to giving them a "huh?"), and I want my spoken Chinese to be good enough that I can correct a handful of misused words and grammar every few days. I don't know that these goals are attainable, but I also know that I'll be pretty crushed if I don't get there. Unfortunately, it turns out that a year just isn't a lot of time: I've been here over three weeks already, which is something like 6-7% of my total stay... Time marches forward and I'm afraid that my Chinese won't be able to keep up.



Well, this has gotten fairly long-winded. An HBA critique will have to wait for another time. I'm also going to stop promising photos, as I don't have Facebook any more (with which to steal others') and I've been too lazy to borrow an adapter to recharge the batteries for my camera (with which to take my own). Light Fellowship, I know you require photos every week for blogging to replace the end-of-year report, but  I'll be writing one anyway so I'm not worried.




Weekly highlights:

• I've figured out how the tests work. Despite only semi-absorbing this week's material, and a conspicuous lack of studying, I landed a solid A on this Friday's test, up 3 points from last week.
• Been watching some of the World Cup, when I can. Ghana's victory over America was well-won (an amazing feat of energy at the end there), and though it was kind of expected sooner or later, I'm pretty disappointed that we're out of the running. In other news, Brazil plays beautifully; their ball handling is really just amazing to watch. Defense proved pretty weak against Portugal, though (the latter had way too many break-aways), and Brazil never seemed to rally enough when it came down to it to actually get the ball in the Portuguese net. (A beautiful header came oh so close, though. Oi!) Also, dear Miguel: Ronaldo didn't kick a single good post-foul shot that entire game; he was all showmanship and no results.
• Went back to Vics (the club) last night with some 3rd-year folks. Enjoyed talking with the taxi drivers but didn't find them particularly hard to understand, so I'm thinking the writers of the SAC guide had been pretty sheltered in terms of their Chinese interlocutors when they warned about taxi drivers' Beijing accents being very thick, etc. Then again, maybe I just got lucky.
• The girl from last week wasn't there. I did plenty of dancing anyway and had a reasonably good time. Drinks were ridiculously expensive, though, and I'm also ashamed to say that I bought a 30RMB glass of milk because I was seriously worried about getting dehydrated and I just couldn't bring myself to buy a 35RMB bottle of water.
• Upon leaving Vics at 3:00, I made the questionable decision to call the aforementioned girl. Fast-forward to today: we had lunch at a perfect little Japanese/fusion restaurant and then walked around the BeiYu campus for a while. She also rode on the back of my bicycle. She's almost exactly my age, but graduated from college early (surprise: an English major) and works as a receptionist at a hotel. There were a couple of frustrating points in our conversation (she has a Beijing accent and talks kind of softly), but she seems to have fairly simple interests and I think we actually got on pretty well. I'm very excited about her offer to call me next time she and her friends go to KTV (karaoke). Anyway, it was fun, and she's all-around quite cute... we'll see!

So th-th-th-that's all, folks. My date and blogging have together taken up an alarming portion of the afternoon, and I'd best move on to clothes-washing and lesson-preparing.

Hoping that everything stateside is going swimmingly,
~Ethan

My Life at HBA

Assuming that Week 1 has been fairly typical, which I think it has, here's what my life at the Harvard-Beijing Academy is going to look like for the next two months.

Monday-Thursday:

• 6.40 AM: Wake up. The sun's already been out for a while and it doesn't actually feel all that early.
• Get ready for the day, and do one last round of vocab review for the day's lesson. (Each lesson is an article of a few pages long with an attached list of new vocabulary, plus explanations of new grammar and sentence patterns. We prepare each lesson (mostly the new vocab) the night before.
• 7.30: Eat breakfast on the first floor of the Conference Center (basically on on-campus hotel, where we're all staying).
• 8.00-12.00: Class, with roughly a 10-minute break every hour. We summarize the article during lecture (15-20 students) and go over new grammar, then split into smaller classes (4 students) to practice reading the text aloud and using the new grammar/sentence patterns.
• 12.00-1.30: Lunch, usually in the student cafeteria - cheap, decent Chinese food. A few classmates will usually share some dishes, family-style. On Tuesdays and Fridays, we have 'Chinese table,' where the teachers will eat with us at a slightly more upscale place around campus and order a combination of foods we already know we like and foods they want us to try.
• 1.30-3.10: 50 minutes of one-on-one class, and a nap; the order changes every day.
• ~3.10-5.00: Something extracurricular. This past week, that mostly meant buying things I needed and exploring the campus. This coming week, the official 'extracurricular activities' will be starting, so I'll be singing my heart out in Popular Chinese Music on Mondays and doing some skill-building in Chinese Cuisine on Thursdays. Other extracurriculars of mine include watching the World Cup and Chinese soap operas (or Korean soap operas dubbed into Chinese), meeting with my tutor (3 hours/wk), and sending e-mails.
• ~5.00-6.30: Do review homework based on the day's lesson.
• ~6.30-7.30: Eat dinner with some classmates. Some of the fourth-year folks are a lot of fun; in particular I've been hanging out with a small group of Yale and Harvard 2013 kids.
• ~7.30-11.00: Prepare tomorrow's lesson.
• ~11.00-11.40: Shower and get ready for bed.
• ~11.40: Sleep. This is, of course, the ideal, and I didn't get to sleep until much later in the first few days. I think I've pretty much adjusted at this point, though.

The weekend:

• Friday is test day, the material being everything we've done throughout the week. The day itself consists of a 2-hour written test, a 5-minute out-loud reading, and finally oral reports based on a 700-character essay that we've had to write for homework on Wednesday night. We finish at 12:00, go to Chinese table, and then have the rest of the day to ourselves to sleep, watching TV, explore, etc.
• Saturday is Adventure Day (TM): HBA takes us somewhere fun. Yesterday it was the Great Wall, which involved about 4 hours of bus riding (all of which I spent sleeping off Friday night; see below) and 4 hours of some really fun walking/hiking. (The Great Wall, it must be noted, is not by any means flat.)
• Sunday is Pull-It-Together Day (also TM): Sleep off the weekend, review any weak spots from last week, wash clothes, buy essentials, and do the homework + lesson prep due Monday. My thought is that on weekends when I don't spend Saturday night out and about (also see below), Sunday can also be Explore-Beijing Day. That said, ACC (my fall program) will probably end up being much more suited to that, and I'm here for another six months so I'm not in a huge rush.
• At night (Fri and Sat), most people go out. Some head to the 五道口 (Wudaokou) area, which is a 15-minute walk away over by China's top universities (Qinghua/Tsinghua and BeiDa/Peking University), and has a KTV (for the uninitiated: karaoke) and a few bars. Another popular destination is 三里屯 (Sanlitun), about half an hour away by taxi and the home to many a bar and club. (And thus many a foreigner: although bar/club culture is growing among the locals in places like Beijing, your average Chinese youth still won't "go out" for fun on weekends.) Instead of going right to the bars/clubs, you're actually better off doing what I've seen among the savvy in Taipei: buying at 7/11 and hanging out on the sidewalk for a while (drinks at the bars and clubs are ridiculously expensive in Chinese terms, and there's no open-container law here), then heading inside for the last drink or two and the dancing.
  
  Personally (and this will probably surprise you), I've had a blast going out both Friday and Saturday. On Friday, four of us did Propaganda, the Wudaokou bar that's been most popular among the HBA folks. I tried some actual bar drinks (a 'B52,' it seems, is lit on fire and then drunk with a straw. Who knew?), and we ended the night dancing together on their mini stage at the end of the dance floor. It should be noted that I was also wearing my 老外 t-shirt at the time, which is surprisingly effective even on the 北语 campus; it should also be noted that Coca Cola's World Cup promo song is apparently a staple anywhere there's a dance floor. (Ana: You win. I still don't think it really fits the World Cup, and the original version is better, but I now love it anyway.) Last night (Saturday), Harvard had an event at Vics, one of the Sanlitun clubs, and a bunch of the HBA folks went over together. I basically danced for five hours straight (feel free to exchange shocked looks with your computer screen), about two of which were spent with this fairly cute Chinese girl whose obvious shyness (her friend had brought her) I found incredibly endearing. I got her number before we went our separate ways, which may or may not have been around 3:30, but I don't really have any particularly good reason to call her, and I don't even know her name as it was so loud down there that my ears have only just recovered. So I don't really want to call, and instead am hoping she'll heed the note I scribbled suggesting that she come to Vics again next weekend. Best use of the Light Fellowship- provided notepad ever; don't leave home without it. Also, possibly the only time that knowing how to write characters has ever been really useful to me outside of my studies - the deaf guy in Taipei doesn't count because he ripped me off.
  Classic Ethan? I'll let the audience to decide.

So that's daily life. Time has been very strange here - the first few days felt like they took a month each and by Wednesday I was sure I had been here forever, but now things are speeding up and I'm already kind of sad that an eighth of the summer is over. There have been some special events, but I haven't much to say about them so I'll just summarize: meeting my 'Chinese mother,' riding with someone on the back of my bicycle for the first time (Beza, I now completely understand your bike-riding struggles), and hiking a part of the Great Wall.


That's all for now. I'll add Great Wall/etc photos later. Next time (and this is mostly to remind myself), I think I want to talk about HBA strengths and weaknesses, and also why I've taken this entire year off.

Be well,
~Ethan/英龙