China

So right now I'm in Beijing, China. I arrived here on March 4, so I've been here for almost 3 weeks.

I'm here taking an 8-week Mandarin Chinese language course. The course itself is good, I'm in a lower intermediate class, which is fine for my level. The school that I am going to teaches Chinese to foreigners during the morning, and then teaches English to Chinese students at night. Therefore, through the school I've been able to meet and make friends with both other foreign students (Germans, Americans, Swedish....) and Chinese students, so it's been great. I have four hours of class a day, from 8-12, and then I usually go out to eat lunch and come back to school. The school has a big common area with TVs, couches, and a pool table, so I usually come back and play pool/practice my Chinese with the Chinese students that are coming for the afternoon/evening classes.

My host mother making jiaozi (small Chinese dumplings).

I'm living with a Chinese family. I figured that it would give me a more authentic Chinese experience if I lived with a Chinese family than with other foreigners in an apartment, plus I figured it would help my Chinese. Well, I think that both have been thus far true. The family is nice, just a couple and a dog. They don't speak a word of English, but they have a 24 year old daughter who is taking English classes and can speak pretty well, and she comes to visit most days. She's married and lives in the same apartment building but on a different floor.

The first week here in China was a bit hectic. I live pretty far from the school so I had to learn the bus routes to take to get there and buy a bus card, I also had to get a cell phone and just generally get acclimated. Then I was sick my second day here (I assume it was something I ate), and the first week was below freezing every day so generally I froze my @$$ off waiting for the bus/walking around, which didn't help out my health at all. The most stressful thing though, was my telephone interview for my German internship: Continental Automotive had written me an email when I was in Japan asking when would be a good time for them to call me the following day. Well, I didn't receive that email until much later, so when I did finally respond I apologized and asked them if I could call them from China. They said that was fine and we set up a time for the first Wednesday that I was here. When I first arrived the school had given me a phone card as part of a welcome package, so I sat down that Wed. night to call Germany using that card, but it didn't work. I asked my host family what was wrong, they didn't know, but they called the phone card company and spoke to various people trying to figure out the problem. All too no avail. We then tried going outside and using a pay phone but that didn't work either. Finally they called the telephone company and found out that the phone was set up somehow (I still don't fully understand it) to use a different card, so they had to reconfigure something and then the card worked. Well, by then it was 2 hours after the scheduled interview time, so I just sent the company an email apologizing, again, and asking if we could reschedule for the next day. However, I never received a response, and the next day when I called I no one picked up. The next day I still hadn't heard anything so I thought "great, I screwed that," but more than upsetting the German company I was worried about upsetting the German American Chamber of Commerce whom this program is through. I sent them an email to them and also to the placement company in Germany that was searching for the internship for me explaining the situation. Later on that day though, I received a reply from Continental. Apparently he had been sick the past few days and hadn't been in the office, so it hadn't even mattered that I had missed the first interview. We spoke that night, it went well, and I found out the next week that I got the internship. So everything worked out in the end, but it was stressful as it was happening. I have a few German friends here, and they would ask me every day for those three days "how did the interview go?" to which everyday I would reply, "well, you see, there was a problem.... "

Since that first week everything has gone really smoothly...

My language partner and I in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

The first weekend I went out and did some sightseeing. I went to the Forbidden City, so named because no one except for those most important/privileged were granted entry for some 500 years. It was home to two dynasties of emperors, and was only opened to the public in the 1940s-50s. It was really interesting. The "city" houses the largest collections of ancient buildings in China, although from the look of them you wouldn't guess that they were very old at all, for, save for the architecture, they are all in fantastic condition as they all have been or are being renovated and restored in preparation for the tourism wave that is going to hit with the Beijing Olympics in 2008. I went with the school and we had a guide who talked us through everything, giving us the history behind the forbidden city itself, as well as all of the individual locales it contains. After the forbidden city I went with one of my Chinese friends to Tiananmen Square, the world's largest public square and the site of the ubiquitous photos of the 1989 pro-democracy protest, tanks and all. The square itself is really impressive, its really awesome in it's sheer magnitude, it is huuuuuge. It is also definitely a very nationalistic/Maoist place, with about 70 billion Chinese flags flying in the square itself, and it is bookended by the Gate of Heavenly Peace, one of the 4 entrances to the Forbidden City, with its gigantic painting of Mao on one side and the Chairman Mao Mausoleum on the other.

That night I went out to Sanlitun, which is THE bar district here in Beijing. There were supposed to be three of us going out, but one felt sick and couldn't go. The problem was, he was the only one who knew Beijing, so he was going to show us around, but he said that it would be know problem, just to tell the taxi driver Sanlitun and we'd be fine. We did that, and we ended up in the bar district. We walked up and down the street trying to figure out what bar to go to, none of them looked either particularly exciting or particularly crowded. We figured that it was still early, it was around 10, so we just went in one and had a beer. The bar wasn't really a bar or a club, but rather just a big room with a stage and many 2-4 people tables. The show was really almost karaoke-esque, with a Chinese band playing covers of Bon Jovi and Guns and Roses. They weren't bad, but they weren't good either. We left after one beer and went to another bar. More of the same, but the band was worse: some Pacific Islander band with a keyboard. The crowd was all 30-40 somethings, which was largely the same as the last bar. We left after one beer and tried another bar. This one also had a stage and tables, but the beer was cheaper and there was a cute Chinese singer on stage so we stayed. The music was half Chinese half English, and once again it felt like we were watching a high school talent show, complete with really cheap sequined/tight fitting costumes, like Sparkle Magic or something. We stayed there for a few hours but all the time we were just shaking our head in disbelief: this was supposedly the biggest bar/club district it Beijing!?!? We chalked it up to cultural differences. We left and went to the lone club on the street. It was more lively, but not too full. There were a lot of foreigners there, and we talked and drank, it was alright. We stayed there for a few hours, but by three the place was almost deserted. During the night, a Russian girl/woman, probably late 20s perhaps early 30s, had been walking up to us and asking for a light, as my friend smokes. She did this a 2 or 3 times. Towards the end of the night, when the bar was pretty empty, I went to the bathroom and when I came back he was sitting at her table chatting with her friend. No problem. I wasn't particularly interested, but nothing else was going on, so I sat down and we settled into friendly, slightly drunken, first-meeting, getting-to-know-you conversation. We were talking for about 15 minutes and then the girl that my friend was talking to asked him his age, 24, and then the girl I was talking to asked me, 23. They said something to each other in Russian, then turned to us and said that it was nice meeting us but that they had to go. It was like a light switch, off/on, we were talking one minute, friendly, laughing, joking, the next minute, no explanation, they were gone. My friend and I looked at each other in disbelief for a minute, then recapped the conversation: he said his age, they left. Queer...

The next day, or the following Monday when we saw the other guy again, he let us know, as we had reasoned by ourselves, that we had gone to the wrong place. We went to Sanlitun Lu (road) which indeed is part of Sanlitun, but the best bars/clubs were around the corner, in some back alleys and stuff. Also, it turns out that there is a rather large ring of Russian prostitutes in the city, so the best we figure, that explains the sudden disappearance of our conversation partners. They were either prostitutes or at least looking for sugar daddies, and we were 23/24 and didn't have the means to pay for either. Awesome. Oh well, it was still a fun night.

Terracotta Warriors.

Last weekend I took a trip to Xi'an, a famous city in the Shaanxi province that served as the seat of over a dozen dynasties, and consequently served as the capital of ancient China for over 2000 years. We took a night train there, 12 hours there and 12 hours back, but the beds were pretty comfortable and we slept for the majority of the time, and it was all students who went, so it was fun. Xi'an was great, we saw all of the major tourist attractions: the city wall, one of the only ancient city walls in China which is still intact, which is about 14 km in length and encircles the city, the Big Goose and the Little Goose Pagodas, two huge Pagodas which house ancient Buddist scripts and stand in the middle of two different Buddist temples/monastic grounds, the Great Mosque, which is the largest mosque in China (I believe that Xi'an/Shaanxi contains the largest population of Muslims in China), and we visited the large Muslim market nearby. (I spent about $10 and bought some sweet souvenirs, and a super-authentic Prada bag). Above all though we went to see the Tomb of Qin Shi Huang and the Army of Terracotta Warriors, the 8th wonder of the ancient world. That was impressive. We visited 3 pits. The first houses about 6000 soldiers and horses, it is incredible, the pit is about the length of 3 football fields and is just filled with fierce soldiers lined and ready for battle. The second is much smaller, and contains only 68, but the 68 most important soldiers, the generals and the like. The third is also massive, but only a few of the figures were able to be recovered, as almost all of them had been shattered beyond repair.

Visiting the Terracotta Warriors.

Tour group with the Big Goose Pagoda in the background.

I really like Beijing thus far, although I haven't really seen all that much of it. Beijing is massive. The city itself is the size of Belgium. The pace is the pace of any big city, and my school is in the heart of the business district here, so its even more heightened here. Also, the whole city is in fast forward now in preparation for the Olympics, with construction/restoration happening seemingly on every corner. The city is definitely polluted, the air is heavy with it. Almost everyday the city is foggy, only its not fog, its smog. The people, everyone that I have met at least, have all been really nice, and any attempt at Chinese usually elicits a smile, they don't expect it. I definitely can tell that I am a foreigner here, moreso than anywhere else that I have ever been. I stick out, I really stick out. Around the school its not so bad, as I said its around the business district, and there are also other language schools, so there are a lot of foreign businessmen and other foreign students. When I go home though, which is pretty far out, I'm all by myself in my foreignness. I was talking with a Chinese friend the other day, and she was asking about how it would be if she went to the US and walked down the street, she asked if everyone would stare and shout "hey, look at the Chinese girl!" I thought about it and I just couldn't see it happening. In the US we have so many Asian Americans, so many other foreign nationalities, that's its completely commonplace to see a non-anglosaxon, she wouldn't stick out in the US any more than anyone else. I told her that I didn't think that anyone would even know that she was foreign unless she spoke. Here though, its completely different. There are Chinese people, about 1.6 billion of them, and then a handful of foreigners. There is no such thing as an American Chinese. I am definitely not a 3rd generation Chinese citizen of American descent. I am a foreigner, and it is obvious. In Tokyo I also stood out, but Tokyo is a more international city, so I assume the residents there are more used to seeing foreigners and their behavior towards me reflected that. Here, most places I go outside of business/commercial districts, I get stared out, and often the shout of "laowai" (foreigner) can be heard. Everything is also magnified by the sheer number of people here. There is nowhere where you are alone in this city, so if I am anywhere, I am surrounded by at least 100 Chinese. Its interesting. I've never experienced any animosity though, as I've said, everyone has treated me really well. Its fun being different though, it makes me feel unique and special :).

Oh yeah, taking the bus is an adventure in and of itself, I feel like its an every-man-for-himself, life-or-death struggle to get on and off. Its also fun, sometimes.

Let's jump in!

More soon....