Thursday, April 29, 2010
Spring Break
Spring Break is finally here! I'm officially done with my midterm exams, classes and teaching. I'm leaving tomorrow morning and will be gone for 10 days with limited access to email. I'm first going to Shanghai to visit my friend Eric, during which I'll get to go to his cousin's wedding! Then I'm going to Zhangjiajie, where they filmed the scenes from Avatar (where they filmed the scenery, everything else was of course computer animated). Then I'll be going to Guilin and Yangshuo, where I'll be visiting my friend from last semester, Kevin. I'm going to be on a tight schedule, but it should be fun. Stories and pictures from each place will be posted ASAP!!
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Library
Last Friday I went to Xianlin campus (where the college students live, I go to class where most of the graduate students are) of Nanjing University to hang out with some of my friends that live there. When asking if they wanted to hang out, they responded with "Of course! You can come visit us whenever you want! But we have a lot of homework to do!" It was a lot of fun, they took me out to dinner and we walked around the campus and chatted. Besides that, we spent the whole time at the library. The shocking thing for me as an American college student: as it got later and later on a FRIDAY night, the library got more and more crowded. There literally was not one seat open (as far as I could tell) when I left the library at 10:00 pm. "It's like this every night of the week," Xinyi said, "Everyday after 4:00 pm it's almost impossible to get a seat." She asked if it was like that in the US and I said, "Usually only during finals time." And then she said:
"Oh during finals time you have to wake up at 5 am and get in line in front of the library by 6 am and take a number. They have as many numbers as there are seats in the library. If you get there after 6:30 am you probably won't have a seat for the rest of the day."
This is why China is crazy.
"Oh during finals time you have to wake up at 5 am and get in line in front of the library by 6 am and take a number. They have as many numbers as there are seats in the library. If you get there after 6:30 am you probably won't have a seat for the rest of the day."
This is why China is crazy.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Smile
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Language and Culture: 不能分开 (Can't be Separated)
My first two English classes went very well last week! The biggest challenge for me is that their English ability ranges from knowing very little to being pretty conversant in English (example: a 40+ year-old Phys. Ed. major that hasn't spoken English in 20 years versus a 25 year-old English major. You can imagine). As a result, adjusting my speaking speed is the biggest challenge. On the first day, I started out speaking relatively slowly, and several students asked me to speed up. After speeding up, however, I had a number of students asking me to slow down. Finding that middle ground is going to be difficult. For my first class, we did introductions, and as expected considering that I am for many of them the first white person that has taught them English, they were very curious about me and asked me a lot of questions. They are very sweet and several of them have already invited me over to their homes to eat dinner and one of my students got me free tickets to a soccer match.
For the second class we discussed "Meeting Guests and Saying Goodbye." Each class is three hours long and at the end we have one hour to discuss certain topics. So I introduced it with the basic idea that language and culture are always fundamentally intertwined. You cannot separate the two or else you will never truly learn the language. I think the topic was a little bit too difficult for them, but I hope in the end that they enjoyed the challenge. So I opened it up with the idea that although the Chinese word for "foreigner" is used quite frequently, in English the word "foreigner" is usually quite inappropriate. And that got me thinking...
For those of you who do not know, Chinese people refer to any person from any country outside of Asia as a 外国人 waiguoren or "foreigner." This is directly linked to the race difference, as they refer to Koreans, Japanese and other Asians by their nationality. I explained to them that it is appropriate to use this word in Chinese, for example: when my American friends and I are speaking with one another in English, we actually say "waiguoren" when we are talking about someone who is not Chinese. Why? Because the word foreigner in English is not normally used so the word "waiguoren" is quite difficult to translate. The word 外国人 "foreigner" literally means "a person from outside the country." On the other hand, 中国人 "Chinese" literally means "a person from the middle country." If you look at the word itself 外 "wai" means outside and quite literally is the opposite of 中 zhong, or "middle" which is the word for a Chinese person.
You know how China used to be referred to as the Middle Kingdom, right? Well actually, it still is. The word for China is 中国 zhongguo, which literally means the "middle country." Note how the character 中, the word for middle, is quite literally a rectangle with a line down the middle to symbolize the meaning for "middle." As a result, when Chinese people are talking about anyone who is not Chinese, they say foreigner, which for them is the antonym of the word for Chinese. This is the root of the translation problem.
So we talked about some appropriate translations for foreigner. Namely that we use the person's nationality to describe them, and if we don't know their nationality, we use their continent, ie "European." Other appropriate translations are "not Chinese," "international," and "westerner." We talked about how this reflects the fact that the US is a very diverse county so if you say foreigner it is really not clear what you are talking about. An African? A Chinese American? An Australian? It could be anyone, really. In addition, if a foreigner is walking down the street in the US, you can't actually tell they are a foreigner by looking at them, whereas in China, you know immediately if someone is foreign or not. I explained to them that we have the same thinking that they have towards other Asian ethnicities (in that they would never call a Japanese person or a Korean a foreigner), but that our thinking doesn't just refer to people of Caucasian race, on the contrary, for us that idea refers to everybody. As a result, the word foreigner is rarely used.
If you live in the United States for a certain amount of time, not only do other people and yourself slowly start to consider you American, but also you can gain citizenship. Whereas I could live in China for the rest of my life and not only never be able to hold citizenship (citizenship is restricted to people of the Han Chinese ethnicity and the 56 designated Chinese ethnic minorities only) but also that I will always and forever be called a foreigner, or in some interpretations, an outsider. As a result of these cultural differences, connotations and interpretations, the word foreigner is not always appropriate.
We also discussed how the different ways that we address people reflect cultural differences. China actually has a very complicated system of addressing people, depending on if you know them, if you're friends, if you're family, if you're co-workers, ect ect. For example, if you don't know someone and they are at least 20 years older than you, then you call them "aunt" or "uncle." If they are less than 20 years older than you, you call them "older brother" or "older sister."
If it is a boy that is only a few years older than you, you can't call them older brother or else people with think you are dating. Instead you can call them 帅哥 shuaige, which literally means "handsome brother" but more colloquially is translated as "hot boy." I know, weird right? If you call someone brother people think you two are dating, but if you call them "hot boy" then people don't have a second thought about it or blink an eye.
On the other hand, if you are friends with them it is a little different. If they are a girl and older than you, then you call them by their name and add "older sister" to the end of it. For example, my friend Tingting is 婷婷姐 or tingtingjie, with means "Tingting sister." With boys, you can call them by their name or just 帅哥 "hot boy."
As you can see, this all clearly reflects the way the language and culture can never be separated under any circumstance. This all reflects China's complicated filial system, as well as filial piety and the fact in China the whole family used to live under one roof. Today, they still consider themselves "one family" under their socialist system of government, and as such still refer to strangers and friends as family members.
Anyway, enough of my rambling. This weekend was nice, I went out to dinner with my friends Pingping and Fangfang on Thursday, and a group of us took some of our friends out to eat Sichuan food (Read: SPICY but delicious) on Friday. Also on Friday CIEE took us to a Chinese cooking school to learn how to cook Chinese food and I learned how to make 麻婆豆腐 which is basically really spicy Tofu. My friend 小虎 Xiaohu (his name means "Little Tiger") took some really cool pictures and I will try to post them soon.
Things are still going great here in China, but I suffered two setbacks recently. In February, I applied for an internship for the Fall 2010 semester with the Department of State Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and after a phone interview with the North Korea Desk, I found out that I was rejected from the position. Secondly, I took the HSK test this morning (Chinese version of the TOEFL) and I'm pretty sure that I basically failed it. I have been looking into going to grad school for International Relations at the Johns Hopkins University branch at Nanjing University, but I need a really high score on the HSK to get in. It was disappointing because I've been feeling relatively good about my Chinese language ability, and then I went into an Intermediate level test (it wasn't even the highest level of the test) and I probably knew less than half the questions.
For the second class we discussed "Meeting Guests and Saying Goodbye." Each class is three hours long and at the end we have one hour to discuss certain topics. So I introduced it with the basic idea that language and culture are always fundamentally intertwined. You cannot separate the two or else you will never truly learn the language. I think the topic was a little bit too difficult for them, but I hope in the end that they enjoyed the challenge. So I opened it up with the idea that although the Chinese word for "foreigner" is used quite frequently, in English the word "foreigner" is usually quite inappropriate. And that got me thinking...
For those of you who do not know, Chinese people refer to any person from any country outside of Asia as a 外国人 waiguoren or "foreigner." This is directly linked to the race difference, as they refer to Koreans, Japanese and other Asians by their nationality. I explained to them that it is appropriate to use this word in Chinese, for example: when my American friends and I are speaking with one another in English, we actually say "waiguoren" when we are talking about someone who is not Chinese. Why? Because the word foreigner in English is not normally used so the word "waiguoren" is quite difficult to translate. The word 外国人 "foreigner" literally means "a person from outside the country." On the other hand, 中国人 "Chinese" literally means "a person from the middle country." If you look at the word itself 外 "wai" means outside and quite literally is the opposite of 中 zhong, or "middle" which is the word for a Chinese person.
You know how China used to be referred to as the Middle Kingdom, right? Well actually, it still is. The word for China is 中国 zhongguo, which literally means the "middle country." Note how the character 中, the word for middle, is quite literally a rectangle with a line down the middle to symbolize the meaning for "middle." As a result, when Chinese people are talking about anyone who is not Chinese, they say foreigner, which for them is the antonym of the word for Chinese. This is the root of the translation problem.
So we talked about some appropriate translations for foreigner. Namely that we use the person's nationality to describe them, and if we don't know their nationality, we use their continent, ie "European." Other appropriate translations are "not Chinese," "international," and "westerner." We talked about how this reflects the fact that the US is a very diverse county so if you say foreigner it is really not clear what you are talking about. An African? A Chinese American? An Australian? It could be anyone, really. In addition, if a foreigner is walking down the street in the US, you can't actually tell they are a foreigner by looking at them, whereas in China, you know immediately if someone is foreign or not. I explained to them that we have the same thinking that they have towards other Asian ethnicities (in that they would never call a Japanese person or a Korean a foreigner), but that our thinking doesn't just refer to people of Caucasian race, on the contrary, for us that idea refers to everybody. As a result, the word foreigner is rarely used.
If you live in the United States for a certain amount of time, not only do other people and yourself slowly start to consider you American, but also you can gain citizenship. Whereas I could live in China for the rest of my life and not only never be able to hold citizenship (citizenship is restricted to people of the Han Chinese ethnicity and the 56 designated Chinese ethnic minorities only) but also that I will always and forever be called a foreigner, or in some interpretations, an outsider. As a result of these cultural differences, connotations and interpretations, the word foreigner is not always appropriate.
We also discussed how the different ways that we address people reflect cultural differences. China actually has a very complicated system of addressing people, depending on if you know them, if you're friends, if you're family, if you're co-workers, ect ect. For example, if you don't know someone and they are at least 20 years older than you, then you call them "aunt" or "uncle." If they are less than 20 years older than you, you call them "older brother" or "older sister."
If it is a boy that is only a few years older than you, you can't call them older brother or else people with think you are dating. Instead you can call them 帅哥 shuaige, which literally means "handsome brother" but more colloquially is translated as "hot boy." I know, weird right? If you call someone brother people think you two are dating, but if you call them "hot boy" then people don't have a second thought about it or blink an eye.
On the other hand, if you are friends with them it is a little different. If they are a girl and older than you, then you call them by their name and add "older sister" to the end of it. For example, my friend Tingting is 婷婷姐 or tingtingjie, with means "Tingting sister." With boys, you can call them by their name or just 帅哥 "hot boy."
As you can see, this all clearly reflects the way the language and culture can never be separated under any circumstance. This all reflects China's complicated filial system, as well as filial piety and the fact in China the whole family used to live under one roof. Today, they still consider themselves "one family" under their socialist system of government, and as such still refer to strangers and friends as family members.
Anyway, enough of my rambling. This weekend was nice, I went out to dinner with my friends Pingping and Fangfang on Thursday, and a group of us took some of our friends out to eat Sichuan food (Read: SPICY but delicious) on Friday. Also on Friday CIEE took us to a Chinese cooking school to learn how to cook Chinese food and I learned how to make 麻婆豆腐 which is basically really spicy Tofu. My friend 小虎 Xiaohu (his name means "Little Tiger") took some really cool pictures and I will try to post them soon.
Things are still going great here in China, but I suffered two setbacks recently. In February, I applied for an internship for the Fall 2010 semester with the Department of State Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and after a phone interview with the North Korea Desk, I found out that I was rejected from the position. Secondly, I took the HSK test this morning (Chinese version of the TOEFL) and I'm pretty sure that I basically failed it. I have been looking into going to grad school for International Relations at the Johns Hopkins University branch at Nanjing University, but I need a really high score on the HSK to get in. It was disappointing because I've been feeling relatively good about my Chinese language ability, and then I went into an Intermediate level test (it wasn't even the highest level of the test) and I probably knew less than half the questions.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
A New Job
On Friday afternoon I got a text message from Pingping asking if I'd like another tutoring job. I said "Sure!" After all, I really need the money and I figured I could handle another 2 hours a week tutoring someone in English. Even better, she said it would be during the week, not on the weekends, so it wouldn't interfere with travel plans. She said, "Ok, great. Go to meet them in the dorm in 1 hour." So I rushed over to school and quickly discovered that this was not exactly a tutoring job. I would be teaching 16 Chinese government officials English six to nine hours a week in preparation for the Youth Olympics that will be held in Nanjing in 2014. Woah. I looked at my student roster. All of them have at least a Master's Degree (some have PH.D's) in some sort of field or another. I'm definitely not prepared for this. But I decided to stick with it, not only because it pays well and it will be a resume booster, but also because I think it will be interesting and give me an opportunity to teach Chinese people real, practical English (something that the Chinese people desperately need). We'll see how it works out.
I just finished up my lesson plan for my first class, which will be held tomorrow. After reading over the textbook, I almost puked. Some of the greetings that were in our book that I'm supposed to teach them are awkward so I changed them (as indicated by the arrows):
Hello, Miss, you are so pretty today. --> NOTE: only say to a friend, if you are male please do not say unless it is a close friend: Hi Susan, you look very pretty today, I like your dress.
How do you do! --> How are you?
Hello, this is my friend Li Ping. We are in the same company. --> This is my friend Li Ping. We work at the same company / business / department.
Oh and just as an extra fun thing, below are a few translated excerpts from a foreign policy journal about Deng Xiaoping that I found particularly interesting for those of you who enjoy these kinds of things.
"If you want to fight for and protect world peace, you have to fight against hegemony and oppose power politics. Superpowers everywhere point there fingers and scold other countries, recklessly interfering with other country's domestic politics, which has caused some countries and regions to have even more complicated conflicts and turmoil. Western countries are right now utilizing their economic superiority and economic support as bait to try to market their own social systems, economic models and way of life in small and mid-sized countries. As a result, they are with uninterrupted acceleration leading political affairs in these countries into turmoil and crisis. Originally these countries had developed economies and stable societies."
True? Absolutely. Heard about Iraq and Afghanistan recently?
"China will not under any circumstances change just because of one incident, will not depend on any superpower or country clique, and still will not succumb to any country's pressure. In the international society, we only speak publicly of justice, we only do official business with affairs that we know, and in this way we will be able to win over the third world's interest in peace and sustain their trust, as well as strengthen China's international position. Deng Xiaoping entrusted that the definition of independence and self-reliance was to truly have no alliances with any countries. China is regarded as a big country and a poor country, and if China were to form an alliance with any superpower this would more or less restrict and hinder China, in regards to foreign relations, to maintain complete independence, and also would not be beneficial for world stability."
Extreme? A little. Ever read an opinion column from the United States' point of view?
I just finished up my lesson plan for my first class, which will be held tomorrow. After reading over the textbook, I almost puked. Some of the greetings that were in our book that I'm supposed to teach them are awkward so I changed them (as indicated by the arrows):
Hello, Miss, you are so pretty today. --> NOTE: only say to a friend, if you are male please do not say unless it is a close friend: Hi Susan, you look very pretty today, I like your dress.
How do you do! --> How are you?
Hello, this is my friend Li Ping. We are in the same company. --> This is my friend Li Ping. We work at the same company / business / department.
Oh and just as an extra fun thing, below are a few translated excerpts from a foreign policy journal about Deng Xiaoping that I found particularly interesting for those of you who enjoy these kinds of things.
"If you want to fight for and protect world peace, you have to fight against hegemony and oppose power politics. Superpowers everywhere point there fingers and scold other countries, recklessly interfering with other country's domestic politics, which has caused some countries and regions to have even more complicated conflicts and turmoil. Western countries are right now utilizing their economic superiority and economic support as bait to try to market their own social systems, economic models and way of life in small and mid-sized countries. As a result, they are with uninterrupted acceleration leading political affairs in these countries into turmoil and crisis. Originally these countries had developed economies and stable societies."
True? Absolutely. Heard about Iraq and Afghanistan recently?
"China will not under any circumstances change just because of one incident, will not depend on any superpower or country clique, and still will not succumb to any country's pressure. In the international society, we only speak publicly of justice, we only do official business with affairs that we know, and in this way we will be able to win over the third world's interest in peace and sustain their trust, as well as strengthen China's international position. Deng Xiaoping entrusted that the definition of independence and self-reliance was to truly have no alliances with any countries. China is regarded as a big country and a poor country, and if China were to form an alliance with any superpower this would more or less restrict and hinder China, in regards to foreign relations, to maintain complete independence, and also would not be beneficial for world stability."
Extreme? A little. Ever read an opinion column from the United States' point of view?
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Update on My Life
First off, I just want to let everyone know that I had a nice birthday just simply because everyone in the US wished me a Happy Birthday by some mode or another of technology, and I went out to lunch with my friends at a fantastic restaurant. The best thing that happened was on Friday one of my good friends from last semester, John, and his girlfriend Tingting took me out to dinner (actually at the same restaurant where we had lunch on my birthday since the food was so good). It was such a nice birthday present, not only because the food was more on the expensive side, but more just because I got to hang out with John and Tingting. To me, just having a nice relaxing night with two good friends was better than anything else. After dinner we went and got tea together at a coffee shop (or should I say tea shop) and chatted together for a couple of hours. So much fun.
Secondly, just an update on my language progress for those of you who follow my blog and are interested. On the up side, I can have long, relatively in-depth conversations about life in general in Chinese. I almost never speak in English anymore, excepting the every once in a while when I hang out with my American friends on the weekends. I can watch TV with virtually no problems (I was watching TV the other day and didn't know the word for "high-interest loan" so I was confused why this poor girl was so upset until I finally admitted to myself that I needed look the word up in the dictionary). My strongest point is my listening comprehension AND (drum roll please) I can talk to people on the phone in Chinese!!!!! That was probably the hardest thing for me to do last semester and I'm so happy I finally got over that hurdle.
On the downside, my grammar is absolutely atrocious, I stutter a lot, still have a thick accent, still have to stop in the middle of a sentence if I don't know the word for something and explain the situation. For example, I forgot the word for tire (which was silly because it's actually a transliteration from English), so when my bike got a flat tire I had to explain to my host family that the black round things on my bike didn't have air in them. I also struggle with reading comprehension. Most of all, I can't really talk all the naturally and smoothly yet and I can't talk about politics or the economy. This is the area that I want to improve the most because when I am talking to someone in Chinese I can't articulate my feelings as well as I would like. This is particularly frustrating if I don't agree with what someone is saying and I want to prove him or her wrong but I can't. So my goal is that by the end of the semester I will be able to have a successful political argument.
Thirdly, just an update on my daily life in general. From Monday through Thursday, I have Chinese lessons for four hours a day, from 8 am to 12 pm. Besides that, during the week I usually meet up with friends for lunch, meet with my language partner (who has become a good friend of mine now), meet with my Chinese tutor, go to my elective class (which is Chinese current events), go to Kungfu class in the evenings, and do homework.
I am also currently doing an independent research project (kind of like writing a thesis... in Chinese) on Deng Xiaoping's foreign policy, and how it influenced world politics and Chinese international status, as well as foreigners' reactions to his foreign policy. Currently I am still getting familiar with his policies by reading Chinese Foreign Policy Journals; it takes me a good 3 hours to finish just a short article so hopefully it will get easier. So I meet once or twice a week with my "research coach", as we call it (I can't think of a better way to translate his position), who is a graduate student in international politics at Nanjing University. Right now it is super challenging but I am looking forward to conducting interviews and writing the paper. This is probably the highlight of my college education thus far. It's so nice to sit down and read a policy journal article in Chinese and actually understand it and just be like, "This is what all the blood, sweat and tears have been for the past two and a half years. This is why I'm in China. This is why I'm spending so much time studying a foreign language. So I can read articles like this and truly understand why a culture is the way it is, why people think the way they do, why policies are written the way they are and why the global political climate is the way it is." It's incredibly satisfying to finally know that all this studying has not been in vain, but I can actually use my skills to conduct research. I'm going to post sometime this week some translated excerpts from one of the articles that I found particularly interesting so that those who are interested in foreign policy can take a look.
On the weekends, I usually travel somewhere, and you can see some of my pictures from Yangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou on my facebook. This past weekend was the first weekend that I wasn't traveling, so it was nice to take a break and relax. When I'm not traveling, I hang out with my friends, usually go to a bar or a restaurant, do homework, hang out with my host family, and study for the HSK (the Chinese equivalent of the TOEFL). This weekend I took my host brother out to eat with some of my friends and I think he enjoyed hanging out with kids older than him. He is really tall for his age, particularly Chinese boys his age, (he is the same height as I am) so he was shocked that everyone we went out to dinner with was taller than him. It was pretty funny. So that is my life currently! Things are going well!
p.s. Just a random note about Chinese culture that I found out this weekend when I went to visit my friend in her dorm room. Boys can't enter the girls dormitory and vice-versa. I mean, I thought Grove City College was insane for having a curfew and kicking boys out of their dorms after 11:00 pm. Here you can't even step foot inside the girls dormitory. What they would think if they knew I had co-ed bathrooms my freshman year of college.....
Saturday, March 27, 2010
So This One Time I Took a Trip to Beijing...
Last weekend (oh dear, was it 2 weekends ago now? It was March 11th...) I went to Beijing with 2 of my friends partly to see the (in)famous sights of Beijing and partly to see one of my best friends from middle/high school, Grace! My friends Vince and Lahela took a midnight sleeper train with me out of Nanjing on Thursday night and we slept until the morning. We finally arrived in Beijing at 3:00 in the afternoon on Friday. Luckily our hostel was right across the street from the train station, so we settled into our room and I immediately left for Tiananmen Square (They really should just translate the pinyin into English, it means Gate of Heavenly Peace).
Anyway, I finally arrived at Tiananmen and called Grace on her handy dandy Chinese cell phone. I was next to the portrait of Mao, but unfortunately she was across this huge highway that separates Tiananmen from the big portrait. So I went through this underground tunnel only to be met by a long line of people waiting to go through some sort of random security check. Also they only had one female security guard and they were only allowing her to check all the women so it was going rather slowly. So I finally arrived on the other side of the street and saw Grace's golden locks of hair across the square (and her red Commie jacket). So I ran as fast as I could towards her and then gave her the biggest hug of my life. It was great to see someone familiar from home! I don't really remember but I may or may not have jumped on her and/or started crying...
After that we went to eat Beijing Roast Duck at this super fancy restaurant (literally the nicest restaurant I have ever stepped foot into on the continent of Asia). They took us into this room with two tables, one of the tables was HUGE, enough to seat about twenty people and the other table was smaller, enough to seat about ten people. So Grace and I sat down at the big table with her and her classmates. Then, after some sort of confusing game of musical chairs of sorts, Grace and I found ourselves at the adult table, aka the table for all the teachers and Penn State graduates now living in China. So we were like "um ok" and continued to make awkward conversation with the adults. I seriously felt like a kid at the adult table on Thanksgiving or something. Haha, it was really fun and the food was delicious!
After that, Grace went back to her hotel and I met up with Vince and Lahela and headed off to find Grace's hotel at People's University. We got off at the university's subway station and attempted to find the address that Grace's TA had given me earlier. After walking for a good 45 minutes, we decided to get a cab and flagged one over. Shortly after getting in the cab, Vince says: "Sarah, this isn't a cab. This is just a guy driving a car around illegally. He doesn't have a meter." So we were like, "Alright, let's just give him the address and hope for the best."
Right after I gave him the address, he got on his cell phone and called someone asking where the hotel was. Still completely normal, nothing unusual. But then I realized that his breath smelled like alcohol and Vince and Lahela (in the back seat) were like "Um this is really sketchy slash creepy." So after about 5 minutes of him randomly driving around and asking his friend for directions, I told him "Ok you need to stop the car right now, we didn't know that this wasn't a cab, we are uncomfortable, you don't know where this place is, and you don't have a meter." Thank God he pulled over and let us out of his car without asking us for a cent.
Feeling defeated, we called Grace, but we weren't able to get clear directions so we kept looking for the address. Finally a university student noticed that we were lost and offered to help. He talked to Grace on the phone and he realized that we were on the opposite side of campus from Grace. So this Chinese guy, who didn't even know us, walked with us all the way across campus (a good 15-20 minute walk) until we finally found Grace. Props to China for having the nicest people in the world. We invited him to come out with us, but he declined. Our group got in two cabs and headed to a bar that Grace's TA had told us about.
Grace and I got in a cab and my friends got in another. We were only able to show the cab driver the address and since Grace and I had both never been there before, we didn't really know where we were going. So the cab driver dropped us off on this street and Grace and I got out and walked around looking for this bar for which the only directions we had were "Follow the hipsters." Finally we decided to get another cab, but this cab driver didn't know the bar either. Finally, after much trial and tribulation, we found the bar, a small place called D22. After arriving, we settled in, eating sweet popcorn and waiting for some show to start that Grace's friend had heard about, and had come to interview the performer about life in China. Finally the main act came on: it was a Dutch guy dressed up as Zombie Elvis. He was a one-man band and was very talented. It was really crowded by the stage, so we went upstairs in the loft and watched from above. Probably the weirdest music I have ever heard in my life, not going to lie about that. But it was entertaining and certainly an experience. Vince absolutely LOVED it and was beaming when we left the bar, and wouldn't stop talking about how great it was. To each his own, I guess. Some white guy by the stage was drunk/high on something was trying to make a most pit by pushing everyone around and caused a huge scene. Minus 1 for us foreigners...
The next day Lahela and I woke up early and headed off to go to the Great Wall. When we arrived at 10:33 am, we found out that the last bus to the Great Wall left at 10:30 am and that we would have to come back tomorrow. Minus 1 for our Lonely Planet Guide that told us the last bus leaves at 5:00 pm. (Vince swears that the Lonely Planet Guides are a work of evil and burned his when he was traveling over winter break in Hainan. To be fair, their section on Nanjing is HORRIBLE). I digress.... So Lahela and I met up with Vince after his disastrous run-in at the train station. He was buying us train tickets, but was having numerous troubles and had to wait in line 3 different times. In the end, he accidentally bought first class tickets (because they only told him the fastest trains and the fastest trains only have soft seats). If you have ever bought train tickets in China, it is seriously the most stressful experience of your life. I myself had accidentally bought tickets for the slowest train on the way from Nanjing to Beijing. There are seemingly thousands of Chinese people pushing on your back and hurrying you, not only that, but the train clerks are behind a glass screen and it is hard to understand them. Anyway, so we met up with Vince and he was embarrassed about his mistake (because the tickets ended up being really expensive) so he wouldn't show us the tickets (because the tickets have the price on them). This is important for a later part in my story.
So we decided to go to the Summer Palace together, which is a huge complex of ancient quarters from past emperors, and one of the most famous is the summer vacation home of the only female emperor, Emperor Wu Zetian. It was absolutely beautiful and unfortunately my pictures didn't really capture the beauty, but instead captured the smog. After that we went to Wangfujin Snack Street and I ate a scorpion! Lahela ate a starfish and Vince ate some other crazy sea creature but I forget which one. After that we went to try to meet up with Grace, but her and her friends' cell phones ran out of money and after a series of unfortunate events, including Lahela getting sick and throwing up her starfish, we were not able to meet up with Grace that night. The next day, Lahela and I set off to see the Great Wall only to discover that it was snowing... snowing a lot! Lahela, who is from Hawaii, said that it was the first time she had seen so much snow (after all, the first time she had seen falling snow was only a few days earlier in Nanjing).
When we got to the bus stop, it turned out that the buses to the Great Wall weren't running because of the snow! So we ended up having to get a "small car" as they call it (a private car, basically) to take us to Badaling, the town closest to Beijing (about 2 hours away) where a part of the Great Wall is. We shared the car with a Taiwanese couple. When we finally got to Badaling, there was at least 6 inches of snow on the ground and still falling steadily. Lahela and I definitely didn't have the right shoes to be climbing great walls in the snow. It was freezing! We finally made it to the top of one of the points and we went as far as we could go considering the snow situation. We took the obligatory pictures and then made our way slowly down the icy, slippery and snow steps. Definitely was a lawsuit waiting to happen, but luckily we were in China so that wasn't a problem.
We had to wait around for the Taiwanese couple, and finally we headed back to Beijing. The driver and the Taiwanese couple were talking about Chinese history, particularly about the Ming Dynasty-- I swear the driver didn't stop talking the entire way back. So they were talking history and so apparently the couple expressed a lot of interest in this particular topic because we stopped at not one, but four historical spots on the way back. One was some sort of "fake" forbidden city gate, one was the "fake" Ming Tombs (the real tombs are in Nanjing), one was the residence of the first Ming Dynasty's grandchildren and some other souvenier shop. Lahela and I wouldn't have cared except that our shoes were soaking wet and we were absolutely freezing. We kept telling him that we wanted to get back to Beijing, but also didn't want to be impolite. After all, the Taiwanese couple were into it 100%. Finally we told him that we had to get back to Beijing because our train was going to leave soon (it was a little bit of a lie, I'll admit). Luckily they didn't speak English so we could complain all we wanted, mostly "This is the car ride from HELL!!!!!"
After that we met up with Vince at Silk Street, which is basically just a huge marketplace with a bunch of foreigners trying to bargain for cheap stuff. I got a pair of jeans and Lahela got a skirt and a dress. After that we made our way back to our hostel and did homework until 9:00 pm (we were on a 9:45 pm train). We arrived at the train station at 9:15 pm and were confused because we didn't see our train on the board that announces the platforms for the trains. We went to the service desk and asked and they were like "UUMMMM your train doesn't depart from this station, you need to go to the South Train Station!" So we ran outside, grabbed a cab, told him to hurry up, he responded by telling us that it was unsafe to drive fast, proceeded to speed to the South Train Station, and arrived only but 2 minutes after our train left. Thank God that at least we were able to exchange our tickets for free tickets for the next day... But we would be stuck in Beijing for another day, had to pay for another night at the hostel, and miss a whole day of classes (we would have to miss 4 hours of class and we're only allowed to miss 6 hours of class the entire semester). Needless to say, we were pretty much freaking out about what we were going to do. Vince felt terrible and kept saying how it was his fault, but it really could have happened to anyone.
It was kind of ironic because over winter break my friends and I experienced somewhat similar mistakes regarding plane tickets. Namely that some of us had let other people buy our tickets, thus resulting in similar "f*** ups" and sleep-in-the-airport experiences. I promised myself that I would never let someone else buy the tickets for me, and here I was standing in a train station because I had let someone else buy my tickets for me and had not insisted on being a control freak about it (read: I didn't insist on checking the tickets myself-- it said on the tickets it was from the Beijing South Station, but Vince didn't see it.
Anyway, we got ourselves together, went back to the hostel (thank god they had a room open for us) and went and ate McDonald's (comfort food). It actually ended up being a blessing in disguise because the next day I had time to go the Forbidden City, which I would not have been able to do otherwise because it was closed that weekend. In case you are wondering, the Forbidden City really is a city-- it's HUGE!! We pretty much did homework for the rest of the day (we had to make up the work we missed in class). On Monday night, we made sure we were at the train station (the south one this time) an hour ahead of time. On Tuesday morning at 5:30 am we arrived in Nanjing. We had to wait a half an hour for the subway to open at 6:00 am, got back to campus, went to class at 8:00 am and did the rest of the things we had to do that day smelly (we hadn't been able to shower because we all live in a homestay) and tired. Finally I made it back to my home, tired but happy, and showered for a long time....
Anyway, I finally arrived at Tiananmen and called Grace on her handy dandy Chinese cell phone. I was next to the portrait of Mao, but unfortunately she was across this huge highway that separates Tiananmen from the big portrait. So I went through this underground tunnel only to be met by a long line of people waiting to go through some sort of random security check. Also they only had one female security guard and they were only allowing her to check all the women so it was going rather slowly. So I finally arrived on the other side of the street and saw Grace's golden locks of hair across the square (and her red Commie jacket). So I ran as fast as I could towards her and then gave her the biggest hug of my life. It was great to see someone familiar from home! I don't really remember but I may or may not have jumped on her and/or started crying...
After that we went to eat Beijing Roast Duck at this super fancy restaurant (literally the nicest restaurant I have ever stepped foot into on the continent of Asia). They took us into this room with two tables, one of the tables was HUGE, enough to seat about twenty people and the other table was smaller, enough to seat about ten people. So Grace and I sat down at the big table with her and her classmates. Then, after some sort of confusing game of musical chairs of sorts, Grace and I found ourselves at the adult table, aka the table for all the teachers and Penn State graduates now living in China. So we were like "um ok" and continued to make awkward conversation with the adults. I seriously felt like a kid at the adult table on Thanksgiving or something. Haha, it was really fun and the food was delicious!
After that, Grace went back to her hotel and I met up with Vince and Lahela and headed off to find Grace's hotel at People's University. We got off at the university's subway station and attempted to find the address that Grace's TA had given me earlier. After walking for a good 45 minutes, we decided to get a cab and flagged one over. Shortly after getting in the cab, Vince says: "Sarah, this isn't a cab. This is just a guy driving a car around illegally. He doesn't have a meter." So we were like, "Alright, let's just give him the address and hope for the best."
Right after I gave him the address, he got on his cell phone and called someone asking where the hotel was. Still completely normal, nothing unusual. But then I realized that his breath smelled like alcohol and Vince and Lahela (in the back seat) were like "Um this is really sketchy slash creepy." So after about 5 minutes of him randomly driving around and asking his friend for directions, I told him "Ok you need to stop the car right now, we didn't know that this wasn't a cab, we are uncomfortable, you don't know where this place is, and you don't have a meter." Thank God he pulled over and let us out of his car without asking us for a cent.
Feeling defeated, we called Grace, but we weren't able to get clear directions so we kept looking for the address. Finally a university student noticed that we were lost and offered to help. He talked to Grace on the phone and he realized that we were on the opposite side of campus from Grace. So this Chinese guy, who didn't even know us, walked with us all the way across campus (a good 15-20 minute walk) until we finally found Grace. Props to China for having the nicest people in the world. We invited him to come out with us, but he declined. Our group got in two cabs and headed to a bar that Grace's TA had told us about.
Grace and I got in a cab and my friends got in another. We were only able to show the cab driver the address and since Grace and I had both never been there before, we didn't really know where we were going. So the cab driver dropped us off on this street and Grace and I got out and walked around looking for this bar for which the only directions we had were "Follow the hipsters." Finally we decided to get another cab, but this cab driver didn't know the bar either. Finally, after much trial and tribulation, we found the bar, a small place called D22. After arriving, we settled in, eating sweet popcorn and waiting for some show to start that Grace's friend had heard about, and had come to interview the performer about life in China. Finally the main act came on: it was a Dutch guy dressed up as Zombie Elvis. He was a one-man band and was very talented. It was really crowded by the stage, so we went upstairs in the loft and watched from above. Probably the weirdest music I have ever heard in my life, not going to lie about that. But it was entertaining and certainly an experience. Vince absolutely LOVED it and was beaming when we left the bar, and wouldn't stop talking about how great it was. To each his own, I guess. Some white guy by the stage was drunk/high on something was trying to make a most pit by pushing everyone around and caused a huge scene. Minus 1 for us foreigners...
The next day Lahela and I woke up early and headed off to go to the Great Wall. When we arrived at 10:33 am, we found out that the last bus to the Great Wall left at 10:30 am and that we would have to come back tomorrow. Minus 1 for our Lonely Planet Guide that told us the last bus leaves at 5:00 pm. (Vince swears that the Lonely Planet Guides are a work of evil and burned his when he was traveling over winter break in Hainan. To be fair, their section on Nanjing is HORRIBLE). I digress.... So Lahela and I met up with Vince after his disastrous run-in at the train station. He was buying us train tickets, but was having numerous troubles and had to wait in line 3 different times. In the end, he accidentally bought first class tickets (because they only told him the fastest trains and the fastest trains only have soft seats). If you have ever bought train tickets in China, it is seriously the most stressful experience of your life. I myself had accidentally bought tickets for the slowest train on the way from Nanjing to Beijing. There are seemingly thousands of Chinese people pushing on your back and hurrying you, not only that, but the train clerks are behind a glass screen and it is hard to understand them. Anyway, so we met up with Vince and he was embarrassed about his mistake (because the tickets ended up being really expensive) so he wouldn't show us the tickets (because the tickets have the price on them). This is important for a later part in my story.
So we decided to go to the Summer Palace together, which is a huge complex of ancient quarters from past emperors, and one of the most famous is the summer vacation home of the only female emperor, Emperor Wu Zetian. It was absolutely beautiful and unfortunately my pictures didn't really capture the beauty, but instead captured the smog. After that we went to Wangfujin Snack Street and I ate a scorpion! Lahela ate a starfish and Vince ate some other crazy sea creature but I forget which one. After that we went to try to meet up with Grace, but her and her friends' cell phones ran out of money and after a series of unfortunate events, including Lahela getting sick and throwing up her starfish, we were not able to meet up with Grace that night. The next day, Lahela and I set off to see the Great Wall only to discover that it was snowing... snowing a lot! Lahela, who is from Hawaii, said that it was the first time she had seen so much snow (after all, the first time she had seen falling snow was only a few days earlier in Nanjing).
When we got to the bus stop, it turned out that the buses to the Great Wall weren't running because of the snow! So we ended up having to get a "small car" as they call it (a private car, basically) to take us to Badaling, the town closest to Beijing (about 2 hours away) where a part of the Great Wall is. We shared the car with a Taiwanese couple. When we finally got to Badaling, there was at least 6 inches of snow on the ground and still falling steadily. Lahela and I definitely didn't have the right shoes to be climbing great walls in the snow. It was freezing! We finally made it to the top of one of the points and we went as far as we could go considering the snow situation. We took the obligatory pictures and then made our way slowly down the icy, slippery and snow steps. Definitely was a lawsuit waiting to happen, but luckily we were in China so that wasn't a problem.
We had to wait around for the Taiwanese couple, and finally we headed back to Beijing. The driver and the Taiwanese couple were talking about Chinese history, particularly about the Ming Dynasty-- I swear the driver didn't stop talking the entire way back. So they were talking history and so apparently the couple expressed a lot of interest in this particular topic because we stopped at not one, but four historical spots on the way back. One was some sort of "fake" forbidden city gate, one was the "fake" Ming Tombs (the real tombs are in Nanjing), one was the residence of the first Ming Dynasty's grandchildren and some other souvenier shop. Lahela and I wouldn't have cared except that our shoes were soaking wet and we were absolutely freezing. We kept telling him that we wanted to get back to Beijing, but also didn't want to be impolite. After all, the Taiwanese couple were into it 100%. Finally we told him that we had to get back to Beijing because our train was going to leave soon (it was a little bit of a lie, I'll admit). Luckily they didn't speak English so we could complain all we wanted, mostly "This is the car ride from HELL!!!!!"
After that we met up with Vince at Silk Street, which is basically just a huge marketplace with a bunch of foreigners trying to bargain for cheap stuff. I got a pair of jeans and Lahela got a skirt and a dress. After that we made our way back to our hostel and did homework until 9:00 pm (we were on a 9:45 pm train). We arrived at the train station at 9:15 pm and were confused because we didn't see our train on the board that announces the platforms for the trains. We went to the service desk and asked and they were like "UUMMMM your train doesn't depart from this station, you need to go to the South Train Station!" So we ran outside, grabbed a cab, told him to hurry up, he responded by telling us that it was unsafe to drive fast, proceeded to speed to the South Train Station, and arrived only but 2 minutes after our train left. Thank God that at least we were able to exchange our tickets for free tickets for the next day... But we would be stuck in Beijing for another day, had to pay for another night at the hostel, and miss a whole day of classes (we would have to miss 4 hours of class and we're only allowed to miss 6 hours of class the entire semester). Needless to say, we were pretty much freaking out about what we were going to do. Vince felt terrible and kept saying how it was his fault, but it really could have happened to anyone.
It was kind of ironic because over winter break my friends and I experienced somewhat similar mistakes regarding plane tickets. Namely that some of us had let other people buy our tickets, thus resulting in similar "f*** ups" and sleep-in-the-airport experiences. I promised myself that I would never let someone else buy the tickets for me, and here I was standing in a train station because I had let someone else buy my tickets for me and had not insisted on being a control freak about it (read: I didn't insist on checking the tickets myself-- it said on the tickets it was from the Beijing South Station, but Vince didn't see it.
Anyway, we got ourselves together, went back to the hostel (thank god they had a room open for us) and went and ate McDonald's (comfort food). It actually ended up being a blessing in disguise because the next day I had time to go the Forbidden City, which I would not have been able to do otherwise because it was closed that weekend. In case you are wondering, the Forbidden City really is a city-- it's HUGE!! We pretty much did homework for the rest of the day (we had to make up the work we missed in class). On Monday night, we made sure we were at the train station (the south one this time) an hour ahead of time. On Tuesday morning at 5:30 am we arrived in Nanjing. We had to wait a half an hour for the subway to open at 6:00 am, got back to campus, went to class at 8:00 am and did the rest of the things we had to do that day smelly (we hadn't been able to shower because we all live in a homestay) and tired. Finally I made it back to my home, tired but happy, and showered for a long time....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)