Daoism, Vomit, and Goats. Oh my?

This weekend began as all weekends do here in China, with a nice long morning of Chinese tests. Much like the exam from two weeks ago, our teacher, feeling quite generous, decided to throw some extra stuff on the exam. What do I mean by extra? Well, extra in this sense would be information that we have never reviewed or been told about. Anyway, after being thoroughly discouraged by the written portion of my exam, I trudged through and ended up doing fairly well on the oral portion of the exam. With my week of work behind me, the weekend began. After a nice lunch, it was time for my first fieldtrip of the weekend, a trip to a Taoist temple in Beijing. After only about a half hour ride, we arrived at the temple and were set loose to explore. Unlike the Buddhist temple that I visited last week, this temple was fairly deserted and was all spiffed up for the Chinese Independence holiday. Since the weather was incredibly nice (meaning no haze), I decided to set off on my own to explore the temple. It was a really relaxing experience. I’ve gotten really used to constantly having tons of people surrounding me at all times, and it was def nice to be alone, especially in a temple on a beautiful day. The temple itself was very similar to all of the other temples that I had already been to, but the shrines themselves were fairly different. Each shrine, within each of the various buildings, had a single statue of a god or several (up to 60 I believe) statues of gods which could be prayed to for various reasons. As I wondered around, I never really saw anyone praying, until the end of the fieldtrip. I wondered into one of the shrines, which contained the “god of long life,” who was piously being prayed to by a young man. I think Muh prayed to the god of wealth too, but I don't know if that actually counts. Anyway, the fieldtrip was very relaxing and the temple was gorgeous. I think this was my favorite temple (short of the Forbidden City of course), but that opinion could be based on the holiday decorations and the incredible weather.

My Friday night ended with a tasty dinner and some beer at the dorm. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of having a little bajiu (China’s response to cheap vodka; It has a nice cheese after taste), before heading out on the city. It was a poor decision. I called my evening early and took a cab ride back with Dan to catch some sleep before my next fieldtrip.

This morning began nice and early at 8am. Thankfully, my roommate went home for the holidays, so I wasn’t awakened 30 minutes early. Still quite asleep, I stumbled down to the bus and found a seat with a window. I popped on my iPod and tried to catch some more sleep. To add injury to insult, I was awakened to find that I was somewhat motion sick, something that hasn’t happened for about five years. Thankfully (sarcastic), we then entered the hill slalom section of our climb into the village. With the bus swaying and my stomach moving closer and closer to my mouth, I mumbled to Muh “Tell them to stop the bus….” After mass chaos arose from the prospect of my vomit spewing across the bus, I was handed several plastic bags just in time to spew in a controlled manner. Needless to say, I was excited to be on firm ground when we arrived at the base of the village. Still not feeling 100% our tour guides informed us that we had a 20 minute hike ahead of us to the top of the village. The weather was amazing, the air was pollution free, and the scenery was breathtaking, so I quickly recovered from my morning. At the top, we were split into groups of six and assigned a guide who would bring us to a home of one of the local families. My group headed to the home of an older woman (Tai Tai, similar to Mrs. in the US) who had a daughter and a granddaughter living with her. The Tai Tai offered us some fresh pears, which the village is apparently known for. I did actually eat mine (my parents and Sarah would be proud), though it tasted like paper to be honest. Then we had the privilege of watching the Tai Tai hand make jiaozi (dumplings) and many many other dishes. We were even allowed to help make some jiaozi, which sounded amazing to me. I miss cooking. When our table was filled with literally 15 dishes, we began to chow down. Needless to say, our group came no where near eating all of the tasty food. Our meal was not free though, our next task was to go with the Tai Tai to work in her field. Thankfully, our Tai Tai’s field was growing a cycle crop of the bean variety, so we simply had to rip the plants out of the earth. I was impressed; our group quickly cleared the entire field. The must love tourist there. We paid and then did manual labor.

The rest of our day was spent visiting with other groups and watching the various farm animals, which consisted of two angry geese, several angry dogs, a few stray donkeys, several packs of very vocal sheep, and a pin of imprisoned goats. When we finally loaded back on to the bus, I was more than happy to catch up on my sleep. Once again, my day of excitement ended with an incredibly long bus ride through the traffic of Beijing. At one point, we stopped dead in traffic for about 15 minutes. Everyone began getting out of their cars and talking with each other. Sadly, our tour guides wouldn't let us out, but we still managed to yell at nearby persons from the bus. I think we were all getting a little loopy. Anywho, head over and check out all the new pictures, there are a lot of them.

Finally, The Great Wall.

This Sunday I finally got to get to the Great Wall! Getting to see the Great Wall was one of the few "must sees" for my trip. I really want to see everything and anything, but I knew that I had to make it to the Great Wall, or this trip would be a failure (not really). The day began early at 8:10 am when I was awakened by my roommate, who was stirring around the room like a child on Christmas morning. He actually said "wake up" in English, followed by some unrecognizable phrase relating to the Great Wall. So, I reluctantly rolled out of bed and got dressed to head out to the bus downstairs. Amazingly, my ankle was not bothering me for the first time in about two weeks. My roommate and I sat awkwardly in the room for about 15 minutes, because, surprise, we had gotten up too early. After making it downstairs, we climbed aboard one of the two awaiting buses and began our journey to the Wall. I had a large amount of homework to do, so I began reading for Philosophy. Deep into my reading of Mencius, my roommate, begins reading over my shoulder and asking for the definitions of various lengthy words. So, the remainder of the bus ride was spent explaining words like "benevolent." It was interesting to say the least. After about two hours of the lightning round of Define-a-Word, we finally arrived at the Great Wall. Unfortunately, there was even more haze at the wall than there was in Beijing. Still incredibly excited, I followed the large group of CET students and Chinese roommates in a caravan through the tourist-laden village below the Wall towards the trailhead. As we began scaling the thousands of stairs between us and the Wall, I shit you not, we all of a sudden come across a giant metal chute cutting through the forest. It turns out that it’s a toboggan ride that goes down from the top of the Wall back down to the parking lot below. That's right, there's a Great Wall ride....at the Great Wall (only 40 Yuan too). Exhausted from climbing stairs for 30 minutes straight, we finally reached the Wall and took a few more stairs up to the top. The view from the top was incredible, but the haze was thick. I would really love to go back sometime before I leave China, just to see the views there without haze. Despite this minor hindrance, the Wall was incredible. I've heard again and again about the size and length of the wall, but seeing it in person is completely different. I was in awe of the Chinese people's ability to build such a monstrous piece of architecture. I was more than happy to follow the Wall for over an hour, and would have been even happier to follow it for about five more, but we had a deadline for returning to the bus. So, we reluctantly turned around and headed for the bus. As you may have guessed, we couldn't possibly pass up riding the toboggan down. I'm not going to lie; it was the best 40 Yuan I have ever spent. It was a blast. The little cars were equipped with a handbrake, which the owners encouraged you to use liberally. The CET leader of our trip, Ben, told us that when his father came, his ride on the toboggan ended with him flying off of the track into the woods. With this in mind, I tried to go as fast as humanly possible. Unfortunately, the track is lined with people (at all the dangerous turns) yelling at riders in English to "Slow down!" At the bottom of the ride, our group found some snack food and loaded back on the bus to head back to campus. The ride back was much longer than the ride up. The traffic in Beijing is atrocious. I did manage to fall asleep (along with everyone on the bus, minus the driver of course), and I managed not to drool on myself, which is quite a feat for me in my history of sleeping in vehicles. So, that's how my journey to the Great Wall ended, with a drool-free nap back to campus. All joking aside, it was amazing, and I can't wait to get back on a day without haze. There are tons of pictures up online, so go check them out!

Busy eating Chuan'r

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while. Up until recently, nothing too exciting has really happened. Class has kept me really busy, but I think I’m starting to get into a groove with studying, which is good because I was pretty overwhelmed the first couple of weeks of class. I think I've been hitting my homesickness low lately. It's normally really hard for me to get homesick, but China is so far away from home and its tough to communicate with everyone from the states. I really miss my parents, Sarah, all my friends from BR and Wake and just being in the states in general. I've had Chinese food pretty much every meal since I've been here and I'm still not even close to being sick of it, but I feel like I need a little variety soon. Me and a few others went to KFC the other day, but it wasn't really satisfying. The chicken was tiny and the mashed potatoes were in a container the size of shot glass. Needless to say, it was also much more expensive than Chinese food. Despite that experience, I'm still craving some McDonalds. Anyway, enough with my whining.
Yesterday, my 21st Century Beijing class had a fieldtrip to a hutong near the Forbidden City. For those of you who don't know, a hutong is just a very narrow street that runs through the traditional housing found in Beijing. Unfortunately, because of the upcoming Olympic games China has begun tearing down certain hutong neighborhoods in order to build modern buildings. But recently, China has realized the historical significance of these neighborhoods, and has begun restoring certain ones. That’s my history lesson for today. So, we arrived in a parking lot near the hutong neighborhood, which happened to be right between a huge bell and drum tower. Our tour guide arrived shortly there after and told us that we were going to be going up into the drum tower. I was really excited, but then I saw the stairwell that went up to the top. It was the steepest set of stairs I have ever seen and they were slanted. After climbing the Mt. Everest of staircases, we were greeted with the thunder of four giant drums being played, it was really cool. Then the view from the top of the tour was amazing, but as always there was tons of smog. I could actually see the Forbidden City and a lake near by, which is a really rare sight in Beijing. After we got our fill of sight seeing, we went back downstairs and loaded into a caravan of rickshaws. It was really funny. I kind of felt bad though, because it seems kind of demeaning to have a guy pull you on a bike. But all the drivers were really funny and it was cool to be driven through the alleyways of the hutongs. We eventually stopped and took a tour of one of the quadrangle homes in the hutong neighborhood. The owner was really nice and told us all about his home and living in the hutongs, it was pretty interesting. Him, his wife and his daughter all share two small rooms. After the visit, we headed back to the dorm, which took about an hour and a half because of the incredible traffic in Beijing.
Getting back to the title of this post, Chuan'r is just some sort of meat stuck on a wooden stick. I normally eat the lamb variety, but I have seen many others. I've seen seahorse, scorpions, bread, beef, pork, chicken, chicken hearts (which I tried, tasted like beef), and squid. China has a ton of interesting food. I'll try to keep everyone updated on the crazy food that I eat. Our CET group is heading to the Great Wall tomorrow, so I'll have some more cool stories and tons of new pictures too. Check out the pictures from yesterday on my picture sight, there are some pretty cool ones!

Fieldtrip to Lama and Confucian temples.

Yesterday was Friday here in Beijing. As always on Friday, my day begin with a nice long Chinese test, followed by more preparation and an oral test. I think I did pretty well, but it was a pretty stressful morning. Thankfully, afterwards I went with a group and ate a tremendous amount of food and got back to campus just in time to leave on my philosophy class fieldtrip. As the bus was already full, it was difficult to find a seat. Also, Professor An allowed CET students who were not enrolled in his classes to attend the field trip as well (though they had to pay their own way), so it was a crowded bus. I ended sitting at the front of the bus with Professor An, which was actually very interesting. He asked about what I wanted to do after college and I told him my plans of continuing my Chinese education. He seemed very excited by this prospect, and began telling me tales of his troubles with establishing a Chinese program at Clemson. Apparently at this point, the Chinese program at Clemson is only behind the French and Spanish programs, which says a lot for the shift in language priority in the US.
Professor An is originally from Beijing, and I took advantage to ask him some questions about the city. A few of the other students and myself are interested in going hiking somewhere in the mountains near Beijing, and Professor An seemed very happy to tell us about prime hiking opportunities and even offered to organize a trip for us. Very exciting.
When we finally arrived at the Lama temple (Tibetan Buddhism), I was surprised to find a parking lot full of tour buses. The temple was overrun with tourists and gift shops which seem inappropriate for a temple, but at this point I'm never surprised to see an overwhelming number of people everywhere. The temple was very beautiful and had even recently been repaired and newly painted in certain areas. It was nice to have Professor An with us, as he could explain anything that we had questions about. My only qualm with the Lama temple (other than the crowd) was the ridiculous use of incense. Sometimes, I literally could not keep my eyes open because of the smoke. People were praying and lighting incense in every corner of the temple.
We next headed to the Confucian temple, which was right across the street. I thought that was incredibly interesting, and was even more impressed when I was told that China has never had a war waged because of Religion other than one rebellion. Even the scholars from both temples would share information with each other and visit each other regularly. Unfortunately, the entire Confucian temple was under construction, so there wasn't too much to see. There was one large archway and a few statues that weren't obscured by scaffolding. There were some interesting parts of the temple compound though. Apparently, in the distant past, the temple also served as a university for the brightest students in China. Also, there was a bridge in the temple that was covered in these little red, wooden tablets. Professor An explained that students come here and right down their concerns for their education and hang them on the bridge in the temple in the hopes that Confucius will aid them in their studies. There was even one from an American girl that said "I hope I do well in 7th grade." Overall, it was really interesting and I would love to go back if the construction is finished before I leave.
There's a new album at my Webshots site called "Temple Field Trip." Check it out for all the pictures from yesterday.

Chinese Voodoo?

Last night was Thursday night, which means that everyone is studying for the end of the week exam for their respective Chinese language classes. My night was going as planned, full of lots of studying and what not. Then I heard a ruckus going on outside my door, so I decided to go check out the commotion. There was a large group of CET students studying together outside of my door. I resisted the temptation to go hang out for quite a while, but when the noise had all but disappeared, I went out into the hall and found only a few CET students left. I started studying for a while, and then Dan's (my neighbor) roommate came by and offered to bring me some medicine for my leg. First of all, my roommate and Muh's roommate both already gave me bottles of the same medicine. But, Dan's roommate could not be swayed in his devotion to healing my leg.
Ten minutes later, my roommate showed up and helped me with my studying. Soon there after, Dan's roommate arrived with his magic leg potion. So, still very eager, Dan's roommate (Bai is his name by the way) proceeded to open the ruby bottle. The stuff smelled exactly like those candy hearts that you get on Valentine's Day. I soon had a lathering of Valentine candy juice on my ankle and an eager Bai rubbing my ankle vigorously. In the middle of this experiment in healing, Bai realized that my roommate had a small bottle of bai jiu (rice alcohol, the worst tasting substance on earth) on his desk. The obvious next step was to pour some into the cap of the bai jiu bottle and light it on fire. I'm not going to say that it didn't look cool, because frankly, it did, but the whole time I thought that this was yet another healing technique. I wasn't too excited to have flaming alcohol thrown onto my injured ankle. Thankfully, it was just for atmosphere. Anyway, just thought that I would share my strange evening with everyone. If anyone needs Chinese leg healing solution stuff, I have four bottles. Also, I finally got a picture of my roommate, or I should say Muh took the picture. Anyway, the picture is on my Webshots page in the Beijing album. Enjoy!

Interesting 24 hours.

Today, instead of having Chinese class, our teacher told us that we would have language practice. However, this means real life application. Our class was split into four groups, and we were told to meet at a certain restaurant, so that we could use our newly learned, food related vocabulary. Seeing as I am currently very slow at walking, our group decided to take a taxi. Needless to say, we were the first group to arrive. We met the teacher upstairs, and were set to our team tasks, which included asking for chopsticks, more bowls, more cups, more tea cups, and finally ordering a dish. We were informed that CET would be paying for this lunch, and to practice thoroughly, we were all to order one dish using Chinese. Well, there were 15 people at the table, so we ended up with an incredible amount of food. We had eggplant dishes, chicken dishes, fish dishes, xiao bai dishes, soup, Beijing duck, spare ribs, and a few pork dishes. I've never seen so much food at once. Our teacher also encouraged us to order beer, which was pretty exciting by American standards. On a side note, I have had incredibly horrible stomach pains all morning, and I really didn't think that I would be able to leave my room, much less go out to a restaurant. Thankfully, I rallied my strength and was able to eat way too much food, for about the third meal in a row. So to recap, I have a cold, I have a bum ankle, and I have a hefty stomach ache. China is trying to kill me. On the bright side, all the Chinese roommates have been very helpful. When they found out that I had hurt my ankle, they were quick to offer help and advice. Apparently in China, it's impossible to find ice, but my roommate and Muh's roommate both brought me the Chinese equivalent of Icy-Hot. Also, my roommate brought me a walking stick....though I'm not really too up on using it. All in all, I was very surprised at how helpful and patient all of the roommates have been so far. I hope I can return the favor one day.

Last night, there was a group activity called the "Name Chop," where all of the students and their roommates were invited to carve their Chinese names onto a small rock stamp. Traditionally, this is how documents were signed in China. The man who was in charge of teaching us to both use calligraphy brushes and carve our stones was what I would describe as new age. He told us to balance our Qi and breathe deeply. Even some of the Chinese roommates were snickering at him. By the end of the event, I had painted a large character, that I believe means peace, painted my Chinese name next to it, and also stamped the painting in red ink with my newly carved stamp. There is a new picture up on the new picture site of both my artistic endeavor and of all the food that I ate for lunch today. I hope you enjoy!

Bad start to a week.

It's a monday afternoon, and I'm done with classes. What do I decide to do? I decide to go play some basketball with Muh on the court downstairs. This was a poor decision for multiple reasons: (1) I am incredibly horrible at basketball. (2) I am currently battling a mild cold (3) I ended up rolling my right ankle pretty badly. As these reasons swirl through my head, I sit with my leg propped up on my suitcase and work on homework while waiting for Chinese food to be delivered to me....in China. However, I have been a little productive today. I changed my picture hosting site to webshots, which loads much more quickly. Though, I don't know if the pictures are quite as large. Anyway, let me know what you think of the new picture site. Here's a link: Webshots. I will also put it up under my links section under the name New Pictures.

The Weekend Excitement.

Last night was a very long evening out on the town in Beijing. Everyone got back from seeing the acrobats at about 9:30pm, which was amazing apparently. Oh well, lesson learned. So, a huge group of us headed out to the front of the school to catch cabs out to a bar called NanJie, which we had been told was a very good local bar. Unfortunately, the cabbie didn't know exactly where the bar was so he dropped us off on a side of the Worker’s Stadium, which is a really huge soccer stadium. So after about thirty phone calls and literally an hour and a half of wondering around, we finally arrived at the bar. It turns out, it’s a bar full of everyone but Chinese people. There were loads and loads of European people, who really enjoyed getting in fights. Right before we left, I helped break up a fight between these drunken Eastern European guys who were about the size of my leg. Also there were a good amount of Americans at the bar. Our group talked to a group of three American guys who were teaching in China and all had plans to go back to the states to study more. I had some pretty interesting shots, one of which was called a Taiwanese Duck Fart. It was pretty good, not the best sounding name though. As it turns out, we didn't get back to the dorm until about 4:00 AM. The best part though, is that my 21^st century Beijing class had a 9:50 AM field trip the next morning to a museum.

Feeling quite wonderful (and by wonderful I mean horrible) I woke around 8:00 AM and wondered down to the bus. The bus ride was about 30 minutes, and we ended up at a museum right by Tiananmen. The theme of the museum was the modernization of Beijing. The museum had a huge floor model of the entire city of Beijing. It was incredible. I felt like Godzilla. The model included all of the new Olympic buildings, which all look incredible. I’d really love to come back in 2008 to see some of the Olympic Games; the city will be incredibly beautiful by then.

As everyone was starving, after the museum, we decided to head to a near by McDonalds. Oh sweet American food!!!! We all had a hamburger and some fries and they were everything that I dreamed they could be. Since we were by Tiananmen again, we all decided that we would go into the Forbidden City. It was a great decision. That place was amazing. We had to pay a 60 Yuan entrance Fee, but it was well worth it. The Forbidden City was a palace for the rulers of China throughout the ages, and is the definition of excess. The place is the size of some towns. Our group walked straight through the compound to the backside. We did very little stopping, and it ended up taking about three hours to go all the way through. It would take days to explore the entire palace! I took plenty of good pictures, but my camera ran out of batteries, so I didn't get everything that I wanted. But Muh’s camera was still working, so hopefully I’ll get some pictures from him. As we were heading back to the front of the Forbidden City to catch the subway back to the dorm, Dan and I noticed a very tall American walking through the City. It was freakin Sebastian Bach (lead singer of Skid Row, an very popular 80s band), you probably know him by sight if you don't recognize the name. It was so surreal. He is playing a show this Sunday in Beijing and was out to see the sights. Dan and I seized the opportunity to get our picture with him. Check out my picture site, there will be a lot of new ones up soon! It really made my week. That’s all the excitement of my weekend thus far. Hopefully the rest of the weekend will involve plenty of sleep!

Whew.

It's Friday afternoon in Beijing. The first week of classes here at CNU are finally over. That was one of the longest academic weeks I've ever been a part of. I think I can safely say that it was a successful one though. This morning was the first weekly test in my Chinese class. The test consisted of a written portion that tested our memory of new vocabulary and also tested our memory of newly learned sentence structure. The second part of the test consisted of an oral examination. Everyone in the class was assigned a 7 minute period throughout the morning to come into the class room and hand in a written paragraph written about the lessons of the week, and then to begin speaking using the new vocabulary and sentence structures for 5 minutes straight. Needless to say, I made it to about 3 minutes and then got the deer in the headlights look. Thankfully, my teacher began asking me questions in Chinese using the sentence structures that I hadn't used yet, and I was actually able to answer her questions. But overall, I think that I did pretty well. We also had a daily quiz every day this week, which covered about 30 new characters a night and 6 new sentence structures. Studying for those normally takes up all of my evenings all week. Unfortunately, I also have two other classes. So, up to this point, those classes have received very little attention, but don't worry, I'll get into the swing of things soon.
On a lighter note, after everyone had finished their tests, a big group of us foreigners headed down to our favorite little alley that sells scallion pancakes and other baked goodies and had a tasty lunch. It was a really beautiful Friday afternoon, so I took a few pictures. We could actually see the large hills behind the city, which you can see in one of the pictures that I posted today. We then wondered around for a little while, and then the consensus was that a nap was in order. Muh woke me up at about 5:30. Tonight, across town there are acrobats performing, and there was a sign up sheet in the laundry room—a sheet that I failed to sign. So, I'm here all by myself until later this evening. Then hopefully I'll be heading out for a night on the town in Beijing, which promises to be very interesting! I'll definitely update you all on the night scene in Beijing sometime this weekend. Until then, Zai Jian.

Class is in session.

This Sunday was the beginning of what is going to be a very difficult academic semester. My first classes did not start until Monday, but we had an Academic meeting on Sunday, to hear a little from all the teachers and receive syllabi and our textbooks. Also, the teachers took this opportunity to assign homework. Yes, we hadn't even started classes and we were assigned homework.
Later that afternoon was the opening banquet! All the CET students loaded into a charter bus outside of school and headed for the Marriot Hotel, which was about at 10 minute ride from CNU. The Marriott is apparently a hotbed for American activity. Within the lobby was a Subway (oh the memories from WFU) and a Baskin Robins. Also outside of the Marriot was a "Big Burger," which I hope to get back to after I get tired of eating Chinese food everyday. Don't get me wrong, the food here is amazing (except for the fish...), but I had kung pao chicken at my last 3 meals (people ordering for me), and that gets kind of tiring. I've been hearing that some people get sick after going back to the US because of all the dairy that is used in our food--some sort of lactose intolerance (or so I was told). But anyway, the Marriot was incredible. Everything was marble or shinny. The banquet was very delicious and had all kinds of food and more importantly, the wait staff was amazing. In China there were no real restaurants about 30 years ago, so the whole incredibly-horrible-service phase is still in high gear. If you like yelling at waitresses across the room for extra bowls of rice, then this is your kind of place.
The evening took a big turn for the worst when I got back from the banquet. It was homework time. So, before class had even started, I ended up doing six and a half hours of homework, all of it just for my Chinese language class. This is going to be a LONG semester. Despite the overwhelming amount of homework, I really like my professors. My Chinese professor is a young Chinese woman who speaks very little English, but is very good at conveying her points with hand gestures. My 21st century Beijing Professor is the faculty advisor for our trip. She's from Guilford College (Greensboro), and is about as exciting as a bag of rocks in a room filled with bags of rocks. She is very knowledgeable though. My Philosophy professor is amazing. He's originally from Beijing, but has taught at Clemson for about 8 years I believe. He uses a lot of humor in his discussions and is incredibly intelligent. Here's a quote from when he was explaining the criteria for writing a paper: "If you write, 'because the Bible says so,' then I give you an F. I hate that. Or if you say, 'Confucius is full of bullshit,' I also give you an F."
I hope that I can make it through this semester without going nuts from all the work, but if not, at least I'll be a crazy person who can speak Chinese. Wish me luck. PS I'm going to try to work on the postcards today. I haven’t really had much time to write them yet, but I haven’t forgotten. Zai Jian.

A very long Friday

On Friday afternoon, several of the other CET students and I set out to have some lunch. When we finished our tasty bowls of beef noodles, we decided to continue walking through the city. Before long, we found ourselves deep in the city. We wound our way through a few narrow allies and eventually found ourselves at the banks of a river. We followed the river taking plenty of pictures until we reached a bridge. Upon crossing the bridge, we were once again lucky enough to stumble upon an interesting part of Beijing. Apparently, there is some sort of fertility park in Beijing, which is filled with sculptures relating to birth and life. The park also contained a playground, except the playground was full of gymnastic training equipment. I did not see a single child, but some old creepy guy did come to the playground and hang upside down from the monkey bars. Apparently that’s cool in China. Yes, I do have a picture of him doing this, just check out the flikr site.
After laughing at the old man for a while, we noticed that there were people actually swimming and lathering up in the river, which may not sound very weird, but this river was a dark green tint that reminded me of the slime from Double Dare. I wouldn't have put my pinky toe in, much less bathe in there. We continued our journey home and eventually came across three boys who gladly let us take their picture (which is also on the flikr site). One of them was carrying a folding chair and the others were eating handfuls of some sort of fruit. It was really bizarre.
When we finally reached another bridge while attempting to return to campus, Muh and I spotted the roof of some sort of ancient Chinese building. We all decided to check it out, and set off to find the entrance. Along the way, I was solicited to buy a cell phone from a random guy on the sidewalk who followed me for about five minutes offering a price of 700 Yuan (roughly $90). It was good Chinese practice, but he was creepy and I didn't need a cell phone, so we parted ways at the entrance to our mystery building. It turned out to be some sort of Chinese art museum. We did not actually go inside, but the architecture and details of the outside of the building were amazing.
We made it back to campus just in time for roommates to begin arriving. It turns out we had been walking for about five hours straight, which is not the best idea before meeting roommates. However, when I returned I was still without my roommate, which was sort of discouraging. So, I headed to dinner with all of the other CET students who had not received their roommates. Upon returning from a tasty dinner (except for the fish dish, which seemed to be some sort of barracuda?) I found my new Chinese roommate and his girlfriend watching TV in my room. So began the awkwardness that is now my life. My Chinese is not good, and his English is not too hot either. So, there is a lot of blank stares and awkward silences. However, they both seemed to be very nice and patient with my lack of Chinese knowledge. His name is "gao ray" and I totally forgot his girlfriend’s name, but our evening ended with a walk over to her dorm and then a long walk back to our own dorm with more exciting awkwardness. But, I think I will learn a lot with the language barrier between us, so I am going to try to take advantage of the opportunity as much as possible.