Bicycles, booty, and boys: all kinds of silliness

Life in China is frequently dirty and impolite and generally un-PC, but sometimes there are really pretty and/or moments when I think wow, how could living in China get any better than this?

*Getting a bingsuan(a cold egg pancake wrapped around other good stuff) and biking to Weiming Lake, then sitting on a rock in the shade next to the lake, eating my delicious bingsuan lunch and studying a little.

*A few days after buying a bike with the assistance of my tutor, I go back to the bike shop and ask for a bell, having just looked up the word for bell in my dictionary. The only bells they have say "I (heart) my baby" on them, so I get that one, figuring that the bicycle is my baby. The man attaches it to the handlebar for me and I ride off to get ice cream, ringing my bell happily.

*Riding from Hanyu class to Kouyu class, I pass a line of schoolchildren in matching tracksuits and yellow hats who are visiting Beida for who knows what reason. When they see me, they all yell "hello" and wave, excited to speak English to a bona fide foreign person, and I ring my bicycle bell at them and hello back.

All evidence points to the fact that, as I had previously suspected, having a bicycle makes life awesomer. Today I rode it across campus, then took a bus to Wudaokou, then took the subway to Xizhimen, then wandered around until I found a market that I had read about in my Insider's Guide to Beijing. I was the only white person in the market. And on the bus. And on the subway. And, as far as I can tell, in the whole Xizhimen area. Hence it was a time for lots of staring, and occasional accented "hello"s from Chinese who want to try out their English, and comments from the crossing guard to random other people about how I don't know when to cross the street and that this is somehow related to the fact that I have white skin (if I understood correctly), and the most intense patronizing I have undergone as of yet from a woman who was selling me pants and assumed that since I am not fluent in Chinese, I wouldn't understand complex concepts like "big" and "okay" unless she employed her incredibly limited English to translate them for me, despite the fact that I had previously used said words, in Chinese, in conversation with her. This might have been the most frustrating thing ever and I might have wanted to admonish her sharply in my (not-too-shabby) Chinese, but I didn't because I wanted those pants so I couldn't do anything to make the vendor dislike me.

Another thing I discovered today is that apparently my butt is MONSTROUS. I knew before that Chinese women were not so (to use the technical term) bootylicious, but it took an attempt at buying jeans today for me to realize the extent of the difference. The difference is: Chinese women do not have hips. I don't think I'm terribly large by American standards, but when I tried on the largest capris on the rack, I still couldn't even put them on all the way. Good times. At the place with the condescending saleslady, I got linen pants that are size XXL. Sweet. It's okay, China, I'm content in the knowledge that with my breadth of hips, having babies is totally more convenient. But you don't need that all that much anyway because you can only have one child each, ohhhhh take that!! Just kidding China, you know I love ya.

Today when I was riding on campus a man stopped me to ask if he could be my friend. I am totally popular. I decided that if I wanted a Chinese boyfriend I could probably just walk around campus and yell "who wants to be my boyfriend" in Chinese, and that would probably take care of it real quick. Everybody loves a waiguoren! China so silly.

In like 2 hours I'm leaving campus to head to the airport, upon which I shall depart for Xinjiang for May break! (Wikipedia it, it's totally an interesting place) I am super psyched. I'll be back in a week, so don't expect any blogs for a little bit. But then expect a really big one, because I'm sure I'll have a lot to tell! Feichang hao!

In case you were tired of my non-stop Chinese adventures

Today I didn't really do anything exciting. I almost lost consciousness in the first half of my Hanyu class, and was only saved by our 10-minute rest period in the middle of class, when I took a super power nap until Ren Bai Ge threw a piece of paper at my head, at which point I continued to sleep because I just didn't care. I was supposed to go volunteer again at the home for babies with medical problems, but I woke up so incredibly ganmao (ganmao=to have a cold) this morning that I had to cancel because I didn't want to get babies sick. I finished all my homework by 1 pm and took a 4-hour nap this afternoon, which ruled. Also I ate spicy food to clear out my sinuses and rode my bicycle. I love having a bicycle. I wish I had gotten one sooner - it's so much faster to get around campus, and BeiDa is really well suited for bikes because it's very flat and there are lots of places to park them because everybody in China has a bike.

Unrelated: Today in Hanyu we learned the word chai, which means "to tear apart," and I had an epiphany because I had seen that character written on all the buildings in a little neighborhood by my church and wondered what it meant, but it turns out they must be marked for demolition. My teacher joked that some people say that's why the country is called Chai-na. Sad but accurate...

It's only 9 am

So I can't exactly be sure what kind of day today is going to turn out to be, but I could try to extrapolate from the data I've collected so far. Let's see how things bode:

-it's Monday (does not bode well)
-I successfully woke up early to study some more (bodes well)
-found out that the zipper on my jeans is broken (does not bode well, and I don't even want to think about how it bodes for me to try to find pants in China)
-didn't actually get all the studying done that I needed to (does not bode well)
-got to the test early (bodes well)
-found out that I had somehow put my water bottle in my backpack this morning without a lid on so now all of my books are rather soggy around the edges (does not bode well)
-took my annoying Tingli midterm and forgot a few kind of important things (does not bode well)
-but at least the test was over in half a class period (bodes well, and now I have time to shower, which bodes fantastically)
-still have to do at least 2 Hanyu worksheets and study for 2 quizzes in the time between classes (does not bode well)
-but I have an appointment with my tutor to go bicycle shopping so hopefully I can get a bicycle today! (bodes well, although bicycle shopping is probably taking away from my study/homework time)

Overall, I would say that I am batting maybe .500 today, which is pretty good, if you imagine that life is baseball. And if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go take a shower, because I feel being clean and happy will increase the quality of boding that we've got going on today.

UPDATE:
shower: successful
studying for quizzes: successful, and I aced those babies
getting homework done: successful
and most importantly, getting a bicycle: feichang successful!!!

Now the only thing I'm worried about is that my bike will get stolen because it's a pretty decent bike - I had to get a new one because there weren't any secondhand ones this time of the season. Bicycle bicycle bicycle! Wo hen gaoxing!

Accomplishments

Things I accomplished this weekend that I hadn't planned:
-teaching at a migrant school
-making new friends
-helping plan a fundraiser
-exploring SanLiTun for the first time
-catching up on the buzz for the next Harry Potter book
-reading really interesting poetry by C.S. Lewis

Things that I planned to accomplish this weekend but never did:
-buying a mouth covering for dusty weather
-going to the market by the Zoo
-getting a bicycle
-putting away my clean laundry
-studying for my Tingli midterm tomorrow
-homework
-buying caffeinated beverages before the store closed in order to more successfully accomplish the previous two items

...whoops. Sometimes it's hard to maintain a balance between different kinds of productivity.

A Love/Hate Relationship, or something

Yesterday my roomie and I went downtown to WangFuJing. It's kind of the hoity-toity, rather pricey shopping area in Beijing, but I wanted to go there just to see it once, because it's pretty famous. The weather was supposed to be nice and warm, so I was like all right, we can walk to the subway station and walk around outside in WangFuJing and it will be nice, right? I had a little shopping list all made of things I was going to look for - in particular I wanted to get a scarf so I can wear it over my face if it's dusty out (Xinjiang, where I'm going over May break, is mostly desert, so I figured I'd need it). But what do you know, it turned out to be a day of dust storms, and before we had even gotten anywhere where I could get a scarf I was choking on dust. To make matters worse, I hadn't been able to sleep much the night before, and even before roomie and I got all the way to WangFuJing we were soooo tired and our throats felt awful and we were a little bit crabby. We walked around in WangFuJing a bit, and I looked in the bookstores there for the elusive Uyghur phrasebook we need for the May break trip, but my mission was unsuccessful. I looked around for the book, and then asked an employee if they had it, and she said of course and went to show me where it was, and then said actually it should be over there, and the employee over there told me they actually didn't have it. Good times. Although then a little man came up and said "Excuse me?" and when I turned to him he said "Maybe I can help you." We had a little Chinglish conversation about my book, but it quickly became clear that he only knew a little English, so we only had a short conversation until his English ran out. It was a kind of adorable little incident.

So I ended up not successfully buying anything in WangFuJing except food. Oh well. Although my roomie and I did discover a hilariously named and rather delicious cream puff place called Beard Papa's. I ate maybe the only vaguely legitimate chocolate dessert I've ever had in China, so maybe the day wasn't an entire waste. I collapsed basically as soon as we got home, and really didn't do anything more the rest of the day except sleep.

Today was totally different than yesterday, however, and pretty much surpassed it in all ways except the chocolate-dessert factor. I woke up this morning with the famous and delightful Beijing cough, and although it still hasn't gone away, I don't mind so much because my day was amazing! I headed out around 11:30 to go to the market by the Beijing Zoo, and on my way to the subway station I called After Hours, who were all together at the spring concert afterparty, and it was really awesome to talk to them and made me really excited for a cappella times next year! When I got to the subway station, however, I ran into a couple of people I knew from CIEE along with some other folks, and we chatted for a bit and they said that they were going
to teach at a school for the children of migrant workers and it still wasn't too late if I wanted to come. I said oh that sounded cool, but I was already going to the market by the Zoo, but then I thought, I can go shopping at that market anytime. I'll seize this opportunity to do something different.

So that's how I wound up taking the subway in the opposite direction that I had intended, up into the northern outskirts of Beijing, then catching a bus, then walking to a little concrete building with a makeshift school facility inside. The girl in charge had little lesson plans for us, and we actually spent the first session working with local teachers on their English. We went over their last week's homework and then we learned question words! Who, what, when, where, why, and how! It was super. We were pretty much one-on-one with our "students," and I worked with a woman named Rose (although she wasn't very confident in remembering/pronouncing her English name) who had brought along her little 4th-grade son and kept asking him questions to check how to say things in English. Her English was pretty limited, and she was very shy about speaking it, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that my Chinese was up to the task of explaining things like when to use which conjugation of the verb "to do" and other various idiosyncrasies of the language. After the lesson, we even had a short game of Bingo! I loved every minute of it. Also, it came out in conversation on the way over to the school that a lot of adults learning English want to learn the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) to help them get past the inconsistent English spelling system and learn to pronounce things properly. Now, most native English speakers who volunteer teaching don't know the IPA, but it just so happens that I am a linguistics major and I just might actually have a fair amount of experience applying the IPA to the phonemic systems of both English and Chinese, and might have done a fair amount of my own research about the relationship between the two when I first learned how to pronounce Chinese. So, I may be developing my own lesson on the IPA to teach in a couple weeks.

After the teachers, we had a session with kids, which was in Chinese rather than English. This week's topic was proper nutrition, and we drew a food pyramid and talked about the number of servings you should be getting in each food group, and then talked about what foods were healthy and what foods weren't. One of the volunteers had brought a stick of the processed meat, a ubiquitous Chinese snack that always sits out unrefrigerated and is probably more similar to Spam than anything else. Appetizing, no? But the kids love them, so we read the list of the ingredients together and talked about how if there are random weird filler ingredients in a food that we've never heard of, maybe we should think twice about eating that food. Afterwards we made no-bake cookies with purportedly healthy ingredients like peanuts and dried fruit, and the children were insanely hyper. I don't think the lesson sank in a whole lot, but they had fun. At one point I said "Zhende?" ("really?") in response to something, and I must have been very loud or dramatic or gotten my tones wrong or something, or maybe it was just because I am a silly white person speaking Chinese, but a couple little girls sat there and did imitations of me for a couple minutes. Good times. I've come to accept the fact that I will always be treated differently in China. It's incredibly un-PC, but you can't expect the Chinese to change their ways overnight, so whatevs. Hen hao!

After the classes were over, I thought about going to the market that was my original destination, and I thought about just going back to campus, and I thought about going to the art district with Meagan to see so-called "guerrilla theater" in the streets, but what I ended up doing was going with some of the other volunteers, some Chinese and some American, to Beijing Agricultural University to have dinner together on campus. During dinner we talked about random stuff, like different cultural attitudes towards vegetarianism, and the importance of ethnic background in America, and the negative consequences of Mao's Great Leap Forward, and it was a fun and interesting time, but after dinner we actually all got together and started planning a fundraiser to raise money for an education/community center with computers for the students of the migrant community. It's very hard for the children of migrant workers to get a good education, because since they aren't technically Beijing residents, the government doesn't have the same provisions for them as it does for Beijing children, so the highest level of education they can get is middle school, and that only if their parents have a fair amount of money. At the same time as tons of Chinese students spend hours upon hours studying every day from a very young age so they can pass the crucial test to get into a good college and get a good job, tons more are totally slipping through the cracks. Granted, education is nowhere near consistent for children of different socioeconomic backgrounds in America, but in China it's an even bigger difference. Anyway, the upshot of this whole thing is that out of pure coincidence, although I never got to the market today, now I'm involved with this migrant school and the NGO that runs it, and tomorrow night I think I'm going out to scout locations for the fundraiser, because (more evidence of the total un-PCness of Chinese culture) the people who are kind of actually in charge of this thing, although they are from Western countries, have Chinese parents and therefore Chinese faces and need a Westerner with them to have credibility. So basically, I volunteered myself, as the least Chinese-looking person ever, to be a figurehead. Hen hao!

Today in the subway I had the unusual experience of being blatantly stared at by a non-Chinese person, who by my judgment was definitely American and probably a college student, who was looking at me as if with the intent to ask a question, but when I asked him he just said he thought I was someone he knew from somewhere but maybe not. Later today someone else (Asian this time...back to normal) also thought they knew me from somewhere...I think maybe in China the frequency of curly-blonde-haired girls is so low that people assume we all must be the same one. Good times. I do admit, I feel instant kinship when I see other blonde women out in the city, especially if they also have curly hair. I always want to strike up conversations with them, because I know that we must share so many of the same type of experiences in China. We are all sisters, the Beijing Blondes.

Anyway, in conclusion, today was an amazing day. It didn't turn out anything like I expected, but when do I ever really know what to expect around here? Sure, yesterday sucked a little, and that dust storm left my throat feeling the urge to abandon my civilized ways and hock a loogie, Beijing style(I might have unabashedly spit in public today...whoops), but hey, suffering builds character. Didn't you learn anything from reading Calvin and Hobbes? With all of its silly pollution and complete lack of political correctness and small children peeing in the street (another one of my delightful China experiences of the day and another reason I will never ever touch the bottoms of my shoes or even think about them, if possible), at least Beijing never fails to be interesting. So it's not really a love/hate relationship between me and China...I just love it even when it sucks a little bit. That's just how I roll. It's hen hao.

Super Thursday

I really don't mind Thursdays, because after my 2 morning classes it's the weekend! I was going to go somewhere this afternoon, but then I got sleepy and took a nap instead. So it could have been a really unproductive day, except that my evening turned out awesome!!! I went out to eat with my English Corner friends...the English topic was supposed to be Chinese traditional medicine, but we actually didn't talk about it at all. Whoops. We did, however, eat delicious and rather spicy food! I am definitely developing my tolerance for spicy foods here. There was one dish that I tried and then afterwards asked what it was, and it turned out to be congealed pig blood. Mmmm. It's actually not bad, especially if you don't know what you're eating. Hen hao! Also, we played Mafia! It was pretty fun, although it got tricky for me when people were using Chinese, because I can't defend myself very well if I can't even tell why I'm being accused. It was super fun though. Someone had a bottle of China's most famous white wine, and I learned that you can only actually get the real stuff if you work for the government. Oh, China. We played Mafia at the restaurant for a really long time, and then we came back to the office where we meet for English Corner because we were going to play more Mafia, but there weren't enough people so instead we went out to play basketball, and even though I was wearing totally unsuitable shoes, I ended up playing basketball with Chinese friends until after midnight! They are so much fun! So basically, it was a super duper evening that totally redeemed what could have been a day of doing absolutely nothing worthwhile. Wooo! Hen hao!

Everything You Wanted to Know About China (But Were Afraid to Ask)

In case you were worried or just curious about certain aspects of my life in China, I made a little Q and A.

What time is it in China?
The same time as it is at home, only AM instead of PM or vice versa. It used to be a 13 hour time difference, but the Communist government doesn't believe in Daylight Savings Time.

What is the weather like in Beijing?
Very dry, but rather nice during the time I've been here. Spring was cool, but summer is here approximately NOW and it's going to be 80 degrees tomorrow! Take that, East Coast of America with your cold weather and your floods.

What about pollution? Do you wear a mask?
The pollution is actually a lot less noticeable than I had expected. The sky is a bit opaque in the distance, but it still gets nice and sunny. I don't wear a mask, but in fact, pretty much nobody wears a mask, because those masks are basically ineffective against the small particles in the air that ordinary people breathe. People in dusty jobs (e.g. street cleaners) often wear masks, and everybody wears them during the spring sandstorm, which usually comes in March, but has not yet occurred, and may not occur this year at all. The upshot of it all is that you shouldn't worry about my innocent little lungs too much. I make sure to cover my mouth if I'm walking in an area with particularly dirty air, and after all, I'm only here for 4 months, anyway.

I was wondering about boogers. Are boogers different in China?
Yes! In fact, one of the most noticeable effects of the air pollution (or at least I think so) is the fact that it makes your boogers (or, to use the technical term, "nose gook") turn a darker color, the famous "black booger" effect (what, you mean you hadn't heard of it?). It sounds bad, but in fact you should feel relieved that my boogers are doing their job and catching the weird dirt that I breathe into my nose. Nose power!

Are the bathrooms all sketchy?
Mostly, yes. They are almost all of the "squatty potty" variety, although you will run into the occasional Western toilet. Really nice bathrooms will have toilet paper and/or soap, and maybe even paper towels or a hand dryer, although that's pushing it. Public bathrooms can be pretty smelly, and the bathrooms on the train are particularly rank. Also train bathrooms flush via a flap that opens onto the tracks, isn't that nice? I thought so too.

I hear the Chinese are buying cars faster than any other country, and China is already full of bicycles, right? Is the traffic scary?
I'm pretty sure there are some kind of traffic laws in China, but nobody pays much attention to them. It's pretty much every man/car/bicycle for himself. Imagine a gigantic game of Chicken, where everybody kind of drives at each other until someone moves out of the way (this is made even more fun by the use of horns). It's also a lot like Frogger if you are a pedestrian or cyclist trying to cross a several-lane street. At first I found the traffic a little unnerving, but now I cross the street like a total Chinese person, striding in front of moving cars and buses and dancing around bikers without so much as a flinch.

YOU'RE GOING TO GET HIT BY A CAR!!!
No I'm not. Don't be silly.

How do you know?
The traffic here is usually so jammed that the cars are generally going pretty slow when I walk in front of them, so it's not particularly risky. When we first got to China, the rule of thumb was "always cross the street at the same time as a Chinese person," but I don't really need that anymore. I am a total pro. In fact, I really enjoy crossing the street, because it requires so much strategy; it's like a sport. That I am awesome at. Sometimes it's even quite elegant, the way that cars and bicycles and pedestrians pass each other going every which way, coming within feet and sometimes inches of each other without touching. It's like a dance.

Are you careful about what kind of food you eat?
Most food is actually okay to eat, I just don't drink tap water. Before I came, I was warned not to eat raw fruits and vegetables, but after avoiding them for a little while I abandoned the effort, and now I'm just careful when I eat them. As long as they are washed well or peeled, it's not a problem. It would be a shame to miss out on the awesome fruits and vegetables here, especially the pineapple-on-a-stick that they sell on every corner. The students from last semester told us that we would get sick pretty much no matter what we ate, so we shouldn't bother being too particular in our food choices, just be vaguely reasonable.

So have you gotten sick?
No, actually. My tutor told me that there is a Chinese saying about traveling which says that different water and different land will make you uncomfortable (I'm paraphrasing here). She also gave me an analogy about these oranges that grow along the banks of the Yangtze River in Southern China that are very delicious in the south, but if you try to grow them in the north they aren't very good. I told my tutor that frankly I was quite comfortable in China and it hasn't disturbed my health at all, and she said that maybe I was still a good orange in China. I like to think that I'm a good orange.

I think you're a good orange.
Why, thank you.

I have a friend who lives in China! You guys could hang out.
Probably not. Even within Beijing, everything is farther apart than you think over here. And I didn't exactly come here to meet other Americans, anyway. No offense.

What about when the Lehigh choir comes?
That's different; I will totally hang out with them. Plus, their concert happens to be on my campus, as I recently found out. It's going to be a sweet time!

Did you eat anything silly today?
I got "Italian Red Meat" flavored potato chips, but frankly they mostly just taste like barbecue.

How does living in China affect the way you speak?
Well, besides the fact that my Chinese has gotten loads better, my English has actually gotten a little bit weird. I occasionally find myself speaking English with the grammar and style of a native Chinese speaker. Also I enunciate things more, like a lot of the time I actually say the entire word "to" instead of just that "tuh" sound that most Americans use in fast speech. This might be partially due to the fact that I talk with non-native English speakers more than I do at home, but mostly I can't really say why it is. Also my Spanish is so mixed up; it's nearly impossible for me to speak Spanish without Chinese words sneaking in. My English is already so peppered with Chinese that when I'm speaking to someone who doesn't know any Chinese, I have to restrain myself from breaking out into the little spurts of Chinglish that characterize most of my conversations.

How do Chinese people react when they hear you speak Chinese for the first time?
Some people are a little bit surprised, but are generally impressed that a person of my appearance knows any Chinese. Lots of Chinese will still refuse to acknowledge me, and will be really patronizing, slowing their speech down to a crawl, using whatever English words they know, and holding up fingers/calculators instead of just telling me numbers out loud when I ask for prices. It's a little bit funny and a little bit offensive and annoying.

So what are you up to right now?
I'm going to take a shower, study a little for my quiz tomorrow, and go to bed. Incidentally, in China I almost always go to bed before midnight and wake up at 7 something. It's crazy.

What if I have more questions?
Deal with it; I'm going to bed. Or post them in comments and I'll answer them later. I changed the settings so you don't even need a Google or Blogger account to comment, so don't fret! Hen hao!

Hangzhou and some other adventures

So I lived through my two midterms on Thursday, and I think I did okay on both of them, probably A-/B+ range, although I don't know for sure yet. I had only slept two hours or so Wednesday night, but Thursday after my tests I wanted to resist napping so I could sleep early at night, so instead I went on a shopping adventure! I ventured off by myself to find a market that I had read about in my guidebook but had never actually been to before, and it was super fun. I felt so independent just getting there myself and talking to the vendors myself in Chinese and such. It wasn't a market with lots of foreigners, which was cool. I bought two skirts and a golden pig, and I think I did quite well on the skirts but probably overpaid for the pig. Oh well, it was a good buy.

Friday after lunch we left on a CIEE trip to Hangzhou! Hangzhou is south of Beijing, and is famous for being a garden city and having beautiful weather. We had doubts, because every CIEE trip so far has had abysmal weather (it is no coincidence that "CIEE" sounds awfully like xia yu, the Chinese word for rain), but it was actually pretty nice. It was soooooo green we were all just in shock for a while. Hangzhou is famous not only for being China's garden city, but also for having the famous Dragon Well tea and really nice silk and some other thing it was famous for that I forgot. Oh! Hangzhou is the city of love, I think. Our tour guide said something about Romeo and Juliet ("a very love story," in her own words), and told us that maybe we would meet our true love in Hangzhou. Good times. Another cool thing about Hangzhou was that it had animated Walk signs, like when you were supposed to cross the street the little man would not only be green, but his arms and legs would be moving. It was totally advanced. Unfortunately, we didn't get to spend a lot of time in Hangzhou because the train we were supposed to take back to Beijing wasn't going to run (I'm not entirely clear on why this was, but I'm fairly certain it has to do with Communism), so we had to leave at lunchtime on our second day to take a bus to Zhouzhuang (the Venice of China!), where we had like 2 hours to stroll around before getting back on the bus to go to Shanghai to catch a different train back. It sucked a little, but we also got upgraded to a 4-star hotel in Hangzhou, which was sweeeeeeet. Mostly what we did the whole weekend was look at various tourist attractions (some temple-y place in Hangzhou and of course a canal-y place in Zhouzhuang) and go shopping, our perennial hobby, although I don't generally buy much. Also in Hangzhou my roomie and I ate small octopi, which was interesting (verdict: rubbery but not bad), and in both cities Chinese people stopped to ask if they could take pictures with me, or if they were slightly sketchier, took pictures of me randomly without asking permission. Good times. It's funny, when I walk with Quynh, Chinese people will ask her to tell me things, assuming she is Chinese (Vietnamese, actually, and she doesn't look at all like a Chinese person, in my opinion, and I'm not even that good at distinguishing my Asians, if we're going to be honest). So in Hangzhou we decided that Quynh should just be my broker, and every time someone asks her to ask me if they can take a picture with me, she should charge them a couple kuai, and we could use the money to supplement our fruit-buying budget. Muahahah!

Picture time!

Pretty pretty gardens in Hangzhou:















Buddha carved in the side of the mountain:


















West Lake, the famousest pretty place in Hangzhou:














Canals in Zhouzhang, the Venice of China:














I really wish we had had more time in Hangzhou and/or Zhouzhuang, because there were lots of cultural-type things that we didn't have time to see because of our trip getting cut short and because of the nasty nasty tourist-season traffic. Shame! But I just figured out that I'm going to Xinjiang with Richard and Casey over May break! There is all kinds of culture there. Xinjiang is an autonomous province in the far western desert of China that's got some whole bunch of Uyghurs (an Islamic ethnic group), but it's just generally very diverse because it borders a lot of places, so there are Chinese and Turkish and Russian ethnic groups. Xinjiang is probably the only place in China where I might plausibly pass for a Chinese person. Might. Hen hao! I am super excited!

Oh man, Tuesday afternoon I went on a mini-adventure to figure out how to get to the Wudaokou clothing market using public transportation, because before I had only gone there by taxi, but I try not to get in the habit of taking taxis everywhere because as comparatively cheap as they are here in China, it adds up. So I looked at a map to see where the market was, then walked to the nearest bus stop and looked at the bus routes to see which ones looked like they stopped near there. Unfortunately, there are no maps at the bus stop, so you if you want to know how to get somewhere you kind of need to know the name of the stop, but I figured it out reasonably okay. I just get off the bus at a stop that I think is near where I'm trying to go and walk around until I find it. If I get lost I can always ask for directions. I think it's super fun, but most people don't have my patience for being slightly lost, so I like to go by myself. This weekend I have super lots of free time, and a lot of people are traveling, but I think I'm just going to go exploring around Beijing. Hen hao! I totally love that my weekend starts Thursday at noon, so I have lots of days to do awesome exploring!

Easter, Babies, and everything in between

It's been a busy past couple days for this girl...on Easter I got up at 6 am because there was supposed to be a sunrise service at Weiming Lake here on campus, but by the time I got out there it was 6:40-something and apparently the people had already left, which was a shame, but I enjoyed a peaceful morning stroll around the lake, so it wasn't all for nought. The Easter choir had to be at church at 7:45 to practice, and then we had services at 9 and 11, so I sang some whole bunch and listened to the sermon twice and missed my family a little bit because I didn't think anybody here would fully appreciate my responding to "He is risen" with "You betcha!" It was still a great day though. The choir rocked out, and the church was packed, and everything was fabulous, and afterwards a whole bunch of people went over to the Cantonese restaurant next door which had an all-you-can-eat buffet (traditional Easter food, I know), and I didn't actually get home until about 2:30, at which time I commenced taking an excellent nap, because darned if I hadn't been up and singing and dancing around in tall shoes since very early, and it was tiring.

Sunday night a bunch of CIEE students had a big ol' study-homework party at Be For Time Tea House, which has an 18 kuai unlimited-free-beverages and snacks deal. It sounded awesome, but we were so determined to drink our money's worth of beverages that after a while we all felt a little bit sick, since it seems that they make all their drinks from powdered mixes. Also the coffee was horrendous. We played little games with each other and the loser had to drink the coffee. Mmmm. I was still a little bit queasy when I woke up in the morning the next day, so I don't think that's going to be a frequent study location anymore. However, one good thing did emerge from my time there, which was another funny sign about water conservation, albeit less drastic than the last one: "Cherish the source of life and close every drop from dripping apart." Yes.

Monday was super warm (it got up to 74! which reminds me that sometime I should learn the metric system), and roomie and I declared a Skirt Day, and I wore one of my new T-shirts with silly English on it and my sparkly red "bride shoes" and was in a super awesome mood even though it was Monday and I hadn't slept very much. Wooo! It caught up to me today though, ahaha, and I was majorly tired in class, but today was the day that I was supposed to go volunteer with the Kind Heart Club to take care of babies with medical problems, and mid-morning I got a text message saying that we were meeting at 12:30 and not 1 as I had previously thought, and I had wanted to take a shower before I went but I only got out of class at 12, so I strategized a little bit and then pulled a super-duper awesome half-hour efficiency maneuver. At 12 o'clock sharp, I left my classroom (which is on the complete opposite side of campus as my dorm), sprinted across campus to my dorm, took a superhumanly fast shower, got dressed, and hustled back to the other side of campus where we were supposed to meet at the bus stop, pausing only to buy some food on the way. And I got there on time. I can't be modest about this; I am totally cool for pulling it off. Today and the next couple days are like intense time management exercises, because in addition to class and volunteering and meetings with my tutor, I have two midterms on Thursday to study for and a composition due at the same time and a quiz tomorrow plus an above average amount of normal homework in my Hanyu class for some reason. Suoyi (English: therefore), I am time-managing every minute of the day.

But yes, volunteering with babies. It's actually about an hour-long bus ride to get there, so the combined transportation time there and back was almost as much time as we actually spent there, but it was soooo awesome. I went with a girl I had never met before from the Kind Heart Club, so she knew the way there and what bus to take and such. The babies were still napping when we arrived, so they played me a little video about the place (Ping An, which means Safe Haven, approximately), which is a medical foster home for orphan babies. It's a small place, and today there were only three babies: one really small baby boy with a heart defect, and two babies with cleft lips, a boy who had gotten surgery and a girl who was going in for surgery next week. The little girl liked me the best, I think, and laughed when I made silly faces at her, and she was sooo cute. By the end of the time quite a few more adult volunteers had arrived than there were babies, so I had to stop hogging the babies' attention, but I had a really good time anyway. I was generally quite impressed with the organization, which is headed by an American (the wife of the CEO of Amway, apparently), because in China there isn't a whole lot of provision for people with any kind of medical handicap, and it's really easy for those children to fall through the cracks, although my Kind Heart Club friend explained that a lot of the children from Ping An get adopted by Americans. Interesting. I was so tired afterwards though that I slept almost the whole bus ride back, because as soon as we arrived I had to grab some dinner and go to meet with my tutor.

I know I've said it before, but my tutor is so awesome. I got there late, and I was so frazzled because I have so much to do and it seemed almost insurmountable, but after working through my stuff with Joy for an hour, we got so much done and I was so happy and I knew I would survive! I'm going to meet with her again tomorrow morning to edit my paper, which is due almost immediately after our meeting. Once again, time management is our watchword. Not that I budgeted any time for blogging...whoops.

But yeah, two random things to go out on: one, when I was entering the building where the Ping An facility is, I noticed an ad (presumably for Canadian vacations? beats me) that
advertised "Amorous feelings of Canada coast." Ah well, you know Canada, it's full of amorous feelings. Of course. The other thing was something I said by accident. I was talking about buying things, and "buy" in Chinese is "mai" - they rhyme. Anyway, without even thinking about it, I told my friend that I wished I had mought some ice cream. Then a couple seconds later it sank in to my brain that I had just said "mought." It was Chinglish on a new, ridiculous level, and I kind of like it. Hen hao! Now time to get back to homework and homework and homework and studying for the quiz I have tomorrow in Hanyu even though our midterm is the day after, I don't know what the teacher is thinking, exactly, but hey, this is China. We just have to accept things as they come.

Grand View Garden and other things

Friday afternoon was another CIEE-arranged field trip, this time to Grand View Garden. So far every single time we've had a CIEE field trip that involved being primarily outside (Forbidden City, Xi'an, DaShanZi Art District), the weather has been cold and wet and unhappy, so we were generally suspicious when it came to Grand View Garden, and most people weren't planning to go. However, when Friday came, the weather was looking fabulously warm and sunny, so I got on the good ol' Beida bus and trucked off to Grand View Garden.

On the bus, we had a tour guide who spoke English, and didn't seem to be entirely confident in our Chinese abilities, so she gave us the whole backstory of the garden in English, and whenever she spoke Chinese, she translated immediately afterwards. A month ago I probably would have been grateful for this, but at this point, I felt that it was rather patronizing, and I wanted to tell her to please please just speak in Chinese, we all understand you!! When we got off the bus she got ahold of a megaphone, and you could just see everybody wince as soon as they saw it. Fortunately we were on our own to roam in the garden, so it was okay after that.

If you haven't heard of it before (just kidding, of course you haven't), Grand View Garden was built in 1984 as a backdrop for the shooting of the movie version of the famous Chinese novel Dream of Red Mansions aka Dream of the Red Chamber aka Story of the Stone aka it's probably called other things too. Apparently they thought it was a kind of neato place, so in 1986 it was opened to the public for visiting. I was ready for some sort of beautiful botanical garden, but when we got there...well, I wasn't too surprised. It was very Chinese, and when I say that I mean that in addition to weeping willows and some flowering bushes, there were tacky fake flowering trees made of fading cloth and rusty metal skeletons. There were also a lot of fabric lanterns hanging around, and I'd guess with about 98% certainty that the flowers as well as the lanterns light up at night. After all, this is China, where Tacky Neon Lights are kind of the dominant decorating style. Hen hao!

Check out the natural foliage of spring!




























Also, although the weather was warm and sunny enough to make the temperature inside the bus slightly uncomfortable, the sun went behind the clouds about 30 seconds after we stepped out of the bus, and it stayed there the whole time. Ha. Plus the foliage wasn't all out yet, so looking at the garden got kind of boring really fast, except there were really cool rocks! I took some pictures of the scenery, but Jacqui and I quickly degenerated into taking silly pictures of ourselves in any "natural" environment that seemed to call out for a Kodak moment.





























Note: the statue in the fountain in the second photo is Li Bai, the famous alcoholic Chinese poet (the fountain spouts water into his cup). The thing I remember about Li Bai is that he died because he was really drunk one time (I think it might have been Dragon Boat Festival) and he was out in a boat at night and he saw the reflection of the moon in the water and tried to catch the moon and drowned. His name is suspiciously similar to the word "libation," although I suspect that they have no actual relation, just an awesome coincidental one.

Besides the landscapes in the garden, I also randomly secretively took pictures of Chinese people, who are frankly more interesting than bare trees and fake flowers:














When we had just gotten into the garden, there was a woman feeding yogurt to a small child, who was so cute that our tour group got a little distracted, and people wanted to take pictures of them, and eventually the baby got scared from all the attention from strangers and started to cry, therefore I was secretive with my picture-taking.

However, far and away the best part of our visit to Grand View Garden (I saved the best for last because this experience was completely unparalleled in silliness) was when Jacqui and I got AMBUSHED by money-seeking Chinese people. Now we Western touristy-types tend to get preyed on wherever we go, so we're kind of used to it by now, and we always just say "no thanks, we don't want to buy anything," and try to hustle away. So when when Jacqui and I wanted to pass through an area that contained some Chinese people wearing pretend traditional-looking clothing and looking suspicious, we tried our best to walk fast and not look interested. However, this time our best was not good enough. A small squadron of Chinese people grabbed us and quickly and forcibly dressed us in ornamented red robes and truly silly hats of above-average sparkliness. Jacqui was ambushed first, and they pushed her into a little conveyance that I ought to know what it's called, but I don't. It was a decorated box-thing with a window that was attached to two long rods so it could be carried by a few people. Anyway, once she was safely inside, they started playing trumpet in what I imagine is a traditional Chinese way, and Jacqui was paraded around a little square with great pomp and circumstance while a lady took pictures to try to sell us later. I stood on the side taking my own pictures as best as I could and laughing although I had been forcibly dressed up myself and knew I was next. I accepted my fate, although when I went to get in the funny little box, my tall sparkly hat got caught on the fringe of the doorway, and it took several Chinese people to free me. If I thought I was hard to embarrass before I came to China, I'm pretty sure I will be completely immune by the time I'm done here. Jacqui tried to get away, but they made her sit in a second little chair and they paraded us around together in a jouncy and extremely tradition fashion, asking me in the traditional way to sit further forward in my chair so the lady could get a better picture of me. I managed to get a sneaky picture of Jacqui from inside my box, but the lady wouldn't let her take a picture of me. Fortunately Paul had arrived a little bit after us and was documenting the whole thing in pictures, so he had better give me some of them. Too bad they didn't ambush him too. It's only fair. They tried to make me go around another time in the little chair thing, but I successfully refused.

After the whole thing was over, they tried their best to usher us back to where they were selling the photos, but we firmly refused and hustled away, cracking up, as soon as we could get out of our silly robes and hats. As of yet I do not have in my possession the photographic documentation of my own experience, but you may extrapolate from the picture I took of Jacqui from inside my royal box:














Note the Chinese people in the background, laughing at us. They are probably just jealous of our hats.

After getting back from the garden, I grabbed some dinner and went to the Good Friday service at church. Holy Week in China has been kind of interesting, because its presence is generally nonexistent except within the bubble of my church. This includes my dorm of American students, too - I put up a sign next to the elevator saying that people should ask me if they wanted to go to church on Good Friday or Easter, but besides Kim and Vanessa, who came with me next week, nobody has expressed an interest. This next week is midterms, so people are mostly worried about studying.

It's interesting, though...to be honest, when I'm home in the States, I'm not always thrilled about dragging myself out of bed or getting dressed and going out in the cold or even just taking the extra time to go to church or Bible study (although afterwards I'm always glad that I went). But it's been different for me in China...I guess I expected it to be harder because of the attitude towards religion here and because there wouldn't be anybody in Beijing who would know to miss my presence at church, so no peer pressure or anything. I thought that all the hustle and bustle and constant new experiences of China would distract me, or that after a long week of classes I wouldn't feel motivated to get up and to church on Sunday morning, but in fact it's exactly the opposite. Waking up for 8 am classes during the week means that waking up for an 11 am church service on Sunday is no trouble at all, but it's more than that. I have to confess, I usually spend far more time thinking about eating lunch than I spend thinking about the more important matters of my life. While this is still kind of true (what can I say...lunch is delicious), something about China has alleviated this tunnel vision a lot. I feel like I'm just operating on a different level than usual, and God's presence in my life is just so obvious to me. I'm more motivated and more responsible than usual, which is really cool, although it surprises me sometimes. Tomorrow I have to be at church at 7:45 because I'm in the Easter choir and we're singing in the 9 and 11 o'clock services. If I were at home, when would I ever be able to get somewhere at 7:45? But I can totally do it tomorrow, and it's going to be awesome! Feichang hao!

The Princess of Belgium

Not a lot of exciting things happened to me this week...I ate, slept, went to class, and spent as much time napping and as little time studying as I can get away with. But as of Tuesday night, I am a mere two degrees of separation from the princess of Belgium. I had just come out of meeting with my tutor at 8:30 and was powerwalking towards the area of campus where all the eating places are, thinking only of how I might obtain some delicious baozi in the quickest manner possible, when a young guy with a bicycle stopped me outside the noodle place. He asked me what was the best place for foreign students to live on campus. I'm easy to profile, but I don't mind. At Beida, foreign students live in the Shao Yuan complex, which has 9 buildings. I told him that Shao Yuan 9 (where I live) was the best, although that wasn't saying a whole lot, and why did he want to know? He replied that he was from Belgium and although not a current student, he had studied at Beida 2 years previous, and now the princess of Belgium wanted to study at Beida in the fall and was looking into the details of doing so, so he was supposed to ask around about the best place to live. I said that I knew Belgium was a small country, but was it so small that everybody knew the princess? No, in fact, he had received an invitation to a banquet for the princess when he had returned to Belgium from China, and had initially thought it was a joke, but apparently the princess had found out somehow that he went to Beida and wanted to ask him things about it. The princess currently goes to some very expensive school in France, but I can only imagine what it would be like for her to come to Beijing...it's a little bit different here. Sure, Shao Yuan 9 is the nicest dorm on campus, and is technically a hotel with maids and non-communal bathrooms and whatnot, but it's still a really cheap, really ghetto little hotel by American standards, with hard tile floors and drafty windows and furniture that has been beat up by semester upon semester of college students. The princess of Belgium! I suggested that maybe the princess should look into living off-campus if she's looking for something really nice. We had a funny little conversation, and Pierre (for that was his name) declared that my American style of talking was highly entertaining (the Americans here are unfazed by the way I talk, but Chinese people and other foreigners think I'm hilarious for some reason) and that we should go sit down somewhere and chat and have some beers or something. I suggested baozi, because I was still jonesing for some baozi-licious goodness, so we went to the baozi place to chill. Pierre insisted on paying for my baozi, and I was particularly glad that we were getting baozi because I always feel awkward when other people pay for me, but baozi are the cheapest food ever (one American dollar will buy you 16 baozi) so it was all good. Then we talked a lot about international relations, and what Americans think of the Chinese, and what Belgians think about America (they're mainly indifferent to it was the impression that I got), and nationalism in various countries. Apparently Belgians have almost no nationalistic feelings because Belgian was just kind of created as a silly little buffer country between Germany and France, so it doesn't have its own language or really much of a national culture (except waffles, maybe? I didn't ask about that), hence Belgians aren't all that patriotic. I had never thought about that. We talked for a while, but then I had to leave to pick up my laundry because the laundry place closed at 10:30 and I was wearing my last pair of clean underwear, so we exchanged phone numbers, and I'm invited to a party sometime in a couple weeks, and now my chain of connection to the princess of Belgium has been significantly shortened. And I have clean clothes. It was a highly productive evening.

I haven't really done much else lately except try to figure out what the heck I want to do this summer...way back in the day I had wanted to go with my phonetics professor's research team to Tibet, but the other members of the team never delivered a verdict on that as far as I can tell, and then I wanted to go teach English in Africa, but then when I was looking at programs I discovered one where you could get a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate at the same time, except it wasn't offered anywhere in Africa, so then I was like well maybe I will go to Thailand then, and I actually sent in the application for that one, but that one's also comparatively quite expensive, and my dad asked if there were any comparable Christian organizations, and I hadn't found any, but I emailed our friend in Singapore who has friends who do volunteer work in Thailand, so I'm waiting to hear about that, but I'm wondering if maybe I should forget about getting certified this summer (I can do that in the US if I have to) and go on a cheaper program, and then I found an organization that offers programs in Thailand and Africa as well as Nepal (which would be totally cool) that is a lot more affordable, but at this point I don't even know anymore. I have to call Continental to see if I can switch my flight, because currently I'm scheduled to leave June 10th, but my program actually ends a few weeks before the real semester here ends, and I decided I wanted to stay until the very end, which is the end of June, so I might switch my flight to then, but if my program starts very soon after that, I might not come home at all in June and just fly out of Beijing to wherever I go in the summer and return to the States in mid-August. Whew. But I can't decide anything about airplane flights until I figure out what I'm doing for the summer, so everything is up in the air. The only thing I'm relatively certain about is that I'm not coming home June 10th, unless it's totally impossible to switch my flight.

The other thing is that I don't know anymore what I'm doing for spring break...I really wanted to go to Tibet but Jacqui can't go anymore because her doctor told her it would be a really bad idea with asthma, and the other people who were going to go with her are going to Xinjiang province now, and the guys who wanted to go to Tibet to Mt. Everest are going to Inner Mongolia now I think, and I still would really want to go to Tibet but it wouldn't be a good idea to go alone, and I don't know anybody else who still wants to go (it's pretty expensive). So I might go to as of yet undetermined, slightly obscure, cheaper places in China with Jacqui. But there are no plans. I have no definite plans for anything, except that right now I'm going to karaoke with the English Corner, so this post is over. Hen hao!

A Lot of Weekendly Adventures

This is a long post so I put the important words in each paragraph in bold in case you are lazy and don't want to read it all. Hen hao!

Technically my weekend starts on Thursday at noon (aren't you jealous? it's pretty cool), so the first thing I did this weekend was try to send a fax. Ha. I had to fax my housing forms to U of R, but when I asked Liu Laoshi she said that the CIEE office fax machine (which I had thought I could use) was only for business purposes. So I went to an on-campus faxing place with my forms, a phone number, and a complete lack of knowledge of how to say "fax" in Chinese. I explained that I needed to send my forms to the phone number (which one would think implies fax, right?), and they...made copies. Okay, let's try again. After a lot of confusion I managed to get it faxed, but not before being made fun of by a Chinese man in the fax place, who also told me that I would have beautiful children (apparently this is a sort of normal compliment in China?) and asked for my phone number. Ha. And here I was a little bit proud of myself, because I broke out a vocab word ("secret") from last chapter. And then I went to Wu-Mei and got random strangely colored baked goods to alleviate my stress.

Thursday evening was another silly racial profiling time...I was getting baozi with Richard, who is Taiwanese, at the cafeteria, and I spoke to the woman in Chinese, and as she gave me my baozi she mentioned that it came in a bag, which was free. I thanked her in Chinese, but when she gave Richard his baozi, she told him like 8 zillion more times that the bag was free, and that he should make sure that I knew that the bag was free. This had to be reiterated quite firmly before we could leave, but we were amused not only by the apparent importance of getting a free bag (they're the cheapest little plastic things ever), but by the fact that even though I had spoken Chinese to her and demonstrated comprehension of the "free bag" concept, obviously I still needed an Asian translator.


Disclaimer: This next part is probably going to make you worried, but you really shouldn't be! My life in Beijing tends to be quite safe. I haven't even ever gotten sick from the food!

After dinner I was going to go walk around Weiming Lake, but I never ended up doing it, because as I was walking on the path a man stopped and asked me something, but he had a really thick Beijing accent so I didn't understand, and I ended up stopping while he said the same thing over and over and we had a painfully slow conversation. He asked me if we could chat, and I was like umm I guess we can walk and talk, since we were both walking on the path, but then he wanted to sit down and he was a little creepy, personal-space-wise and when I said that I wanted to go he grabbed my wrist and tried to keep me from leaving. Long story short, we yelled at each other in Chinese for a little bit, and I was just like well I'm gonna leave, buster, and you can't hold onto my wrist forever, so I dragged him probably 20 or 30 feet before wrenching him off (at these times it is convenient that I am a comparatively large person in China). A girl was walking by (this was in a public park on campus and it was completely light out) and stopped to ask what was going on, and it ended up that we were headed in the same direction so we walked together and she was my friend and we all lived happily ever after and then I went to English Corner and we talked about sports and I endeavored to explain Extreme Frisbee Golf and Calvinball to Chinese people and it was lots of fun, and my tutor taught me how to say "don't touch me" in Chinese ("bu peng wo").

On Friday we went on a CIEE trip to the DaShanZi Art District, which is a bunch of old warehouses that have been reclaimed by the modern art community as galleries, and it was soooooo cool although it was cold and rainy and nasty out. The artistic community here really has a lot to say, especially with respect to Communism. It made me wish I had the materials to make some art. All I need is some glue and paper probably, because every day I acquire lots of good content materials like plastic wrappers and receipts and such. One of the really awesome things we saw in the art district was a guy who made sculptures out of newspapers, including some more abstract loopy things and some more functional things like a chair made out of twisted newspapers and chicken wire. Pretty much I'm going to make furniture for my house out of newspaper and wire and metal frames when I grow up. Another more sobering exhibit was one where the artist took old group photos and restaged them with the same people 30 or 40 years later. The slightly disturbing part was the large percentage of people who were missing in the later photos despite the fact that they were all quite young in the originals. I really don't know exactly what health care and life expectancy are like here (all I know is that most people have truly horrible teeth), but it seemed unusual to me.

Friday night I went to a talk about relationships at church, which had some good points, but I was sitting in the front, and the speaker kept using me as an example or making eye contact with me whenever he brought up something really awkward. Ahaha. Afterwards some of us went out for pizza (not bad, but they don't use tomato sauce here because apparently it is expensive, which is unfortunate, although they do have ketchup available to put on your pizza) and I tested out my Spanish with two Peruvian guys and found it to be a little dusty and very mixed up with Chinese, but still fairly serviceable. Good times.

Saturday morning I went to Easter Choir rehearsal at church! It was super fun. It was a really small group, but there were practically no altos so I felt useful, and they let me make up my own harmonies for things and I enjoyed myself immensely. I didn't realize how much I missed singing in a sort of organized way, although I do love having silly Chinese song singalongs with my roomie. Sightsinging brings me great joy! The gal who was directing the choir asked if I wanted to join her praise and worship team (there are a few of them that rotate), and I think I'm going to do it if I can manage getting to practices. After rehearsal I met Jacqui and Richard and Quynh for lunch at Lush, which is such a foreigner hangout (I got a chicken caesar pita...imagine that), but delicious! And then we went shop shop shopping and I got silly T-shirts, a bright green one that has stern-looking men on it says "Say no to bad weather! Less rain" in both English and Chinese characters, and a dark pink one that has a bicycle on it and says "Go freely with singing even hum The ground is dry but the air is full of sound." Richard and Jacqui and I tried to go see Temple of Heaven but it was closed when we got there so we went to the Pearl Market, which was nearby. Pearl Market has lots and lots of pearls, but also a lot of coral and pashminas and such. It's pretty touristy but the pearls are actually incredibly cheap, and they are real pearls, not fake like cheap things frequently are here. I had a necklace and matching earrings custom-made for me while I watched with a mix of pearls and little red coral (I've decided that if I have lots and lots of red things I can match more easily, and it's an easy color scheme to maintain in China), and they cost around $10 American, put together. So! If you want me to bring you pearl and/or coral jewelry, give me some ideas as to color and/or style and I can probably hook you up. Also at Pearl Market for the same price as the jewelry I got a pair of shiny red shoes with embroidery and beads. I was surprised that they had big enough shoes for me, but happy to finally know what size to look for (41, apparently). I probably could have gotten them for cheaper, but I bargained pretty decently and used my Chinese pretty well...the man told me that if I ever came back he would give me a deal because I was *Chinese,* haha. It's interesting to get a sense of how much business in China revolves around guanxi (lit. "relations") - basically, it's all who you know. It's true everywhere, but even more so in China...doing business is all about the guanxi. If you are an old customer or a friend, or even if you have a friend who is a customer there, everything is leverage towards getting you the better price.

After Pearl Market we stopped by Wal-Mart, because you can't get peanut butter just anywhere in Beijing. By the time we got home and ate dinner it was around 10 pm. Fortunately I had brought a package of galuptious red bean biscuits to tide us over in our wanderings! Hen hao! Other people went out Saturday night, but I opted to sleep. I also opted to sleep most of this afternoon. This morning I went to church, and it was awesome, and Kim and Vanessa came with me, which was also awesome. I think I will ask around the dorm to see if other people want to come next week, because it is Easter!! It came up so fast! The church is also offering a class in Chinese spiritual language, which I don't know anything about, so I might try to do that. Did I mention that before? I don't remember.

I went out to dinner tonight with my tutor and we got lots of little dishes and it was fun. We got an incredibly ugly baked fish that looked weird but ended up being rather tasty. Hen hao! I always have fun meeting with my tutor because we talk about so many random things. I learned that they play Mafia in China too! Maybe this is even part of CIEE's intention in giving us tutors, but it's as much of a cultural exchange as it is a linguistic exchange.

Anyway, that's where I stand now, and I haven't done any homework or studying yet this weekend. Whoops. It's all good though, because I am a studying ninja and can learn lots of characters real quick-like! Hen hao!