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!