Weekend, Part 1: Pre-Xi'an

On Thursday our Hanyu/Tingli class-posse went out to Wudaokou and got Japanese food and then went out and danced until we melted into pools of sweat and our limbs fell off. It was fun, although my ears rang for like an hour after leaving Propaganda (I can feel my mother cringing at that) and my lower back was crazy sore on Friday. I mostly just slept and bummed around Friday morning/afternoon, because we were meeting at 4:10 to take the train to Xi'an (where they have them there terracotta warriors). I realized before leaving that I only had 2 pairs of clean socks for 4 days...whoops! So I had to take my laundry out and get 2 new pairs of socks. It all turned out fabulously, and I was so happy to have clean laundry waiting for me when I got back from Xi'an!

The train to Xi'an was overnight, a 12 hour ride. It took like an hour just to get to the train station by bus, and then another to actually get on the train and leave. Woohoo!

Riding the train overnight was actually totally awesome. We were in hard sleeper class, which means there are 6 beds to a compartment, and the compartment doesn't have a door. I slept on the middle level, and it was all kinds of fun because the compartment is so small that I could reach all the bars of the beds so I could swing and climb around like Spiderman! It was excellent. Most of the time was spent sleeping, though. On the train, they turn the lights off at 10 and on again at 5:30 or 6. Hen hao! The crazy Chinese people were asleep in their beds by like 9 though. What a silly country.

Sweatshirts and racial profiling, hip hop and picnics

I finally got a Beijing University sweatshirt! I've been wanting one for a while but they never had one that was a zip-up AND had Beijing Daxue on it in characters AND was my size and in a color I liked. But yesterday Eva and I were in Wu-Mei checking out the Beida stuff, and they had sweatshirts that met all of the above qualifications, except they were a little bit too big for us, but we got them anyway. Hen hao! And when we wore them back in our dorm, everybody on the hall wanted one. So I'm pretty sure that eventually like all of CIEE will have the same navy track-jacket sweatshirts, and we'll be like some awesome foreign sports team. Yeahhhh. Somebody in my Kouyu class even asked where I got my sweatshirt. It's totally the best one that they have. But the best part about it is that when I wore it to meet my tutor last night, she informed me that the Chinese characters on the shirt are the handwriting of none other than dear ol' Chairman Mao. Fabulous! If you're interested, his handwriting is kind of messy. Whatever, Chairman Mao. Your "xue" is all kinds of silly-looking.

The other fabulous thing that happened yesterday was I got racial-profiled. Some chick walked up to me in the dining hall and gave me a piece of paper, smiled and walked away. When I looked at it it turned out to be an advertisement for a Chinese tutor, including such awesomeness as "I hope to share my learning experience with you and earn some pocket."
Yep. I was totally ordering food in Chinese in a competent enough way, but obviously I need a tutor because I am a white person! Hen hao!

BTW, my tutor is totally awesome. We mostly just chat during our tutoring time, and it is pretty random...I tried to explain the Duckie Maniac Club to her, and she thought it was the bestestest thing ever and totally cute. We talked about a cappella groups and I learned that some group from Pennsylvania (which is Pan sha fan ya or something equally silly in Chinese)
performed on campus last fall, which I thought was totally awesome, and we sang songs and talked about the one child policy. Hen hao!

So tonight a whole bunch of CIEE peeps went to the first meeting of the Beida Hip-Hop Club, which some of them were in last semester and they said it was really fun. They want a lot of people in the club because there is some huge performance coming up soon with famous Chinese celebrity people (Yao Ming is the only one I'd recognize) and they're supposed to have a 60-person dance team. Except when we got there, there were like 5 Chinese people, and then all of the CIEE posse trooped in. There were maybe a dozen of us, and the Chinese people were totally surprised/amused by our numbers. We schmoozed and introduced ourselves for a little while, and then Julie (who was in Hip-Hop Club last semester) explained that they wanted us to freestyle but were too embarrassed to ask. Ahaha. We all sat down and a teeny little Chinese girl got up and broke out some crazy amazing dance moves. It was insane. Then another dude got up and danced, and some other folks, but most of our posse was pretty unwilling. Except then we wanted to see the dude dance again because he was really good, and he was like no no and we were like if you dance we'll all dance. Then everybody got up and grooved in a group a little bit but it kind of turned into a huge circle and then they were like heyy go freestyle in the middle! So basically, Eva and I busted out some freestyle hip-hop action together in front of a bunch of Chinese people. It was fabulous. Hip-Hop Club definitely has the ghettoest Asians around this place. Feichang hao!

When we all got back to our dorm afterwards, I did a little homework, and I was hungry, and then Eva walked by with a jar of peanut butter and some bread and honey and we were like SNACK TIME and it turned into a picnic out by the elevators with all sorts of sandwich spreads and mangoes and marshmallow pies and other foods and a bunch of people from our hall came out and we all sat on a blanket on the ground and had a little late-night peanut-butter-and-sweetened-condensed-milk sammich picnic. And, P.S., sweetened condensed milk is ridiculously awesome. And in Wu-Mei, you can buy it in a convenient squeeze tube. Rock. Annnnnnnd now I should finish my homework, because I have class un less than 8 hours. Ooch. Hen hao!

For everything else, there's MasterCard

Sugar-syrup-coated tomatoes on a stick: 2 kuai
Sheep flavor potato snacks: 1.5 kuai
Seaweed flavor peanut crackers (Premium Soft Crunch!): 3 kuai
Knowing that China will never run out of weird new food for me to try: priceless

...and sugar coated tomatoes are better than you might expect. Hen hao!

How Could I Forget

I realized this morning that I didn't even mention the best part about visiting Stone Flower Cave. It's up on a mountain by a little village and some run-down souvenir shops, and as we were walking by the shops, I heard an interesting rendition of a very familiar tune coming out of one of them. It was a thumping-bass hip-hop remix of...get ready for it... "Do Your Ears Hang Low." There were no words, but the tune was unmistakable. It was unquestionably the highlight of my day.

Going to Church in China

This morning Jackie and I embarked on an adventure to go to the church that Sa Jia Li Ya's been attending in Beijing. Beijing International Christian Fellowship is a church for foreigners only (I showed my passport to get in), and Chinese nationals can't attend. We walked across campus and took a bus to the general area, except a) we were both wearing unfortunate shoe choices and b) the directions to the church were confusing because there are about 348902849038209 bazillion streets with the same name. So it was a little bit of an arduous journey. Bu hao!

We finally managed to get there like 5 minutes before the service...BICF actually reminded me a lot of PCC in Rochester. It definitely had the sort of large interdenominational vibe, which I suppose is the sensible way to go with such a diverse congregation. There was a lot of singing before the sermon, and we even did a Chinese song, which was interesting. They put up both the phonetic lyrics and the characters, so I could pretty much tell the meaning of the words by the characters, which was cool. After all the walking and feet pain and getting lost though, I was mostly looking forward to just sitting down and listening to the message. The speaker was really good, although I think there's a rotation of who preaches. The sermon was on 1 Corinthians 12, but he angled it towards our specific audience, talking about how it applied to foreigners and relating to life in Beijing. It was very relevant, and I think I'd go back there, although I'm interested in seeing what other Beijing churches are like, particularly the state-sponsored ones. It's an interesting environment here for religion. After the service we got lunch with some other girls who are studying abroad at Beida (although not in my program), and we rode back to campus together and I learned that there's a small group Bible study on campus, so I'll probably check that out sometime, although this next weekend there won't be any churchly things in my life as we're going on the big CIEE trip to Xi'an. From which, by the way, we get back at like 7 am Monday morning. And I have class at 8. Ouch...I hope I can get enough work/sleep accomplished on the train.

This afternoon I took a delicious nappy-nap and bummed around. I met with my tutor tonight! She is fabulous. She helped me study for my 4 zillion quizzes tomorrow, aka three (one in every class! hen hao!). I studied some more tonight, and I'm feeling pretty good about my level of preparation for tomorrow...I hope there's not any work that I was supposed to do and missed hearing about. It's a constant threat when the teachers are speaking all quickly-like in Chinese.

I am all kinds of sleepy right now...I hope my staying up late this weekend didn't destroy my awesome old-person sleeping schedule forever.

All Sorts of Silliness

First of all, happy birthday to my two silly little brothers who are now 12 and 17 (ahhh so old)! It is your birthday in China right now even though it's still March 9th in the US, so ha. I didn't get you any presents, but I promise when I come back from China I'll bring you all sorts of silly things. Hen hao!

So I actually went to Wal-Mart again yesterday because Erika and Enrico wanted to go so I went along to show them where it was...I didn't get lost at all this time, but it's still a pretty long walk. My hip joints are allllll kinds of sore this morning.

There were a couple funny things about Wal-Mart that I forgot to mention before. One is that a lot of employees have English names on their nametags in addition to their Chinese ones, and I definitely saw two male employees named "Polly" and "Lori." It was fabulous. The other strange thing about Wal-Mart was the bathroom...it was a pretty good bathroom; they even provided soap and had a totally functional hand dryer, but the best part was that they had self-flush squatty potties. It seems like such a contradiction to me, like a funny combination of Chinese tradition and modern civilization. Silly China. Silly Wal-Mart.

I got more stuff at Wal-Mart, even though I had just been the day before...I got some more candied hawthorne strips (so delicious!) and some hawthorne berry juice and other random things like this doughnut thing that looked like it had brown sugar on top but it was really some random light brown fibrous substance. But the best acquisition of all was CHEESE. They don't have cheese in China. I mean, they do, but Chinese dairy products are generally not to be trusted. My doughnut-thing had Chinese butter on it and it was weeeiiiirrrdd. But magically, in the midst of Wal-Mart, we came upon cheese. And not only cheese, but the most quintessentially American cheese of all: Kraft Singles. The white kind, not even the yellow kind. After wavering over the price (20 kuai seems so expensive even though it's not even $3 American), I decided to spring for it. We had been in major cheese withdrawal. I ate a piece of cheese straight out of the package while waiting for the train at the subway station, and it was fabulous. Totally worth it.

So last night when I got back from Wal-Mart there was almost nobody on my hall, and it seems that they had all gone out to dinner and then to some club, but my roomie came back early because she is sick so we had a quiet little chill night on our hall. For those of you who were wondering, my roommate's name is Quynh (read: Quinn) and she is from Oregon and she is Vietnamese and she's kind of like the Asian answer to Sarah Mastroianni, for those of you who are acquainted with the inimitable Sarah. Quynh is fun and talkative and she was here last semester so her Chinese is a bazillion times awesomer than mine, plus she knows all the ropes already. My roomie is awesome! She plays Chinese music and swears that she's going to get me hooked, and it's true...sometime we will go do karaoke and sing silly Chinese ballads except I don't actually know the words. Whatever! Also we watch this Korean reality show called Full House about two Western girls who live in a house with some members of the Korean boy band Super Junior and they play all these silly games and it's pretty ridiculous. Hen hao!

I feel like I know less about Asian pop culture than like everyone else on this program...about half of the CIEE students are some kind of Asian I think. I feel like I'm starting to be able to distinguish between Chinese and Korean and Japanese people by appearance. Starting to. A couple of people in the program are actually native Japanese/Korean but go to school in America. It's actually harder sometimes for the people who look Asian because the Chinese are less forgiving to them if their Chinese is not perfect. Some people had a hard time getting into a club the other night because they didn't believe they were foreigners at first and it was free admission for foreigners or something. As much as I feel conspicuous here (and I'm sure vendors assume they can make me pay a higher price because I'm a waiguoren), looking different is mostly to my advantage. People stare pretty shamelessly, but they're also willing to help me. The other day in the dining hall a woman came up to me and asked if I needed help ordering...I guess I radiate confusion, even though I did pretty much know what I was doing. Waiguoren hen hao!

We are leaving on a trip for Stone Flower Caves now...doesn't that sound pretty?

Stuff Mart!

This morning I went to class and whatever, but that wasn't interesting. This afternoon, however, I decided to venture out into Beijing on a quest for Western items that I couldn't find on campus, such as peanut butter. My destination: Wal-Mart. Of course there is a Wal-Mart in Beijing. It's actually vaguely near campus. But only vaguely.

I looked in my Insider's Guide to Beijing to find out where the Wal-Mart was, and I found it on a map before setting out. There were only 2 roads involved, so I figured it would be easy. What I didn't figure was that I'd kind of forget the name of the road I was supposed to turn onto, so I would go too far and have to come back. When I successfully found the Wal-Mart road, I strolled on down it for a while, and it was quite a while, so I asked which was the subway was (because I Wal-Mart was right next to the subway station and I didn't want to be a total bozo American and be like WHERE'S WALMART ITS WHERE WE AMERICANS LIKE TO HANG OUTTT) and it was still farther down and I found the subway station but Wal-Mart didn't appear to be there, so I started walking back and then I glanced up and in a hole between 2 other buildings I saw a sign that said Wal-Mart Supercenter! It took me a little bit to figure out how to get around to the Wal-Mart, but when I succeeded it was awesome. Wal-Mart is a little different here, but not too much. They sell different stuff, mostly, although there were some of the same brands. One big difference is that in China you can buy alcohol at Wal-Mart. You know, the beer department...it's right around the corner from the condiments. Hen silly!

I succeeded at getting peanut butter, although I failed at getting a knife to spread it. It seems to me that they pretty much don't have butter knives in China, just the huge sharp chopping kind. Whatever, I will make do with my lone spoon. Hen hao!

So I figured I'd be a little lazier coming back from Wal-Mart, seeing as I had walked like an hour to get there. So I took the subway to Wudaokou, which is the closest station to campus, and figured I'd just walk from there because I did it last weekend so I should know how. However, this time I came out of a different exit from the subway station, so when I turned right to go to campus like I had last time, it was the wrong direction. I walked in the wrong direction for like 45 minutes, and then I knew it was wrong because I should have arrived by then. So I asked, and sure enough I had been walking east instead of west. Whoops. But at this point I was dead set on walking and too stubborn to change my mind and take a bus or a cab, so I trucked on back 45 minutes to the subway station and then another half hour to campus. I rule.

I had only been on campus for like 30 seconds when I made a friend! I was strolling along and a dude was walking next to me, and he said "ni hao" so I ni hao'd back, and he asked me if I was English and I said no, American, and we had what was pretty much the exact textbook conversation that they've been hammering into our heads in my Kouyu class...he asked me how my Chinese was and how long I had studied Chinese and how long I was going to be in China and what was my major and we talked about China things, and I learned that his name is Zhao Jian (or Alex) and that he is a teacher at a school in a place where I didn't really know where it was, and now we are pals. Hen hao! I want to make some Chinese friends so I'm really immersed in the culture.

It was like 8 or something when I finally got back to my dorm and I had left in the early afternoon...it was a long day but really awesome. I ate a late dinner of delicious vegetable baozi and egg and a 7 up that I had a silly time ordering because I don't know how to say "7 up" in Chinese, but I was like "the green one," and it worked out all right and I told the dude "feichang hao!" and it was full of silliness and we laughed, yay.

Anyway, right now I am allllll kinds of tired considering that I've been up since 7 am and I spent all of my time from 3 pm to 8 walking to and from and around Wal-Mart. Hen hao! I will sleep well tonight...no class tomorrow, and I'm meeting with my tutor in the morning!