Out and about in the city

I can never really think of good ways to start these posts -- so I'll just say that I've successfully completed the second week of HBA, and am extremely glad that it's the weekend, although it's already Sunday and I'll be in class again soon enough. Also, I apologize for the title, which doesn't really mean anything, but I didn't feel creative enough to think of a better title than that.

Academics and accents

There really wasn't a big difference between last week and the first, with the possible exception that I'm getting more used to the class format and I think I am slowly, but hopefully somewhat steadily, improving.

Something that I meant to write about, but forgot to mention, in my Shanghai entries, was about my accent. When I was traveling around Shanghai, in taxis/souvenir shopping/asking for directions, etc., various people would ask me where I was from, since clearly I didn't sound like I was from Shanghai. The responses included Hong Kong, Guangdong, "the south," Taiwan, Singapore (at first I was surprised, but then I remembered that people in Singapore speak Mandarin), and Japan (!), the last of which I was not so pleased about since I didn't think my Chinese was that accented. :(

In any case, I thought that probably once I got to Beijing I'd be surrounded by classmates who had learned perfectly accented Beijing-accented Mandarin. However, this has turned out to be the complete opposite of the truth, much to my amusement. There are 10 students in the fifth-year class, eight of which are undergrads. All eight of us are native speakers, and furthermore, our families all come from the south 南方, which results in predominantly southern-accented Mandarin being spoken. This manifests itself largely in our inability to 卷舌 correctly and a huge lack of erhua 儿化 or the "rrrrrrrr" sound, as I think of it, that's so predominant in Beijingers' speech. This has proved to be a great source of amusement, particularly since Luo Laoshi 骆老师, one of our teachers who is from Tianjin 天津, heavily uses erhua in his speech, in complete contrast to our lack of it.

Pollution

I know this is sort of the pot-calling-the-kettle-black to complain about this, since I'm from LA, but the air pollution is sort of getting to me. It's not even on a day-to-day basis: I don't wake up, for example, and walk outside and think, ugh, more smog today and while the air doesn't really smell either clean or crisp, if you don't think about it you won't really notice that it's as bad as it really is. Instead, the problem lies more in the day-after-day part of it. My idea of summer weather being an endless succession of bright sunny days and blue skies, I think the sun-and-sky combo, or lack of it, is what is starting to get to me. I feel like I'm living in a perpetually gray and dismal weather, which always looks like it's about to rain. As a contrast, clearly Los Angeles is smoggy and polluted, but the aforementioned blue skies and bright sun are always in evidence, particularly in summer. Unfortunately, I've got another six weeks in Beijing (with a break in Inner Mongolia in the middle!)...hopefully I'll be better able to better deal with this as the weeks go by.

In the cab on the way to see Beijing opera we passed through Tian'anmen Square 天安门广场,which was larger than I thought and also kind of barren and concrete, nothing like People's Square 人民广场 in Shanghai. The point of this picture though is to show the sky -- it's like this every single day.

Shopping and dining

On Saturday, a couple of friends and I went to Xiushuijie 秀水街, which is this market unabashedly and entirely aimed at tourists.

The new CCTV 中国中央电视台 building that's under construction. The lines are because I was taking this picture from the backseat of a cab, which are also cheap and spoiling me because once I get back to the East Coast I'm going to start expecting extremely affordable door-to-door service...

I'm not really an argumentative person by nature, especially in a foreign language that I am not entirely comfortable in, so at first I was really reluctant to haggle. But after my friend (and fellow Yalie!) Lena bargained some shirts down to 40 RMB (from some absurd price, probably something like 300 RMB for each), I decided that I had to do it. The first time was really difficult, but after that I discovered I actually kind of like haggling, if only because it feels like a game. In the end I was able to get a couple of winter sweaters down from a ridiculous price of 850 RMB （about $125) to 70 RMB (about $10.20) each.

As opposed to the hardy shoes, I guess...

Lena and I got separated from the other three so we went to go find dinner before going to catch the HBA-organized Beijing Opera 京戏 trip. It was a really nice place...

Dinner is served!

If you've been to China, you've probably already guessed the punch line, so to speak, of this, but we went to eat at...


Pizza Hut! No, really...it's a five-star restaurant in China. And the prices show it, too...our two-person set menu cost 74 RMB per person ($10.80). Even in the States I would consider this a little pricey to pay for a meal, so in China it's ridiculously high. To make a comparison, my lunch at the cafeteria costs anywhere from 6 to 9 RMB ($0.88 to $1.30) and a positively huge bowl of eel rice (trust me, it's actually really good) from the Japanese restaurant downstairs costs 26 RMB ($3.79). Kind of makes you think about the economic disparity that there is in China, even in cities such as Beijing.

There were a couple of families with little kids at Pizza Hut, and I idly guessed that they were probably there for their birthday. Lo and behold, Lena overheard one of the parents sitting at a table close to us tell their kid that he could order what he wanted because it was his birthday. I don't think it would be out of the question at all to venture that they probably only went to Pizza Hut once a year.

It's all Greek (or, in this case, Chinese) to me

After dining in style at Pizza Hut, we caught a cab to the Liyuan Theater 梨园剧场 at the Qianmen Hotel 前门饭店 to watch Beijing opera 京戏, which I perceive to be one of those traditional arts that people watch because it's cultural, i.e. not because there's an extremely high entertainment quotient in it.

Me, Shan and Lena (all 5th-year students) plus Timo, HBA's indefatigable secretary. Who also speaks Chinese extremely well.

Beijing opera itself consists of elaborately-dressed individuals singing with extremely high and somewhat shrill voices that are not intelligible to most Chinese, let alone foreigners. Thus, there are subtitles that are in English and in Chinese on screens on both sides; seeing as we are in China, of course there is bound to be hilarious Chinglish. Unfortunately I wasn't able to snap a picture of it but Timo, the HBA secretary, snapped one so I'm going to try to get the exact wording from him.

The third act of the Beijing opera that we watched involved a considerable amount of martial arts, the most interesting one.

Summing up

In many ways, this second week has been a lot better than the first one -- my grades have improved (a little), I'm beginning to get more of a feel for the campus and I was able to get out to the city. At the same time, however, getting into the city center on Saturday and being able to see some of Beijing has only made me more determined to get out of BLCU 北语 more often, so this is my goal for the next six weeks (not including, of course, the time in Inner Mongolia!)