Mega-post part I: Inner Mongolia

So I feel like this is a good introduction to this post, as it sums up nicely much of my experience in Inner Mongolia: lamb, lamb and more lamb and lots of time sitting on that bus.

After thinking about what I wanted to write about for this post, I came to the conclusion that it would be one really, really long post, and also that because of my procrastinating habits it would be hard to find time to write it, and I wanted to write about these things before they got hopelessly out-of-date. So I've decided to split it into Inner Mongolia (and week 4) and everything after.

Week four wrap-up

The Saturday before leaving for Inner Mongolia I went with my friend My Khanh from Princeton in Beijing to Houhai 后海 to have dinner, and then the next Sunday I went to the Forbidden City 故宫.

There isn't really much to say about Houhai, but in a good way, as in I like it a lot. It's this area that centers around several lakes, fittingly called Houhai and Qianhai 前海. The architecture is deliberately reminiscent, and while I'm usually not the biggest fan of this -- think Xintiandi in Shanghai -- I think in this case it's tastefully done. Also Houhai is mostly bars and restaurants and not a ton of super-loud clubs, so I found that the atmosphere was conducive to conversation.

Stylized scenery. It kind of reminds you of Shanghai (I remember reading somewhere that this was intentional.)

Sunday was a gorgeous blue day like the ones at home -- I've yet to see another one as nice in Beijing.

The Forbidden City is huge, but the buildings are amazingly preserved. There really isn't much to say that you can't get from reading the Wikipedia article on it. The only thing that I can think is that we should be thankful that it survived the Cultural Revolution (more about this later when I get to the last couple of days in Inner Mongolia.) Oh, and now incidentally I have been to both "Palace Museums" 故宫博物院, in Taipei and in Beijing. (The one in Beijing is, of course, the Forbidden City; the National Palace Museum 郭禮故宮博物院 in Taipei is actually a museum that consists mostly of the art taken to Taiwan in 1949.)

Now for pictures:

THE flag. This is the one that hordes of Chinese tourists see being lowered in the late afternoon.

Some hall. After a while, they all start kind of looking the same to you.

For those of who you took Spence: this is where Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧太后 ruled from "behind the curtain," or something like that, in the late Qing dynasty.

I'm particularly proud of this picture. It's the northeast corner of the Forbidden City.

Inner Mongolia!

So I chose Inner Mongolia for my social study 社会调查 for a couple of reasons: firstly, I didn't want to stay in Beijing. As much as I felt, and still feel, like I didn't have a really good idea of what the city is actually like, I couldn't envision myself staying in Beijing nonstop for nine weeks. I can't still figure out why it is, but after a week in Shanghai and four in Beijing I still can't say that I really like the capital more than Shanghai. Secondly, I wanted to see Inner Mongolia, because I felt that after having seen Shanghai, unquestionably the most modern Chinese city aside from Hong Kong, and Beijing (which is pretty far behind Shanghai in some places), I wanted to see something really different and more genuinely "Chinese," although on second thought perhaps Inner Mongolia is not the best place to see these sorts of things.

Anyway, now for the detailed day-by-day, since I know you all are dying to hear this:

Day 0: Trains and real conversations

Why a day 0? Because I figure a day spent mostly in Beijing and on the train doesn't really count as the first day of the trip, and, more importantly, this is the way I've numbered my photos on my computer. So.

After surviving the midterm (let's not get started on this) and Chinese table 中文桌子 at the Muslim Restaurant at BLCU, I went to run a ton of errands and then we convened to leave for the Beijing train station. Perhaps representing China very well, the train station was packed to the gills with people and was hot and muggy and 闷. Our train was going from Beijing to Baotou 包头, a city in Inner Mongolia that I actually haven't been to yet.

After figuring out how to get onto the top bunk (I forgot to take a picture of this, but envision three bunks on top of each other, with the top bunk only taking up about 20 percent of the available space and the other ones taking up 40 percent each), I settled in for our 11-hour ride to Hohhot. The thing that was most rewarding about the train ride was conversing with real Chinese passengers. Somehow I got into a conversation with a trader from Sichuan 四川 and we talked about the American perception of China, what China is like, the rich-poor gap, etc. It was really rewarding to have a conversation with someone who was authentically "Chinese," i.e. not a teacher who is going to correct your every mistake and speak exaggeratedly standard 标准. I wish I'd written down what we talked about because now after a week of whirlwind days I can't really remember what we talked about except that we mostly discussed Sino-American relations. It was also really interesting to get a glimpse into hard-bunk on Chinese trains and what it's like. Everyone's really chatty and feels free to offer their opinion about things ranging from Inner Mongolia's grasslands to the American south. You also have to do this weird ticket-exchanging thing where the attendants take your paper ticket and give you a plastic card at the beginning of the train ride, and when you get close to your destination you give them back the plastic card and get your paper ticket back, which to me seems like an entirely unnecessary process, akin to how I have to get a receipt for stationery products at Chaoshifa 超市发 market before I can actually buy them. Whatever. It's China.

Day 1: Grassland adventures

Early morning in Hohhot.

After arriving in Hohhot bright and early (and I mean early, like 5:30 am or so), we hopped onto a bus for the grasslands. The first thing that struck me about Hohhot and Inner Mongolia was the beautiful weather -- as I've already mentioned numerous times, the weather in Beijing tends to be really muggy and the sky an unappetizing gray, but the first day in Inner Mongolia the sky was a brilliant blue and the air crisp but not cold, like it is on mornings in late spring.

Breakfast place. Can you say globalization?

The rest of the day was spent interviewing herders 牧民, who live around the area. It was actually really kind of difficult for me to understand what a lot of them were saying. Listening comprehension 听力 has never really been my strength anyway, and when coupled with an accent that I couldn't entirely understand (seeing as how my southern Chinese 南方 accent, is apparently one of the most difficult things in the world to understand, as I learned later in Hohhot and will discuss later), it was really a sobering experience and made me think about how much more there is to Chinese than I thought.

Lunch: it's all lamb or lamb-milk (is that even what it's called?) based products.

Finally, I have never before in my life seen such empty grasslands. Particularly since I come from sprawling Californian suburbia and go to school in the East Coast, which seems to just be an endless megalopolis, it was amazingly beautiful.

The picture doesn't really adequately represent how empty and wide-spreading the grasslands are in reality, but it gives you an idea.

On top of some hill.

Warning: the next paragraph is a little gruesome.

Then at night we saw a lamb being slaughtered. The way they use to kill the lamb involves pulling out the heart while the lamb is still alive, fol. Yes, you read that right, all while the lamb is still conscious. Apparently this way the meat tastes fresher or there's less blood or something. Of course at the time I was a little reluctant to watch the whole thing, but later one had no problem eating the lamb.

Don't worry, this is AFTER the lamb's heart was pulled out.

I forgot to mention, before we ate there was a performance of Mongolian wrestling, which is apparently one of the three traditions (the other two being horse racing and archery) that is very important in Mongolian culture, followed by students participating.

Day 2: Stylized Mongolia

On Sunday, we headed off to a more touristy camp of Mongolian yurts and rode horses for a good part of the afternoon, from which I learned that riding trotting horses is actually kind of difficult -- you keep bouncing up and down on the seat; what you're supposed to do is stand up on the horse, but the problem is that after three hours of riding horses, my un-fit self is tired like none other, particularly my legs.

This is when the horse was, thankfully, walking.

This yurt camp was more stylized (I don't have any pictures on me at the moment, which seems like a gross oversight in retrospect) and it got me to thinking about the differences between historical Inner Mongolia and what it's really like today. Traditional yurts were made of cloth, I think, definitely not concrete. It really made me think about how the preservation of traditional culture, and how easy it is to say that through economic development we're preserving it but in reality only preserving a stylized version, custom-designed for tourists, with all the negative aspects taken out of it. Inner Mongolia has undergone some serious Sinification (Han-ficiation?) 汉化 over the last 60 years, and the diminishing of traditional Mongolian culture is a part of this. But more on this later.

(You can't tell, but when I was typing that sentence, there were so many points when I wanted to write Chinese, with the effect of something like: Chuantong menggubao were made of cloth...how easy it is to say that tongguo economic development...with all the biduan taken out of it. Sigh.)

Day 3: More interviewing

The third day of our trip was more interviewing of mumin 牧民, and then followed by an agonizingly long ride to Erdos 鄂尔多斯, not a particularly interesting city.

Although we did find time to take a jumping picture.

Day 4: Propaganda and publicity

After getting to Erdos, we got up early in the morning to take a tour of a cashmere factory in Erdos and interview some workers there. To tell the truth, the cashmere factory wasn't the most particularly interesting part of the trip ever, but I did take some awesome pictures of the propaganda--I mean, worker motivation signs. The funniest ones are those in which the English doesn't really match the Chinese, in that the Chinese is a lot harsher-sounding than the English. The impression I got from the cashmere factory is that there is a lot of Han influence in Inner Mongolia and that this cashmere brand is apparently really famous, but I still don't know that much about it. Also, it was one of those rather soulless corporate tours, which didn't make it very interesting.

Also, there was this series of really interesting signs:

Meaning something like: "One percent of my mistakes equal 100 percent of loss for the business." Ouch. Talk about pressure.

Yeah, there's an English translation, but it doesn't really equal the Chinese, which is something more along the lines of: "If you pass nervous days in the factory, then you'll pass rich days at home."

Later that day we went to Genghis Khan's Mausoleum 成吉思汗陵墓. Apparently, although the current whereabouts of Genghis Khan's body are unknown because he was buried with little fanfare and his grave is not marked, this mausoleum is still home to a lot of his possessions. What I found the most interesting, though, was not really the mausoleum itself but what it represented about Inner Mongolia. First off, I found it to have this vaguely fake aura, since all of it had been spruced up several years before, and the huge building housing a lot of the remains and things actually replaced a collection of yurts that had previously been there. Second, the concept of building a mausoleum when you don't have the body is a little strange, to say the least. Third, there's extensive Sinification 汉化 here -- all the guards and tour guides speak Chinese, and there's incense to burn in front of some of the possessions; although I don't know much about Mongolian culture, that strikes me as somewhat culturally inaccurate.


The same day, we went to interview this family, called 达尔扈特人, Da'erhute, I don't know how to say this in English）who have apparently guarded the mausoleum for generations upon end since Genghis Khan's death in the 1100s. We were supposed to interview three families, but we were only able to interview one, the reason being since these 达尔扈特人 have not been traditionally very Sinified AND because apparently there was some trouble with the Olympic torch as it went through Inner Mongolia (I haven't even gotten started on how irritated I am at the Olympics. This can be exhibit 1), we were restricted, all 20 of us, to only interviewing one family. Apparently there are a lot of restrictions on them by the Inner Mongolian government, I think, and they're not supposed to leave the province. The man we interviewed also said that since these people have been guarding the mausoleum for so long, they'd like to let the world know about this contribution, but again because of some cultural issues it isn't really going to happen, which gets you to thinking about Sinification of these regions and how political cultural issues can often get.

Finally, on something of a random note, the front gate at the mausoleum reminded me of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall 中正紀念堂 in Taipei. To a certain point all Chinese architecture kind of looks the same to me.

Taipei, anyone?

Day 5: The desert!

This was one of the best days of the trip for me. We went to Xiangshawan 向沙湾, which is so named because apparently when you slide down the sand it is supposed to make this crackling sound. Not true -- I slid down (a la skiing) the sand and only discovered that the sand is really, really hot. Duh. I'll let the pictures/captions speak for themselves, since I think that that's the best way to describe it.

On the cable car across to Xiangshawan.

Amazingly, more comfortable than horses.

My camel!

So many camels!

Desert yay!

I spotted this toilet on camel-back, and wondered who was going to use it.

Archery.

More archery.

Too cool for school. Haha.

About to get into this ball-thing, which then rolled down this chute thing. It was really fun.

Then at night we went back to Hohhot, which I don't really have much to say about except that it looks like any other large Chinese city, with the exception of Mongolian words throughout. I did, however, go with a classmate of mine and Timo (the HBA secretary) to have hot pot in individual hot pots, which Ｉ now find to be one of the more convenient arrangements that I have seen.

Day 6: Hohhot happenings

On the second-to-last day in Inner Mongolia, we went to Mengniu 蒙牛, which is a factory that makes a ton of products, most famously popsicles 冰棍儿, at least among the fifth-year students. The tour was your run-of-the-mill standard factory/corporate tour, with the only oddity being that we had to wear these shoe coverings (what's with the shoe coverings in Inner Mongolia?) in order that the factory floor didn't get wet. It was admittedly pretty interesting to see the processing of all those dairy products, however.

...

It's really cool, actually -- if you look at the back of the picture, apparently the cows walk into this revolving thing by themselves, get milked as it turns, and then walk off.

Yeah, so we get bored during the tour.

Later that afternoon, we went to the Dazhao Lamasery 大昭庙, which was built in 1579. However, like so many other things in China, much of it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt later, and the only reason that the most famous hall (which also includes some really cool dragon sculptures and the requisite Buddhas) survived the 60s and 70s in China was because it was used as an arms storehouse. It's one thing to read about these things in history books, but another to come face to face with all this architecture and realize that the Cultural Revolution's impact on Chinese history was really profound.

A Tibetan prayer-wheel at the lamasery.

There's a matching one with 寿 on it as well.
Ouch.

Finally, that evening we went to watch this musical performance thing at Ruyi Square -- basically, it's a huge backdrop of water fountains with music ranging from contemporary Mandopop to Communist-sounding songs.

I don't know why, but this picture reminds me of Christmas.

Apparently this happens every night (I'm guessing it doesn't happen during the winter though?)

Fifth-years!

Day 7: The end

I'm running out of energy at this point to describe the rest of the trip, so this day is going to be somewhat shorter in description (and hence the non-clever description of this day). We went to Inner Mongolia University 内蒙古大学 and Inner Mongolia Normal University 内蒙古师范大学 to interview students. I actually found this to be the most valuable interviewing experience, not so much because it contributed much to my social study report (which by this point was pretty well-defined in my mind) but because we were able to talk one-on-one for an extended period of time. It was particularly interesting discussing the Olympics, because from this I was able to see how important the Olympics really are to so many Chinese people. Perhaps it's only Beijing that's organizing them, but there are so many Chinese people, including these university students, who really felt as if it was something that entire China should be proud of. I also discussed Sino-American relations, gaokao 高考, Taiwan (of course) and general economic change in general.

There was a ping-pong contest going on at Inner Mongolia Normal University, an annual one that goes to a different place every year and this year happens to be in Inner Mongolia. No wonder Chinese people love ping-pong so much.

Finally, later that day we headed off to the provincial museum of Inner Mongolia, which was basically your standard museum, with exhibits on minority nationalities added.

Charles and I.

I couldn't resist taking this picture.

So, Inner Mongolia...

All in all, I had a really good time in Inner Mongolia. I can't even begin to describe what a relief it was to escape the haze, pollution, smog and general crowded-ness of Beijing and see the huge grasslands, blue skies, white clouds and generally gorgeous landscapes of Inner Mongolia. The cities, Erdos and Hohhot, weren't so impressive, but then again they were your standard run-of-the-mill Chinese city. At the same time, I had a vaguely uneasy -- that's not really the right word, but I'm not really sure what would be -- feeling about the whole commercialization of traditional Mongolian culture. Yeah, we stayed in yurts and rode horses on the grasslands, but I'm pretty sure traditional Mongolian yurts weren't made out of cement and the horses didn't trot around on a predefined path. Of course tourists can never fully experience an authentic cultural experience, but there's something about how unabashed the commercialization of traditional Mongolian culture is in Inner Mongolia that bothers me. This is clearly also not limited to just Inner Mongolia/China, but going to Inner Mongolia made this thought stick out rather prominently in my mind.

In part II (hopefully to come in the next few days, which means that I will finally be caught up on blogging): Gang's visit, my ambivalent thoughts about Beijing and the Olympics, the Summer Palace, Old Summer Palace, Beihai Park and my thoughts on HBA and life in general. Stay tuned.

Unfortunate events

As depressing as this may sound, this is unfortunately a rather good summation of this week's events. Also as a warning to all my devoted readers (ha, ha) this entry won't have any pictures, for reasons that will be summarily explained below...

Bengkui

Or, 崩溃, which means something along the lines of crumble, collapse or fall apart. This word, along with many other computer-related vocabulary, has unfortunately become part of my vocbulary...since, you guessed it, my computer has 崩溃了. To be more exact (and in English), the registry and/or the hard drive both have problems, are hopelessly corrupted and are now useless. This happened last Monday, so in the last week this has resulted in several different phenomena:

(1) In contrast to the questionably-useful vocabulary I have been learning (I know how to say "gibbon," several different synonyms for "miserliness," and how to describe Chinese prosody, as an example), I now know much computer vocabulary that I didn't know before! (Including, for example, how to say "registry," "backup," "hard drive," "file," "copy," etc.) They say there's nothing like a superbly inconvenient situation in a developing foreign country to make you learn vocabulary faster -- or something like that, anyway.

(2) In the last week I have hailed a cab more times than in the previous 20 years of my life. I am now an expert on how to get to Zhongguancun 中关村, which is this super-tech-heavy area of Beijing, and can describe to you numerous buildings on the route. More about this later. That is, transportation in general, not Zhongguancun.

(3) I am now an expert at using 201 cards and IP cards, which are both telephone cards. Having bought a 30 RMB ($4.35) card and used it directly to call the US, I now know that that is a bad idea, since calls using the 201 card are 8 RMB ($1.17) a minute and that call ended in approximately three minutes. I'm also now a speed demon at using the phone in my room and find a certain pleasure in clacking away at the numbers (since I have to dial 2012, input my 201 card number, then the PIN, then the access number, then the IP card number to call abroad, then the actual number) on the phone.

(4) Finally, I have discovered that I have much more free time than I did in previous weeks, not having a computer, the conclusion of which is fairly obvious...

In any case, this is the reason why there will be no pictures in today's post (because I'm borrowing someone's computer and it will take forever for me to upload pictures, resize them, etc. and plus because I'm lazy and want to go to sleep soon.)

Muttering in the rain

On Friday, my friend My Khanh (who is studying at PiB) made plans to meet up at Wangfujing 王府井 after she got back from watching Beijing opera that night. That night was a complete disaster (but not because of My Khanh! In fact, we successfully met up the next day!), and again I think I will summarize by giving you the list of the lessons that I have learned from this experience.

(1) Making plans to meet at the "only McDonald's" on Wangfujing Dajie 王府井大街 is a bad idea when there are two McDonald's. Enough said.

(2) Well, I suppose there are really only two lessons, but this second one is that that Friday night trying to hail a cab in the rain was hands-down absolutely the most god-awful miserable night that I have spent in my entire month in China so far without exception. After failing to meet up with My Khanh, I decided to head back to BLCU to get some rest. Unfortunately, last night it had been pouring rain for hours. I knew that hailing a cab in the rain was difficult, but Friday night was absolutely ridiculous. I was waiting at Wangfujing Dajie and Chang'an Dajie 长安大街, which is this major thoroughfare through central Beijing, and I waited for a full hour and a half to catch a cab, all the while while it was still raining. The experience went something like this:

1. I'd stare miserably at the traffic on Chang'an Dajie racing by and cursing at all those people sitting warmly in cabs racing home and muttering under my breath at the incompetence of subway lines that close before midnight, and one that closes before 9 pm (don't even get me started on this. Actually, I think I will, just a bit later.)

2. Cabs would turn onto Wangfujing Dajie, and I'd raise my hand to try to hail them. At first, I only waited for ones that had For hire 空车 in them, but soon it became a reflex to just push my arm up when I saw a car that had a bump on the roof.

3. The cabs would race by and I imagined the passengers inside laughing at me, a thought which started in my second hour of waiting. In the rare event that a cab was actually stopping on Wangfujing Dajie, a horde of people would descend on the cab. As soon as the passengers inside got out, people would squeeze in amid arguments about who got their first, and the cab would race away. Needless to say it was very difficult to be the first one to get to a cab.

4. All the while, I was wading through streets that were flooding with rain, etc.

Finally around midnight or so I was able to hail a cab, and effectively collapsed in exhaustion and sheer joy after getting on one.

Getting around

Which brings me to the of the week, public transportation. As a southern Californian, this is a topic near and dear to my heart, since it effectively lacks any as such. The same things that I mentioned in one of my posts while in Shanghai about the subway system there hold true for Beijing. After last night, the one thing that really sticks out in my mind is how absurdly early some of the subway lines close, and how New Yorkers (and I think Londoners?) are spoiled for having a 24-hour subway system.

There's actually only one more observation I want to make, I realize, which is something small but I think very telling. New Yorkers have the reputation of being an unfriendly, brusque people (this is going somewhere, bear with me). But in all my experience of taking the subway in New York, people never fail to wait for the passengers to get off before getting on. This is absolutely not the case in China, not even in Shanghai, which I consider by far to be the most modernized city in China (perhaps I'm a bit biased at this point against Beijing, haha). As soon as the subway doors open people rush into the car as if it's going to depart imminently, leaving the departing passengers to fend their way through the masses.

I don't really know what the greater significance of this is. Perhaps I'm a spoiled Westerner who doesn't know how to approach life aggressively enough. The thing is, habits like spitting on the street or old men wearing questionably little clothing doesn't even bother me. But somehow I feel like this shows something about Chinese society, but right now I'm not exactly sure what.
I have another little anecdote that I've been meaning to write about for the last couple of posts but which I keep forgetting. Before I left for China, I read about Beijing Capital Airport's terminal 3 (which I flew into! Sparkly and new it definitely is) and how it was completed in record time, and no construction project like that could be completed at anything near that speed in a Western country. I think the comparison was Heathrow in the UK. The conclusion drawn was that the authoritarian nature of the government ensures that public hearings, community meetings, etc., are all entirely unnecessary in China, which has the result that construction projects like the airport's terminal 3 can be completed much faster than they would in a democracy.

Anyway -- my example is, when I came to HBA, the street that BLCU is on, Chengfu Lu 成府路, had no paved sidewalks at all. It was all dirt and mud. Keep in mind that this is three weeks ago. Now this stretch of Chengfu Lu is 95% paved, in less than three weeks. The reason, of course, is that the Olympic Village and many of the stadiums are down the way (and one of BLCU's gymnasiums is going to serve as a practice gym for Olympic basketball players), and so the government, of course, doesn't want these muddy, dirty streets to be the impression of pedestrians who may be around this area. I don't know about the rest of you, but construction projects of this sort in southern California always take ages to complete. But in communist China, if the government wants it done, it gets it done, fast. (Not that I'm complaining. My flip-flop-wearing self is super glad that the sidewalks are all now paved. :) )

Fill 'em up

I think I have mentioned food in every one of my posts in Beijing so far, so this won't be an exception. My continuing impression of Beijing food hasn't really changed, which is that everything around BLCU is rather greasy and oily and that I'm still not a big fan of the northern school of Chinese cuisine. I read in the Lonely Planet guide that Light gave us that the northern school is hearty food which is supposed to fill people up in the winter, or something like that, but written more elegantly. And I think it's true. As much as I like my baozi 包子 (dumplings of sorts) in the morning, the food here is rather monotonous. There's a lot of bread and meat. I think part of the reason I'm somewhat dissatisfied is that I don't get out of BLCU that often, but by the same token I think if I were in Taiwan, for example, and restricted to a small circuit I don't think I would be as dissatisfied with the culinary scene there.

I'm really starting to miss all the fresh fruits. Particularly: grapes, which I don't eat here because you have to peel fruits to stay on the safe side and I don't have the willpower to peel every grape before eating one; mangoes, which are a quintessential summer fruit; and lychees and longans, which can be found here but are ridiculously expensive compared to the south. I'm also hankering after a good cup of boba 波霸奶茶 and a rice-roll 飯團 that is one of my all-time favorite Chinese breakfast foods anywhere. Sigh.

Time to do homework

Haha, which is true. But again to sum up, after reading this post I realize that it has been mostly a series of complaints, which I think stems partially from the fact that (1) this week has been particularly unfortunate and (2) they're more fun to write about that spectacular successes. :) So if you're reading this, I just want to say that my life here in Beijing is not really all as miserable as it's made out to be by this blog. But by the same token, Beijing also falls short in a lot of ways which have proven to be more serious than I would have thought. So, to use an expression that I have (re)learned here at HBA, you can't look at this situation with only one viewpoint, or something like that, or, you can't 一概而论 life here in the capital.

Coming next week: hopefully, the recovery of the computer. And, Inner Mongolia!

(On second thought, that post may come next-next week, as I'm leaving for Hohhot 呼和浩特 on Friday.)

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!)