The Beijing Blur

Starting Sunday morning, not 7 hours after arriving in Beijing orientation began.

Broken up into groups, we followed RA’s on the short walk through East Campus to “Food Alley”.  At the end was a ChaShiFa – the local chain grocery store.  We spent an hour in there picking up a few essentials, for me that meant Diet Coke and Ritz crackers then onto search for breakfast. 

An outside Zhaozi (dumpling) standing was delighted by our huge group and even brought some stools out onto the sidewalk to eat.  A bag of 10 dumplings was 5 kuai – roughly 89 US cents.  And talk about a steal, they were the best dumplings I’d ever had! (Sorry Hwang Laoshi)

For the rest of Sunday the whole group (76 of us) sat in a room listening to speeches about how amazing the experience will be and how we have to take advantage of every minute.  As much as I agreed, it was pretty tough fighting off the jetlag so I was happy when we took a break in the afternoon for a campus tour and lunch.

The IES building – our building – has everything we need in it: our rooms/bathrooms, kitchens, lounges, lecture rooms, meeting rooms, classrooms, and teachers offices.  Technically, if I stalked up on groceries I’d never have to leave, but where’s the fun in that?? So I listened intently as the RA in my group pointed out different buildings on campus.  Although this tour was not much help since everything is closed for the Chun Jie holiday.  The school semesters are pretty different here – students finished their fall semester the first week of January and will return for spring at the end of February.

The campus tour ended at a restaurant close by.  We ate family style and I got to seriously hold up on my phrase “I’ll try everything once”.  I met a lot of students at lunch, including Deven from U of Portland and John from Tulane in Louisiana.  A couple teachers were there too.

Little did I know at the time, lunch break served another purpose.  Walking back into our building, signs with our names and room numbers were posted.  At the top of the signs was something I was not too thrilled about – Oral Placement Test.  Wow, didn’t see that one coming.  I hadn’t spoken Chinese in something like 6 weeks, my roommate for even longer, so we were both pretty concerned.

Nervously standing in the hallway I made a couple quick friends, Adam is a junior at George Washington in DC, John is a senior at Northeastern in Boston, and Rachel and Sarah are juniors at Wofford College in South Carolina.  The test was only about 5 minutes and though she commented on my tones she said I’d be just fine in 201.

Finally it was dinner time.  The RA’s had ordered pizza from a favorite restaurant of last semester’s students called PBD’s. Pizza on my first day in China seemed wrong but it was nice to get some food and social time.  More social time was to come as a couple brave souls and I bundled up and headed out to explore the Beijing nightlife.  We didn’t make it far, only to a bar called Helen’s down the street but it was fun to mingle, everyone was eager to meet each other and make friends.

Monday brought more speeches and information sessions.  The best one was at the end of the day.  The year-long students who had been here last semester talked to us without the teachers and RA’s.  We got to ask them questions we all wanted to know and they gave us the inside scoop on some things that teachers and advisors are better off not knowing.

After that was over, a big group of people went out to Helen’s again.  This time there were more of us Lao wei (foreigners) there.  I got to talk with Adam more about DC and we asked the year-long guys their favorite hangout spots around the city.

On Tuesday we were paired up based on language skill and sent out into the city on “Mystery Beijing”.  I was lucky enough to get paired with Shin-Yee, a native Taiwanese speaker who’s a junior at UMBC.  Our mission was to find a bookstore downtown.  On our way out of the dorm we realized a group of guys had the same spot so we teamed up.

Naturally the first thing to do when you get into a competition is to… go eat lunch!  The 4 of us went to a great lunch spot where we were squeezed between 100 hungry workers and fuwen (waiters) running around.  After dumplings and fried noodles we were off.  Chris wasn’t feeling well so he went back to campus leaving David from Northwestern with the 2 of us.  We soon had our first battle with public transportation.

Riding buses, getting lost, finding subway stations, and being shoved around was a lot more fun than it sounds.  It also made finding the bookstore that much greater.  

Though his Chinese is still at a low level, David took this opportunity to strike up a conversation with anyone who crossed his path, he developed what I call his Chinese pickup line: “Ni hao. Wo shi Meigou ren” Hello, I’m an American.  While some blew him off (and all the young women walked off quickly in the opposite direction) many people were delighted to have a conversation with him.  As entertaining as this was, it slowed down our progress quite a bit.  We found the bookstore then made our way back.  Through another serious of confusing bus routes (it was like it was all written in another language! Ha!) We finally got back to campus… 5 hours later.  I was so tired by the time Convocation began that I again struggled to stay awake.

After convocation a big group of us went to dinner at a Wegger restaurant.   Wegger is a minority group in western China that has strong Kazakhstani influence.  The food was again served family style and I got to try dishes I’d never even seen before.  Then after dinner, we rallied again to explore the nightlife of Houhai, a district in Beijing.

I thought Tuesday was crazy but it was only a warm-up.  Wednesday morning bright and early brought “Mystery Beijing Round 2: The real competition”.  We split into groups of 5 and were given a lost list of sites around Beijing except the sites weren’t listed, the activities you do there were.  Once deciphering the code and figuring out a few of the spots it was time for the subway again.  We started at an ice rink on another university’s campus north of ours.  At the ice rink we saw a really interesting way of ice skating.  Chinese people sat on chairs that were nailed to wooden boards with blades on the bottom of them.  They held ice picks in each hand to maneuver themselves around the frozen lake, we all wanted to try it!  Our task once we got there though was something different.

We all lined up, our mission: race across the ice, in our shoes, hopping on one foot.  The kick? If we all fell before the finish line, we had to start over again.  Starting off 3 of the girls were more nervous about falling than winning so they hopped cautiously down the ice.  However LeighAnn and I were in a dead heat flying across the ice.  At the turn around point I went to switch feet, and it was all over.  In one of those cartoon moments I was up in the air, then down on my back.  I laid on the ice giggling a bit and noticed an Asian man on a bench not too far away trying to stifle his laugher. I looked at him and started laughing hysterically and his reaction was to do the same.  Taking my shameful walk back LeighAnn finished in first and our group completed the contest.  The rest of the day went on like this with small tasks around Beijing.  Though we had a ton of fun we didn’t make it back in time to enter our photos into the competition.  After a few more lectures in the evening we slumped off to our beds exhausted.

Thursday morning began with the Language Pledge.  For the first 6 weeks we have all promised to speak only in Chinese from 8am-4pm while on campus.  This includes rooms, hallways, and any eateries on campus.  At the end of February the language pledge will turn 24 hours.  This a picture of LeighAnn after the language pledge… due to our lower level language skill currently it is more like a vow of silence.

Classes began after the pledge.  My morning class is a block of area studies, the unit I’m starting with is an extremely interesting class called Understanding China.  It’s basically a history class from the beginning of society in China to present day.  Then we have a nice break for lunch and 2 hours of Chinese in the afternoon.  Unbelievably we were assigned homework on our first day: 800 words on the youth culture in China today, due Friday at 9am.

After staying up much later than we should have LeighAnn and I finished our papers, slumped to class in the morning then napped all Friday afternoon.