假期 vacation

This past week I have been living the Beijing life at a much more relaxed pace on my fall vacation. Most of my other classmates jumped on trains and plains in order to explore different areas of China. Because I didn’t feel like the bathroom conditions aboard sleeper trains, and have already spent a lot of time, energy, and money traveling around this China this summer, I decided to stay home in Beijing and see what amusing situations I could stumble into during an unrestrained week in the city.

Biggest thing I learned this week. Beijing gets COLD. Suddenly the beautiful afternoon sun with accompanying light breeze of fall transformed into frigid cold death temperature. Going outside was not an option many a time this week and I was forced to order from the overexpensive Korean restaurant downstairs. Also, they have not turned the heat on yet so I have been wearing multiple layers to bed. No fun! Luckily towards the end of the week the grip of frost and death relented and the beautiful fall weather returned.

I decided,  because I was going to have so much time on my hands, I should perhaps find some part-time work that could be both mentally stimulating and economically beneficial at the same time. I asked one of the teacher in the program and she put me in touch with a friend over at a company that specializes in teaching students Chinese in preparation for their eventually study in a foreign country. I spent a lot of time over the last week riding the subway back and forth to the company’s office in order to do a series of interviews and sample classes. So while I wasn’t able to start teaching this past week, I am set to begin teaching Oral English and SAT prep classes next week which should help keep me busy and cut down on time-wasting TV habits that have slowly developed lately. The pay is really good too, better than the pay at any jobs I have worked in America. Pure excitement this opportunity is.

While I wasn’t shuffling back and forth to the center of the city for these interviews I was spending a lot of quality time with my roommate. He has his own car which allows us to travel around the city faster and in much more comfortable conditions than the bus or subway provide. My roommate has friends that attend the National University for Performing Arts so we had the opportunity to watch the dress rehearsal of a traditional Beijing Opera for free (tickets are usually more than 50 dollars). The costumes and singing were fantastic the machine that displays the words and characters were broken. Therefore, it was excruciatingly difficult to hear the singing and understand the story. So while I appreciated the performance for the first hour, at the end of all three hours I was practically falling asleep because I had no idea what in the world was happening.

On another day we took the public buses out to 香山 (fragrant hills park). We wanted to climb the hill and see all the trees around Beijing with their leaves changing into deep shades of red and yellow on their course to eventually death. However, the leaves hadn’t really changed yet (bad timing). The park was crowded but nonetheless we had a great time chatting our way up the hill and seeing views like this:

 

 

Beijing Revealed!

 

It was interesting to see just how massive Beijing is (even if the pollution is blocking the view).

The week flew by and in addition to doing all this stuff I bought a jacket, made pancakes, caught up on a lot of TV, made friends on the Subway, got lost, put ketchup on pasta and called it spaghetti, witnessed true Chinese road rage (and even got involved), and slept in past 11 a couple times. Overall, it was a very successful vacation and while I am looking forward to the start of classes tomorrow, I really enjoyed my new found freedom this past week.

Only 7 WEEKS left… on the downward slide now!

北京的照片 pictures from beijing

here are some pictures from my time so far in Beijing…

Enjoy!

It’s the biggest public square in the entire world and  arguably the most important political and cultural space in China, Tiananmen. Please note the color of the sky, that isn’t rain or clouds…that’s sweet pollution. My lungs are in love.

 

 

 

On seeing these cameras in Tiananmen I reluctantly put the Democracy is swell pamphlets I was planning to hand out back in my pockets. Tiananmen is China’s pride and joy and as THE place where political unrest has developed in the past, the government wants to know what is going on.

Construction, it is all over Beijing and the entire country of China. Don’t count on any roped off “Hard Hat” zones here, you just kind of run into these giant piles of stone or even better guys jackhammering away or welding up a storm (literally of sparks).

While a new Beijing is being built remnants of the past are constantly being neglected or torn down. This “Friendship Hotel” was on the side of a rather abandoned Hutong (cramp narrow alleyways where people work and live) that construction crews were essentially ripping apart. While lots of organizations and people  are working to protect pieces of the past, the truth is Beijing is sacrificing its own history while flinging itself towards modernity.

the abandoned looking Hutong neighborhood I randomly explored

A piece of Ming dynasty city wall that I checked out after finding that the Beijing Underground City (think giant bomb shelter with movie theatre, hospital, school, the works… built during the cold war) that is closed for repairs for the next year. There is a little park and some flowers beside it but really no one pays attention to it. I thought it interesting that the city has practically swallowed up this ancient relic and no one really pays attention to it while they commute to work or are out shopping.

The shopping center, Xidan. Everything is too expensive so not really that into this place. Lots of people though, and tons of foreigners

 

Huge pagoda on Peking University’s campus. I wish Bowdoin had something this cool but I guess Coles tower half counts.

 

Bridge and lake in the Summer Palace, essentially the emperor’s vacation home (palace?) right outside of Beijing. Once again, please note the sky.

 

For all the art history majors out there here is a cool painting I found in the 798 art district.

 

more artsy things I don’t actually understand

Yep, that woman is suspending a giant beam with two girls sitting on it in the air with her legs. No big deal.

 

That’s just a taste of Beijing!

好久不见 long time no see

Its been a while people of the internet. I have not written something substantial for this blog for a quite a while. I apologize for not keeping you up to date on my happenings in Beijing but things have been really busy lately in a rushing to class staying up late doing homework kind of way. It’s true, my days of frivolous exploration and adventure have gotten fewer and fewer as I work my way  deeper into the twisted labyrinths of this semester.

However, having lived in Beijing for a few months I feel myself feeling less like a traveler or visiter (like I felt like in Hangzhou) and establishing myself more permanently in this city in a variety of  ways. I have a transportation card now, which lets me skip the lines in the subway or hop on a bus with a quick swipe of my wallet against the scanner. I never got one in Hangzhou and scrounged through my pockets every time looking for that last elusive 1 yuan. It makes things a lot more convenient and I laugh to myself walking past all the silly tourists fighting the lines while buying their one use cards

I actually have a gym membership here and most days walk the ten minutes to hop on a treadmill or lift some weights and get away from the claustrophobia of the campus. The gym is usually crowded with all sorts of old women walking on treadmills and yelling about their marital problems into their cellphone and huge Chinese guys struggling lifting these big stacks of weight at the other side of the gym. I am not sure if I am afraid of the old women or the other guys, It’s a really busy place and fun to go watch Chinese soap operas on the tvs they have in the walls while doing a little running.

I have also made an effort to try all the restaurants in the area; some of them performed better than others. One night a couple of friends and I were out eating dinner. We had just finished our meals and were finishing up our conversation before we returned to school. Suddenly the power went off and people began yelling out in the darkness. We got up, walked out, and noticed that no other stores in the block had lost power, it was just the restaurant that we were in. I guess they decided not to recharge their electricity card which people and businesses in Beijing must do. It was very strange and I have not returned to that restaurant again (UPDATE: went back tonight, power was fine).

I instead go to a Sichuan province restaurant not too far from campus practically every single day. This place is packed with students and workers from the area day and is staffed by 4 or 5 teenage girls of unknown age (they told us 16 but they look much younger) and really quickly turns out decent food. The food is cheap (about 1 dollar a dish) and usually isn’t covered in too much oil. It’s good stuff.

Aside from these day to day activities not much has been happening in good ol’ Beijing. We have been all been talking about the Chinese prisoner Liu Xiaobo who just one the nobel prize lately. He is a Chinese intellectual and writer and has been in and out of Chinese jails since the 1989 Tiananmen incident. He is in jail now because he signed the Charter 08, a document calling for political reform and the democratization of China in 2008. The government has been trying to keep the word about him winning away from the people of China. There was no news coverage of the event, blogs and sites are being filtered and you cannot send text messages with his name in them right now. It is really interesting to see how pervasive China’s censoring controls really are and this has been a great event to test them. It’s super super big news here and its pretty cool that I am here in Beijing and able to talk with my roommates and teachers about this (just don’t tell the government).

If I am gaining anything from my studies right now (other than getting better at Chinese) it is an appreciation and maybe blossoming obsession with recent Chinese history. Since the revolution in 1949 China has undergone unfathomable and borderline crazy transformations. It is so interesting the wild shifts that this county has gone through in the last 60 years. Just seeing people on the street and realizing they lived through the freaking CULTURAL REVOLUTION where high schoolers were sent all over the country by Mao to break, burn, torture, and destroy anyone and anything that had to do with the past, democracy, the bourgeoisie, pretty much anything, is insane to think about it. I’m now bent on reading every piece of information about this period of time leading up today. I’m hooked.

That’s it people…thats my life right now. I will be writing more I swear. Stay tuned

再见！

我和中国 me and china

My childhood was irrationally filled with fantasies of Asia and San Francisco. No joke, from a very young age on I was  fixated  with a city in California and the entire  continent of Asia. There were no visible reasons why I was so preoccupied with two seemingly unrelated places but the feelings just wouldn’t shake as I continued to grow up. My parents even agree, these two places always seemed to be in the back of my mind during my childhood . To a kid growing up in Maine, these two places felt literally removed from me, completely  unobtainable. Asia seemed especially distant, this giant chunk of land on the map with these millions of people I knew nothing about. It really only the times when I watched Jackie Chan movies with my dad or mindlessly spun the globe during school thinking about where I would go or end up when I grew up.

It’s just funny how these little things during your childhood can play such a big role in the choices you make and things you do when you get older.

I just sort of remembered this today and needed a break from writing about AIDS in Chinese so I wanted to share this little story.