Ack. I was doing a reasonable job of updating the blog until the last couple of weeks. I have a pretty good excuse for week 1 - I spent it in Inner Mongolia doing our social study report, as per HBA mandate (I feel like the longer I'm here, the clunkier my prose becomes...apologies). Without much advanced knowledge of any sort, I decided to do my report on Mongolian (the language, that is) because it's the sort of topic I've always been interested in, and I thought that my background knowledge on language preservation was enough that I might be able to produce something whose importance extended beyond exceeding the word length.
But really, for all the talk about producing the report, that's not what the week was about. Writing 1200 characters isn't really going to be that much of a challenge - I think a lot of people took two or three hours. I had to handwrite mine (remind me to explain sometime while my computer is still broken) and then type it up, but that probably took...6 hours total? Beyond that it was just an unbelievably fortunate week where I had the chance to explore somewhere beyond the boundaries of what I had ever encountered before. And it's not that Inner Mongolia should be exaggerated as some distant ultima thule (see nabokov) because it's really very much like the rest of China in lots of respects, which is a lesson in itself. But I also saw the most remote terrain I've ever seen in my life, inhabited only by shepherds and goatherds. I have the pictures if I ever find a way to put them on the internet - but maybe a better description is that I'm pretty sure I could pick most directions and then walk for a hundred miles without encountering another human being, except maybe for a flock of sheep or two. overlying the rapidly desertifying grasslands you can see distant, jagged red-purple mountains, which we crossed once on a somewhat terrifying return trip to the citified part of inner mongolia.
The experience deserves to be better described, and I hope that it will be in more detail at some point, but it stacks up with any of the most fortunate experiences of my increasingly inexplicably fortunate life. I'll go as far as saying that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I was lucky enough to stumble open. I hope I get to go back some day.
Currently going through somewhat of a Chinese music binge, again tricky given that I don't have a computer. Ends up leading to a lot of frustration most of the time as I turn on V, china's answer to MTV, and hope that they'll play a decent song or two. For now, check out here for what's currently on my mind. Actually, I normally don't have youtube at my internet cafe, so I'll take the opportunity to link up to this as well (watch the whole thing...although I promise the lyrics are very moving as well if you don't speak any chinese)
I seriously have at least 8 topics for blog posts in one of my coursebooks right now, but just no time to write them down at all. Shawn (a.k.a. 少华） is consistently unbelievably friendly in letting me barge into his room and monopolize his computer for long stretches of time, but even so I barely have time to keep up with whatever happenings are in the outside world. the blog is high on my priorities list, but so are the other things I don't have time to do. As of right now I'm already neglecting a particularly challenging new lesson. Probably another hour and a half tonight to memorize, and then wake up tomorrow to review/复习...so, that's it for now. Pictures could be coming if I ever get around to taking up weimin on his offer of loaning his computer so I can start uploading.
27.7.09
4.7.09
post of the time period
It's sort of hard to figure out exactly what to write when everytime I want to post I'm put on the spot with about twenty minutes to write down the things I've been stewing over for the last few days. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with our blogging prompts. what are you going to do.
The biggest thing on my mind is that, on and off, I'm starting to feel like I have some idea of what Iw ant to do with myself. Truth be told, if you'd asked me why I was here, the simplest answer would just be that I really like learning Chinese. But the more I'm around here, the more the puzzle pieces begin to interlock. Of course, it's often just a passing revelation and the next day I have no idea what I was thinking. But lately, I've been thinking that the best way to combine my interests might be to go to geophysics grad school, get involved in climate issues of some sort, and then try to get involved in a job in China with some sort of environmental capacity. The longer I'm here the more I am, first and foremost, blown away by how quickly life moves around here and how fast things are changing, and as a result just how much damage china's environment is taking. One of my teachers mentioned that when she was a kid, the city centers were all cooler than they are now because widespread use of air conditioners has raised the ambient temperature. We're talking about a country that is developing rampantly, and will continue to do so even as shanghai and beijing settle down, thanks to the "Develop the west" campaign. If there is a battle against global warming to be won, it will be here in China. So why not try to get involved?
Beyond that, I've mostly been musing about the places I want to go. Last night, I didn't sleep too much because I postponed studying for my test, instead reading my china lonely planet, courtesy of the kind folks at light. For any of you who have ever read my travel blogs in the past (maybe two of you, but then again there are about five people reading this, so there) I actually dislike using guides to navigate once I get somewhere. But this one's a little different, because its pages contain hundreds of cities I had never even heard of, but now get to contemplate visiting, a distant fantasy in case the fellowship money lasts. Did you know there's an actual town called Shangri-la in China? Some enterprising local politicians in Yunnan renamed their city in a bid to draw more tourists.
Trips that I've contemplated: trying to go to korea by boat to meet up with jason kb, going to qufu, confucius's home (this one I expect to happen), getting to india by going through tibet and nepal, traveling to western sichuan, going to inner mongolia...except that the last one is really going to happen!
1.7.09
About ten minutes worth of ramblings
There are times when this city can be frustrating. First of all, the scale of the place makes getting anywhere a matter of concerted effort. This isn't like Boston, where a good half hour will get you to Southie, or New Haven when about half an hour of biking can get you clear across town. Though the subway system is far-flung and fairly quick, Beijing is quite simply huge. In the States, the only city I can think of that comes close is New York City - a much better analog than LA, where people drive everywhere, because really Beijing is just a series of neighborhoods, one after another, turning toward the fringes into farm towns, all growing the same crops. My botanical knowledge is sorely lacking, but rather than the rice paddies of Vietnam, which are essentially my only good comparison, these are rows after rows of what look like cornstalks, with the occasional root vegetable or orchard of peaches all growing in paper bags (pollution induced, perhaps?). I'm not tired of the food at this point, but it's becoming a possibility whereas before I wouldn't have worried about it.
The weather as legitimately beautiful yesterday. Blue sky, interspersed with clouds. Warm but not drenched-in-sweat-inducingly so. The rumor has it that August will see the haze return in style, but for now, I can't complain.
Planned to write more, no time as usual. Now if dell would just get their act together...
The weather as legitimately beautiful yesterday. Blue sky, interspersed with clouds. Warm but not drenched-in-sweat-inducingly so. The rumor has it that August will see the haze return in style, but for now, I can't complain.
Planned to write more, no time as usual. Now if dell would just get their act together...
30.6.09
Food and language
Those are the two big subjects that I feel I have yet to address since I started writing in my blog. I have no way to get pictures from my camera yet, so I'm not going to let you share my experience of scaling a segment of the great wall, which incidentally was awesome in the old sense of the word.
The single best thing I have tasted here is...nan. What? Seriously? That's not even Chinese! Well, I'm not going to let you in on the details until my computer gets fixed (which could potentially be as soon as the next couple of days, although don't count on it). But the single tastiest item, definitely reflective of my personal food tastes, might be a loaf of nan from the on-campus Muslim restaurant. You'll enjoy the details when I post them.
Using various averages from mathematics, I'll tell you that the mean of my meal prices is probably around 15, the median is probably around 10 or so and the mode is definitely 7 or 8. Kuai, that is. It might be a little confusing why I call them kuai when the official currency of China is the renminbi - you need to understand a little bit about the Chinese language first, but yeah, they're the same thing. Anyway, the exchange rate is about 7 to 1, which should tell you about everything you need to know. The food in this neighborhood is truly dirt cheap, and it's hardly anomalous - I'm sure that there are neighborhoods in beijing where you could eat expensive food, but I suspect that compared to, say, a town outside of beijing, I'm paying what would be considered a premium. Snack food is everywhere for cheap. An ice cream bar costs about 2 or 3 kuai, leading to a serious ice cream habit on my end (I try not to eat one every day). From there on there are baozi, jianbing, jiaozi, kababs, pretty much anything you can imagine. There are tons of street-side stands - I was worried that it wouldn't be the case, that beijing would be a little too xiandai (modernized) but for all that the new buildings are going up in droves, at least in this part of town folks are always out on the streets, hawking books, shady looking meat, rubik's cubes, clothing...at night the salesfolk swarm in and the sidewalk is swathed in towels loaded with junky merchandise, dresses, purses, boxers, shenme de (etc.).
In any case. I promised to talk about food, so back to the subject. There's a bunch of different restaurants on campus - it's much less of a, for want of a better term, potemkin campus like yale is. the word has significant negative connotations, so I'll clarify by saying that yale owns almost every building within a close distance of campus and leases them based on its needs and desires, trying to create a cohesive image. I've never been 100% comfortable about that being the case. Anyway, the tradeoff is beiyu's (BLCU's) campus, where a significant amount of buildings appear to be owned by other folks, and it's not clear if leasing goes on or not. There's at least one KTV (karaoke) place on campus, a few different restaurants, including the aforementioned muslim one, and so on. However, there is also at least one dirt cheap student cafeteria where I eat almost every day. A trek to the second floor reveals a bunch of tiny little places that are essentially fast food - go up to the window, order, two minutes later get your food and sit down at one of the 8-person tables with your cohort. Except that all the dishes are actually jiachang-style - family kitchen, your chinese golden oldies of sorts. you can get a mapodoufu, gongbaojiding, or just plain old noodles, throwing in a rice or a hard-boiled egg for one kuai each. And really, though the food is laden in grease, it is quite good, a lot better than other greasy cafeteria fare I've had in my life.
When going further afield, well, to be honest, I have yet to do so that much. But there's a lot to be had. You can go to further hole-in-the-wall type joints, as I did today, where a meal is unlikely to be much more than 15 kuai for a serious amount of food. Even these places are an upgrade over the cafeteria, though, because it's here that you start to be able to enjoy chinese food the way it's supposed to be - in a group, ordering a ton of dishes and splitting them all at once. I'm almost positive I like Asian-style eating better than the American equivalent. Rather than getting two or three courses, as well as the odd bite of a friend's food if they're feeling generous, if you go with like seven or eight people, you get to eat five or six different dishes, each with their own particular flavor! you can order things that complement each other, a soup, fish, one "ma" dish...
Right, I think I need to talk about ma. So, have you ever heard about Sichuanese food being particularly spicy? The trick is, yes, it absolutely is, but they also have a certain flavor completely missing from the west: ma. It is not an excess of spiciness, but rather a certain pepper that induces numbness in the tongue as you eat it - supposedly what fugu does, except that while you have to go to the most expensive place in new york city to try it in the states, every single self-respecting place in china has at least a mapodoufu - tofu drenched in spice and ma-inducing peppers, which sort of look like miniature twin cherries. It's essentially the craziest revelation ever to find out that there's a whole different world of flavor that you have never tried in the states that is, if not a staple of chinese food, then widely available.
So, beyond the world of mere chinese food, there are a lot of korean places around, as well as a fair number of muslim, japanese and american fast food places. KFC, mcdonalds and pizza hut are everywhere, though each actually has its own chinese name (kendeji, maidanglao and bishengke respectively...thank you, chinese class!) I had maybe the best expensive meal yet last night, at a korean place where we were served raw meat, which we put in a tilted metal slab so that the juices could drain off. the flavors were pretty astonishingly good, though at 35 kuai (5 bucks) it was one of the more expensive meals I've eaten here, maybe the most expensive.
I promise to start taking pictures of special meals once my laptop gets working.
Shoot, I don't have time to talk about the language. I am such a bad blogger. I'll get around to it, I promise. It will even be fun. But for now, the major update is that I'm pretty sure I'm going to be going to the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, distinct from the actual country. We have a social study project to complete halfway through the program, and that's one of the locations available.There are also chances to go to a chinese village, shanghai, qingdao, chinese schools, a shaolin temple and a couple of others. Any of them would be amazing, and I'm tempted to check out the village, but I suspect that going to inner mongolia will be the most irreplaceable of the bunch.As well as making for some pretty crazy pictures, I hope.
In the very distant future, plans are starting to form in my mind for great adventures...so I ask a question that I expect no answer to: what's the best way to get from china to india? bear in mind that, as I just found out, the border is closed...
The single best thing I have tasted here is...nan. What? Seriously? That's not even Chinese! Well, I'm not going to let you in on the details until my computer gets fixed (which could potentially be as soon as the next couple of days, although don't count on it). But the single tastiest item, definitely reflective of my personal food tastes, might be a loaf of nan from the on-campus Muslim restaurant. You'll enjoy the details when I post them.
Using various averages from mathematics, I'll tell you that the mean of my meal prices is probably around 15, the median is probably around 10 or so and the mode is definitely 7 or 8. Kuai, that is. It might be a little confusing why I call them kuai when the official currency of China is the renminbi - you need to understand a little bit about the Chinese language first, but yeah, they're the same thing. Anyway, the exchange rate is about 7 to 1, which should tell you about everything you need to know. The food in this neighborhood is truly dirt cheap, and it's hardly anomalous - I'm sure that there are neighborhoods in beijing where you could eat expensive food, but I suspect that compared to, say, a town outside of beijing, I'm paying what would be considered a premium. Snack food is everywhere for cheap. An ice cream bar costs about 2 or 3 kuai, leading to a serious ice cream habit on my end (I try not to eat one every day). From there on there are baozi, jianbing, jiaozi, kababs, pretty much anything you can imagine. There are tons of street-side stands - I was worried that it wouldn't be the case, that beijing would be a little too xiandai (modernized) but for all that the new buildings are going up in droves, at least in this part of town folks are always out on the streets, hawking books, shady looking meat, rubik's cubes, clothing...at night the salesfolk swarm in and the sidewalk is swathed in towels loaded with junky merchandise, dresses, purses, boxers, shenme de (etc.).
In any case. I promised to talk about food, so back to the subject. There's a bunch of different restaurants on campus - it's much less of a, for want of a better term, potemkin campus like yale is. the word has significant negative connotations, so I'll clarify by saying that yale owns almost every building within a close distance of campus and leases them based on its needs and desires, trying to create a cohesive image. I've never been 100% comfortable about that being the case. Anyway, the tradeoff is beiyu's (BLCU's) campus, where a significant amount of buildings appear to be owned by other folks, and it's not clear if leasing goes on or not. There's at least one KTV (karaoke) place on campus, a few different restaurants, including the aforementioned muslim one, and so on. However, there is also at least one dirt cheap student cafeteria where I eat almost every day. A trek to the second floor reveals a bunch of tiny little places that are essentially fast food - go up to the window, order, two minutes later get your food and sit down at one of the 8-person tables with your cohort. Except that all the dishes are actually jiachang-style - family kitchen, your chinese golden oldies of sorts. you can get a mapodoufu, gongbaojiding, or just plain old noodles, throwing in a rice or a hard-boiled egg for one kuai each. And really, though the food is laden in grease, it is quite good, a lot better than other greasy cafeteria fare I've had in my life.
When going further afield, well, to be honest, I have yet to do so that much. But there's a lot to be had. You can go to further hole-in-the-wall type joints, as I did today, where a meal is unlikely to be much more than 15 kuai for a serious amount of food. Even these places are an upgrade over the cafeteria, though, because it's here that you start to be able to enjoy chinese food the way it's supposed to be - in a group, ordering a ton of dishes and splitting them all at once. I'm almost positive I like Asian-style eating better than the American equivalent. Rather than getting two or three courses, as well as the odd bite of a friend's food if they're feeling generous, if you go with like seven or eight people, you get to eat five or six different dishes, each with their own particular flavor! you can order things that complement each other, a soup, fish, one "ma" dish...
Right, I think I need to talk about ma. So, have you ever heard about Sichuanese food being particularly spicy? The trick is, yes, it absolutely is, but they also have a certain flavor completely missing from the west: ma. It is not an excess of spiciness, but rather a certain pepper that induces numbness in the tongue as you eat it - supposedly what fugu does, except that while you have to go to the most expensive place in new york city to try it in the states, every single self-respecting place in china has at least a mapodoufu - tofu drenched in spice and ma-inducing peppers, which sort of look like miniature twin cherries. It's essentially the craziest revelation ever to find out that there's a whole different world of flavor that you have never tried in the states that is, if not a staple of chinese food, then widely available.
So, beyond the world of mere chinese food, there are a lot of korean places around, as well as a fair number of muslim, japanese and american fast food places. KFC, mcdonalds and pizza hut are everywhere, though each actually has its own chinese name (kendeji, maidanglao and bishengke respectively...thank you, chinese class!) I had maybe the best expensive meal yet last night, at a korean place where we were served raw meat, which we put in a tilted metal slab so that the juices could drain off. the flavors were pretty astonishingly good, though at 35 kuai (5 bucks) it was one of the more expensive meals I've eaten here, maybe the most expensive.
I promise to start taking pictures of special meals once my laptop gets working.
Shoot, I don't have time to talk about the language. I am such a bad blogger. I'll get around to it, I promise. It will even be fun. But for now, the major update is that I'm pretty sure I'm going to be going to the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, distinct from the actual country. We have a social study project to complete halfway through the program, and that's one of the locations available.There are also chances to go to a chinese village, shanghai, qingdao, chinese schools, a shaolin temple and a couple of others. Any of them would be amazing, and I'm tempted to check out the village, but I suspect that going to inner mongolia will be the most irreplaceable of the bunch.As well as making for some pretty crazy pictures, I hope.
In the very distant future, plans are starting to form in my mind for great adventures...so I ask a question that I expect no answer to: what's the best way to get from china to india? bear in mind that, as I just found out, the border is closed...
24.6.09
Meandering through Beijing
I don't know if I'll get to all that I planned to, or even if I ever will, but here are a few thoughts on my mind.
The first is that I today expressed probably the most complex thought I've managed to express in Chinese so far during our afternoon one-on-one session, which is as follows: I think that the U.S. and China have fundamentally different attitudes to prices. By China, I might be referring more generally to Asia. I had a similar feeling in Vietnam, but I don't think I've been to enough places to know yet, so I'll refrain from saying so.
The fundamental difference is that I think as an American you accept money to have a fixed value. You talk about getting a deal when you buy something. If you go out to eat, 5 bucks is definitely cheap for lunch, 10 bucks for a sitdown dinner tends to be a pretty nice deal. Prices vary regionally. You expect to spend more downtown in a city than out in a town in the middle of nowhere. Something else you never think about is that prices are absolute. When's the last time you haggled, ever? Price implies quality - when you go out to eat a nice meal, you plan to spend more and go to a restaurant with a particular ambiance, and presumably better food.
China's pricing structure doesn't work the same way, and I think that it's something you seriously have to watch out for when you go to China. Assuming that a price you find in a given location is reasonable is a trap. Just about anything is negotiable, not at a restaurant, but besides that you can go to any stand or store, sometimes even in a mall, and try to cut a deal. And I think it's something that as an American we have trouble with, because prices are Prices. They are predetermined, inflexible, and you do things such as buying in bulk or buying a store-brand in order to economize. So the flexibility throws a wrench in things. There is no floor - I bet if you went to the right place you could buy anything you wanted for two bucks. I'm exaggerating, but not as much as you would think. Sure, name brand items command more respect, resulting in higher price tags. But basically, the way that pricing works in China seems haphazard, arbitrary. You do not know that a restaurant is better by it being more expensive. I'm almost a little bit suspicious whenever a restaurant is too expensive because I can almost guarantee that it will be no better than a restaurant that costs a third the price. Restaurants also don't value the same qualities as American ones do - I couldn't really imagine people paying twice as much money to eat somewhere where the lights are turned down to half-intensity and the ceilings match the walls. Then again, chains are almost consistently more expensive than smaller family-owned places, so brands do mean something. It's not that easy.
In short - quality does not work the same way as it does in the States. I think the best chance you have to find a good place for any given service is word of mouth. A dingy restaurant can have the best food you've ever tasted. Clean restaurants can serve laduzi-inducing meals (isn't it great that the chinese have three words for diarrhea?). It can be frustrating, but it's also exhilerating, because your ability to find a good price depends so much on your own perspicacity and tenacity.
As far as the language itself goes - I've had a lot of thoughts lately, but I don't know if I can gather them all right now now that I'm actually sitting in front of a computer. My apologies. I guess all I'll state is how beautiful and fluent and flat out fascinating putonghua has been. I wish I could teach you a few expressions, but for now...suan le ba (nevermind/whatever/forget about it).
The first is that I today expressed probably the most complex thought I've managed to express in Chinese so far during our afternoon one-on-one session, which is as follows: I think that the U.S. and China have fundamentally different attitudes to prices. By China, I might be referring more generally to Asia. I had a similar feeling in Vietnam, but I don't think I've been to enough places to know yet, so I'll refrain from saying so.
The fundamental difference is that I think as an American you accept money to have a fixed value. You talk about getting a deal when you buy something. If you go out to eat, 5 bucks is definitely cheap for lunch, 10 bucks for a sitdown dinner tends to be a pretty nice deal. Prices vary regionally. You expect to spend more downtown in a city than out in a town in the middle of nowhere. Something else you never think about is that prices are absolute. When's the last time you haggled, ever? Price implies quality - when you go out to eat a nice meal, you plan to spend more and go to a restaurant with a particular ambiance, and presumably better food.
China's pricing structure doesn't work the same way, and I think that it's something you seriously have to watch out for when you go to China. Assuming that a price you find in a given location is reasonable is a trap. Just about anything is negotiable, not at a restaurant, but besides that you can go to any stand or store, sometimes even in a mall, and try to cut a deal. And I think it's something that as an American we have trouble with, because prices are Prices. They are predetermined, inflexible, and you do things such as buying in bulk or buying a store-brand in order to economize. So the flexibility throws a wrench in things. There is no floor - I bet if you went to the right place you could buy anything you wanted for two bucks. I'm exaggerating, but not as much as you would think. Sure, name brand items command more respect, resulting in higher price tags. But basically, the way that pricing works in China seems haphazard, arbitrary. You do not know that a restaurant is better by it being more expensive. I'm almost a little bit suspicious whenever a restaurant is too expensive because I can almost guarantee that it will be no better than a restaurant that costs a third the price. Restaurants also don't value the same qualities as American ones do - I couldn't really imagine people paying twice as much money to eat somewhere where the lights are turned down to half-intensity and the ceilings match the walls. Then again, chains are almost consistently more expensive than smaller family-owned places, so brands do mean something. It's not that easy.
In short - quality does not work the same way as it does in the States. I think the best chance you have to find a good place for any given service is word of mouth. A dingy restaurant can have the best food you've ever tasted. Clean restaurants can serve laduzi-inducing meals (isn't it great that the chinese have three words for diarrhea?). It can be frustrating, but it's also exhilerating, because your ability to find a good price depends so much on your own perspicacity and tenacity.
As far as the language itself goes - I've had a lot of thoughts lately, but I don't know if I can gather them all right now now that I'm actually sitting in front of a computer. My apologies. I guess all I'll state is how beautiful and fluent and flat out fascinating putonghua has been. I wish I could teach you a few expressions, but for now...suan le ba (nevermind/whatever/forget about it).
21.6.09
as long as I can make it
I've been planning to update the blog for a long, long while, but each time something more important comes up, usually my academic well-being, that prevents me from doing so. I talked to mom for longer than I expected to and I don't really have much more time tonight to update, so I'm going to limit myself to the 20-some minutes that I have left at my usual, lovable internet bar, eternally replete with videogame addicts, cigarette smoke, and the oddly out of place pool tables at the back of the room. This place is massive - there might literally be three hundred computers, from the look of it.
Anyway. No time to be too methodical. I'll just say whatever comes to mind, working chronologically backwards.
Today was the first day of ultimate. It felt great to get out there and play again, and I definitely feel like I'm good enough to make a difference in the local scene - unfortunately, the place is extremely far away from the campus. I don't know if you have any idea how big beijing is, but one of my friends found a good measure today - your good-sized american city has a ring road, right? boston, DC, richmond...well, beijing has five ring roads. No joke. All concentric, just about evenly spaced, but it's deceptive how much distance there is between them, because you can look at a map and fathom it without realizing that they're a good 15 minutes apart from each other. And this is hardly china's biggest city - there are city with tens of millions of people you have never heard of. Can you find shenzhen on a map? how about chongqing? zhenyang? I have absolutely no idea where the last one is, but it evidently has ten million people living in it. you see my point.
Yesterday was pretty fantastic. During the day time, I happened to run into a whole bunch of people who were headed to tiananmen square (the word pengqiao in chinese is a lot more elegant, I think). So with them I went, and I saw for the first time mao's giant portrait and the sprawling expanse of tiananmen, along with the state flag, surprisingly not as big as you might expect. Unfortunately, we didn't really have time to go to the forbidden palace (gugong in chinese) but that'll clearly happen at some point, and it just costs 50 kuai. not too bad. so a few of us instead went to the beijing equivalent of times square, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten and do not have the time to look up. Anyway - the reason we didn't have time to go to gugong is...we went to see the beijing opera, or jingju! so, as with a lot of english terms for things chinese (for instance, dragon - the chinese one is actually fairly different from the european one) opera is a misnomer. because while there was a performance, and some singing, it was dominated by a much different aura. While there, we were all seated at tables, being served tea and small trinkets! There's definitely a light-hearted element - a tea server came around with a comically long-funneled pot, doing acrobatic stunts leading to us refilling our teacup. there ended up being two operas - one was a comic one featuring an old bargeman and a young damsel in distress - actually, a nun, which I found sort of interesting. I thought it was fascinating, though it's hard to imagine how much of the context I was missing. It's said that the opera is often incomprehensible even to chinese speakers, and after going I can see why! It was very stylized, but much more like a theatrical production than opera - a lot of their dialog was in plain speech, and the singing parts often involved movement. Anyway, no more time - the second was unbelievable. It was an opera about buddha and his eighteen henchmen attempting to quench a revolt by the "monkey king" - essentially, sort of a trickster figure a la loki in viking mythology, except that this guy was made up to look like, well, a monkey, and his mannerisms were all cleverly simian. So, there wasn't much talking in this one - really, it was the monkey god doing an unbelievable series of tricks - he had a staff, and the stuff he was doing with it was unheard of. There cannot be that many more skilled performers of his craft in the entire world. He basically confronted a series of buddha's henchmen all defined by specific, often ridiculous characteristcs - long arms, drunken one, the tiger, along with some extremely acrobatic swordsman. It was jaw-dropping, and it's the sort of cultural feature that I don't really have an american match for - what are you going to compare it to, cirque du soleil? also, can you imagine using jesus in a play in the states?!
I'm sort of crazy about this place. I don't know if you can tell from the description. According to our pre-orientation meeting for the light fellowship, my feelings about china are supposed to follow those of your traditional shakespearean comedy - start out being excited, start to miss the way things are back home, and then end up being really excited. I wish I could start to talk about it, but essentially - I don't know if I've ever been somewhere that reminds me so much of the states. oh, but it's completely different in so many details, sure - I don't know. have you ever been somewhere with a 3000 year history where life changes overnight?
scrabble - no time! but life is good. if time develops I'll use it, but right now things are good. I'm happy with the way I'm spending my time.
class. oh, class. It probably needs to be talked about, since I was goign to talk about that on wednesday and still haven't gotten around to it. aia. no time. but I will say. the teachers are unbelievable. The best I've ever had for a consistent stretch of time. anywhere. I can't get over how amazing every single one of them is. unfailingly enthusiastic when they really have to work just as hard as we do, maybe harder. while being grad students at the same time. after each class I try to decide which teacher is best, and I usually decide on that day's teacher before changing my mind the next day. my chinese has improved so dramatically that it's ridiculous.
mingtian jian! (don't get your hopes up) if I remember/have time I'll talk about the club I went to as well as some useful phrases.
15.6.09
trials and tribulations of the language pledge
I'm not planning on posting every day, but I'm at the internet cafe attempting to solve my computer programs, so here I am anyway. If my laptop ever gets fixed who knows how much I'll be posting, and maybe even with pictures! for now...
times change fast around here. The two biggest changes are pretty obvious: I can only speak chinese for the next nine weeks, barring emergencies and the present situation of heckling dell into giving me a new hard drive. The second is that classes started! I was planning to talk more about the former until I actually went to my first class today - and actually, I think I'm still going to do that, with a brief mention of how class went.
So, since I thought the language pledge was already in effect when I got here, it's not like all that much changed in my interactions with china, really. The difference is talking to other folks who I'd spent the last couple of days chatting to in english, suddenly only able to have stumbling conversations with each other. Yesterday when everyone signed the pledge, they all walked out and started giggling to each other and trying their first stumbling chinese sentences. and for some reason, I was frustrated. I'm not usually this grumpy, but the thing is that you're here to master chinese. you're supposed to be able to speak it - it shouldn't tickle you that you can say five words. I don't know why it bothered me - maybe I was the one taking it too seriously.
Most of the folks I've been hanging out with are better speakers than I am. A lot of them are people I already knew by some way or another - a high school buddy at harvard and a couple of friends from yale. I wouldn't say that it's a deliberate strategy, but I've really enjoyed talking to people who are better speakers than I am so far. They're not so much better that I can't keep up with them, but I feel like I learn a lot from them just in passing, even in the manner of discourse. You might wonder if it's the blind leading the blind, but a fourth year student is probably closing on fluency. It's remarkable how much everyday stuff I've learned, even as I start forgetting stuff. Think of a pot of water boiling over.
The most interesting thing I was planning to write about is what I'm planning to do about my Scrabbling. For those of you who don't know, I like Scrabble. A lot. And while I spent the last semester essentially Scrabbleless as I struggled to get my act together and graduate, when I got back to Boston the last couple of weeks before coming here I suddenly started playing a lot of Scrabble. It didn't take too long for the urge to get rekindled, to the point that I promised myself I was going to get serious and try to learn all the words over the course of this next year. My method - going through the dictionary page by page, crossing out the words I know and then going back through and making a flashcard for every two pages, one a day, and then putting them into a study program (zyzzyva, for those in the know). The thing is that with the language pledge, I wonder how kosher it is to be doing it - and more importantly, whether it ultimately hurts my Chinese to be doing such a thing. I'm inclined to say no, except that I'm learning so much every day that adding 25 new english words is a legitimate burden. I'm sort of trapped between my two interests. I feel similarly about ultimate - it's certainly less obvious, but in ultimate you're always talking on the field, and english is the lingua franca. is that violating the pledge? should I care?
I don't think I'll be happy negating scrabble and ultimate for a year, so I guess it's a matter of finding a balance. as always.
tutorial time! more later.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)