Category: Post

Woke up at 6:30. Got dressed, packed, and waited outside the rooms until 7 for our morning gathering. We went north a block into the muslim district again for breakfast, this time I pointed to a paomo place and asked if I could eat there. About half the group ended up eating there. This is one of the famous specialty foods of the city, and I quite enjoyed it. They give you an empty bowl and two fairly hard bread rolls. you tear the rolls up into small pieces (shred them), and give it back to them. They fill it up with broth (with lamb meat and some noodles) and give it back. the broth soaks into the bread, and tastes really good.

Next we got onto the bus, as a new tour guide materialized (so we once again seemed to be creating an entourage with 2 tour guides and a bus driver). We were going first to the terra cotta warriors, but instead detoured to a factory where they make the imitation ones today. Not everyone realized that it was pointless being there, and so it took 30 minutes to get everyone rounded back into the bus, with plenty of dirty looks at the tour guides on my part.

Went to the actual warriors next. It’s been turned entirely into a tourist trap by this point. Not entirely surprising, i suppose, but still a disappointment. They took us first into a cinema, passing an old guy behind a big fan who was apparently the farmer that discovered the ruins. He now charges for signatures. You’re not allowed to take his photo.

The movie was some weird reenactment of soldiers doing things, it didn’t seem related to the ruins at all, so I slipped out the back and decided that I was frustrated enough to go off and see the sights on my own.

I walked through the three pits. there are railings around them, at least on the weekends they are fully crowded by tourists. Quite a spectacle, but so built up as to not be really that exciting. Took some pictures. You need a better zoom lens to really capture individual sculptures though, since you can get close to any of them.

There was a poor quality museum on the premises too, walked through it, and then sat and waited for about 15 minutes while the rest of the group finished their tour.

had dinner at a ‘village restaurant’ which had tourist prices, but decent food. Hi-lights were probably the pomegranate chicken and the tofu dish.

Drove next to a provincial history museum. It was two stories, I got through it in about 50 minutes, and then waited another half hour for others to finish. On the way back to the hotel, the bus passed by the market I’ve been wanting to go to, and the let me and others interested off there.

The market was cool, lots of small stalls, but decent looking / quality clothing. lots of flocks of college students. I got a jacket and a belt for 150 rmb.

Walked back towards campus, though we were still outside of the wall. Found a dumpling place, and had egg/chive, radish/chicken, and pork dumplings which were cheap and good. Took a bus the rest of the way back to the hotel.

Our room wasn’t open, (that is, sergio who had the key to the room with everyone in our group (me, max, joe, steven, jeremy) wasn’t around) so we hung out in joes room until he got back. I took a shower and used the internet at the hostel lounge. Then walked around the Muslim district one last evening. Got some preserved kiwi slices and a pomegranate.

Came back, started watching ‘painted skin’, but decided it wasn’t that interesting, so I came back to the room for bed. got myself in order for tomorrow, and heading to bed soon. I need to finish coming up with a plan, so I don’t waste my free time tomorrow morning.

Got up at 6:30 on the train. We were stopped at a station, it was not the xian station. At about 7:30 we got to xian after a couple more starts and stops.

took taxis from the train station a few blocks to our hostel. Dropped our bags, and went to find some breakfast. We walked a block over and ended up in the islamic shopping area. We stopped in the first restaurant we found, which was a big mistake. Breakfast was the only thing on their menu, which was bowls of porridge, and a small pita filled with hot peppers and hot sauce. Very spicy.

After breakfast we walked back to the hostel, I wanted to grab my camera. After lots of fussing around we got taken to another building behind and shown rooms. They’re really basic, the teachers said they were expecting something nicer.

We grabbed stuff, and headed to the main bell tower. to the north of it was more of the islamic shopping area. we walked through a long winding alley lined on both sides with stalls to get to a mosque at the center of the area. We admired the mosque for the while. It looked very similar to any temple, but had lots of arabic rather than chinese. on the way out we looked around at the shops. Mostly for sale were cheap knock off belts / shoes/ shirts. Several north-face ones although the quality was horrible.

at the end the teachers bought us some snacks from one of the stalls that were quite good.

Next up was lunch. we continued to the east of the east of the bell tower, to a higher class area of town.
we stopped in a large restaurant of some sort and had a very good meal.

after lunch we went south; to the stone forest. This was the first library in some senses, and is a preserved area full of gigantic stone tablets. they were the original writings of Confucius and many other historically significant writings.

there were legitimate rubbings that you could see made and buy, but they were fairly expensive (300 kuai)

Next up was the city wall. we walked up on the wall, rented bikes, and biked all the way around (8 miles)
the bikes didn’t quite have enough shocks to deal with the rough stone path.

Me and max finished at the same time, so we headed back to the room together. I bought a fake rubbing near the wall for 20 kuai, a much better deal, considering it was identical in every way I could tell.

got back around dinner time. A bunch of people were hanging out in the rooms, since they had either not wanted to bike, or hadn’t wandered around afterwards.

I headed out with a group of people (max and jeremy) others less actively. into the islamic area. We bought and shared various types of street food. There were glutinious rice slabs in some syrup, rice cakes with jelly, noodles, pot stickers, two pieces of dough with some meat mixture between them – all fried, and many others. It was a good meal.

after dinner we decided to check out an arcade we had noticed earlier in the area. There was a crowd of teenagers around the dance machine, and they all seemed quite good at it. This was a fancier version than the US that can also detect and require hand motions. We looked around downstairs as well, which turned out to be just a gambling area.

Walked back to the room to collect belongings and regroup. Went over to a cafe for a bit, got icecream and a lovely view of the city.

Max and I decided to take a look at the nightlife. We walked down the street that was claimed to be active, but really didn’t see much that looked exciting. There were several expensive karaoke ‘clubs’ that looked to cost 50 – 500 kuai for a room.

On the walk back we came across something claiming to be a club. We walked in, and really weren’t expecting what we found. It had loud music, a very small area, tons of staff, and was quite expensive. Coming out after ordering one drink we decided that it was likely either a front for prostitution or mob activity.

Came back at 11, headed to bed.

Woke up at 9ish. Reviewed the article that I was talking about, packed, and then went to class.
Class was cool, we talked for the first hour on newspaper articles Me and Sergio had picked out. Mine was on windows black-screen initiative. Microsoft has started a newer enforcement of pirated windows where the bad copies turn the screen black periodically. I learned a good set of words related to software from that. We spent the second hour learning about stuff that would be useful in xian.

After class at noon, I went over to the cafeteria to meet with my research tutor. We had lunch at the cafeteria, and then set out to do some interviewing. We weren’t able to find a dvd vendor quickly, so we decided to spend this session interviewing students. We talked to 5 students, representing probably a fairly elite urban cross section, and got some interesting answers from them.

At 2:45 we finished, and I headed back to the dorm. Got on the bus at 3, and we drove to the train station. Got some fast food, and mochi for the train ride, and got on the train at about 5. Hung out on the train for a little bit, watched survive style 5+ with some people, which is a great, if confusing for the chinese teachers, movie. Then spent the evening chatting with others for a while. People are surprisingly interested and uneducated in terms of physics, and put much more faith and value in religion than I can really fathom.

Went to bed, not much else exciting.

Got up at 7am. Took the midterm. It went fine, I can write well now, although my reading comprehension isn’t as good. A reversal from where I’ve been before, which is cool. It gives me something different to focus on, especially since I feel like I’ve got the memorization thing down pretty well at this point.

After the test I went back to my room and wrote out the calligraphy homework. Did a bit of catch-up on correspondence, and a bit of research into additional things to see this weekend in xiAn. It looks like there won’t be quite enough time to go out to hua shan, since our flight back is at 3 pm, which is mid afternoon. I did find the main shopping streets in the town, as well as the other attractions though from asking the pomona language resident who grew up in the city.

I also stumbled across a couple other interesting looking areas to try and get to after the trip is over.

The core class period was used for a discussion of our rural stay. It wasn’t all that informative, most the same points we had all experienced while we were on the rural stay. The only thing that was interesting was that Prof. Wang talked about her history. She was in the student protests back in the 80s, and then was in england as they finished up. She talked about seeing the student leader who went to cambridge after the protests ended and thinking that he was a politician and a fraud. It was really interesting to hear how she initially was really disillusioned by the chinese government, but then the rallies and seeing the leadership of it safely in england talking about it’s political significance brought her back towards the side of the government.

Next was calligraphy, we looked at the standard style, I still can’t quite get the ‘silkworm head, duck tail’ style of the strokes, but most people can’t, so I don’t feel too bad. I should buy some paper to practice with at some point. The class was reasonably interesting.

After class not a ton was going on. I went out to dinner, got a ‘pizza’, a piece of bread with ham and peppers on it. The chinese style bread too, rather than italian. (that is: really fluffy, and really sweet.) it was interesting to say the least.

In the evening I wanted to go out and do something. I was hoping to get out to one of the night markets, but nobody else was really that excited about the prospect. The second year students have at test tomorrow, so were all studying. I ended up going out with max and rebecca again. The plan was to bike to the subway station and then take it to a nightclub in sanlitun. I was able to cary rebecca on the back of my bike without problem, and I feel a bit more comfortable doing that now. Max’s bike kept loosing it’s chain though. He was borrowing it from alice, and she needs to take it to one of the numerous mechanics and get them to take a couple links of the chain, since it’s way loose. Since it had fallen off a couple times before we got out of the college, we figured we hadn’t really come up with a workable plan.

We ended up going over to wudaoko again. We met, by accident, one of rebeccas friends. A girl who’s chinese name is lanju who also went to saas for highschool and now goes to davidson. She knows jenny and gray, as well as william kostner and kelvin bates. (all of whom I know to some degree from lakeside.)

I left when they started dancing, since I wasn’t quite willing to get to bed that late, and walked back to campus. Collected my bike from where I’d left it earlier in the evening and came back.

Leaving for xian tomorrow afternoon. Before that i’ll meet with my disp advisor and hopefully get some interviews done.

Got up at 7, fairly tired out.

Went to class, did fine on the dictations and homework and such-forth. We went over on time a little bit, so that we’re all squared away before the exam.

Spent the rest of the morning finishing the math and beginning to review everything.

Did math tutoring for a couple hours in the afternoon, met with my language tutor for an hour as well.

Went out to the nearby cafeteria for some dinner.

Not much else today besides studying chinese. Hopefully I’ll be ready for tomorrow.

got up at about 8:30-ish. Did a round of studying through the Chinese. Got through the reading for math, and began working through the problem set.

Went out to the store to get a quick lunch.

Came back, did another round of chinese, wrote out the set for tomorrow, since class wasn’t until the afternoon.

Did work on my disp, got a set of questions written up, and emailed my tutor, we’re going to meet friday afternoon.

Went to class at 2, did grammar for most of class, with some speaking at the end. She told us that the test on thursday would involve us writing out a dialog and memorizing it before hand, so that we could also read it without looking at it.

Came back, studied the new words for tomorrow for a while. Did the homework as well.

Went to dinner with sergio. Got beans with potatoes, rice, and a baozi. We stopped by a milk tea place on the way back to the dorm. Got a kiwi bubble tea.

Did more studying in the evening. Got much of the math homework done, and feel reasonably comfortable with the words for tomorrow. The dialogs these past few days have been annoying, because they have many additional words that we’ve never learned in them.

Got up at 6:30, finished up my homework from last night. Probably made the right decision in going to bed early, since I had a headache and wasn’t being productive.

Went to class, sergio was less prepared than me, but neither of us did that well on recall of the words. Prof. wang was pretty understanding since we hadn’t been given any free time over the weekend.

after class, went back and studied through most of the afternoon.
It’s max’s birthday, so he organized a group to go and get dinner.

A few kids got food poisoning, probably from the wedding food. I wasn’t among them. Probably one of the vegetable dishes, since it was all of the vegetarians that got sick (plus a couple others.)

Met with lucia from 6-7 and did a tutoring session. Talked about the olympics for a while, since that is a homework assignment for next week. (thesis driven essay on something about the olympics.)

Went out in the evening, it was me, max, joe, Mary, Mary’s Tutor (shanshan), and the tutor’s friend (sarah, forgot her chinese name). Since so many people weren’t feeling well, we went over to wudaoko, a mile or so walk from campus.

There was a mexican restaurant over there that max had heard about, so we went there. The food was actually surprisingly good. I got fajitas, which seemed as true to the original as what you’d get in america. The prices were also not that bad, which was a nice change.

On the way out, there was a dance club of some sort below the restaurant. We walked in, apparantly there’s no cover on mondays (wonder why) and determined that there really wasn’t anything going on. When we walked out 5 minutes later they guys at the door gave us VIP cards that give us free cover every night, an interesting gimmick.

Walked back to campus, went to bed shortly thereafter.

Got up at 6:30 – woken up by Matt getting up. he said that the chickens had woken him up.

We stood around somewhat awkwardly until breakfast was ready. I took some photos of the house, we walked up onto the roof to look at the village in the morning, and helped feed wood into the wok for breakfast.

The food was baozi, egg fried bread, potatoes (almost like hash browns, but not), porridge.

After breakfast we walked past the wedding setup to the basketball court, with the host brother. He’s on the basketball team at his school (although it sounds like so are most people. His highschool as I understand it: 2000 people, 3 grades (in china 3years junior high, 3 years high school (optional, about 1/10 of students continue here.)) Each grade has 8 sections with about 40 people in them (it doesn’t add up, I know.) each section for each grade has a basketball team with 8 kids. That means that basically half of the students play basketball.

Anyway, he wanted to play with Joe and max, and I had asked them to come out. So we went over there and let him start playing with them.

I found the teachers, and got a few sentences that would be appropriate to say at a wedding hashed out.

I packed, rehearsed a few times, and then met the teachers at the wedding area when the bride’s procession showed up.

She was from a long ways away apparently, the groom was local. The wedding was a combination of western and traditional style, she was wearing a white dress instead of the traditional red, and the music playing was a western wedding march.

She was carried out of the car by the groom while the kids covered both of them in silly string.

There were lots of fireworks.

The wedding took a total of about an hour. Some was ceremony, they had to toast the parents, and the groom offered money to the bride’s father, who then gave it back to her as a present.

The whole thing was very up beat, and not that serious. Apparently most of the speeches were jabs at various other people, and the audience would cheer most of the time. I read my thing which was quite embarrassing, but they seemed happy that there were Americans there.

When the wedding finished it turned out we’d been planned for in the reception and couldn’t really refuse. We ate for about an hour. I sat at the table with Prof. wang and the village secretary. It turns out that the main point of the reception is to eat and drink entirely too much. The bride and groom would come around toasting everyone, as would the secretary and various other people. When a table finished eating another group of people would take their place. There were close to 30 different dishes.

I stayed sober, since we were going to go up the great wall in the afternoon. Some people didn’t have quite as much willpower as me.

We got on the bus after everyone finished eating. Drove about an hour to the great wall.

The wall we went to was crowded and well developed. Took a gondola up to the wall from the parking lot. Lots of vendors around the base trying to sell various trinkets.

They said to meet about 5 towers over in 2 hours, when it really would take about 15 minutes.

Jeremy and I took off in the other direction. We went all the way up to the ridge that we could see from where we were. About half way there, a sign said ‘no access’ but we continued on. Shortly after the renovations ended, and we ended up on a more natural portion of the wall. The main wall was forested over, with a small trail to walk on. We’d pass a few people, they mostly said they’d come from the other side of the ridge, which was steeper, but that this area was really beautiful. We rested briefly at the tower we’d set out for and then headed back.

We ended up where we started at 3:35, realized we were cutting it pretty close, and ran the rest of the way to the download point. It turned out that we were ‘sliding down’ which meant that there were little 4 wheeled carts we sat on and went down a curved metal pipe. It was fun, although not really worth paying for.

I grabbed some water back at the base since I’d gotten dehydrated on the wall.

We got on the bus, and got back to beida at about 6:30.

I’m still pretty tired and have a headache, but I’ve got a test tomorrow to do some studying for before going to bed. Pictures will probably show up tomorrow; I don’t have quite enough energy to do that today.

got up at 7, woke up quietly without getting matt up. got to the main room, and waited for breakfast. Yu jia (the son), and matt got up when breakfast was ready. Breakfast was really good. There were bread with egg on, porridge, pickled veggies.

After breakfast We went over for class at 8. We had class in the secretaries office. It was a second week of colloquial phrases, like making suggestions or plans. Lasted a couple hours. Our homework for next week is to read and make a presentation on a newspaper article.

Next, we did research for a while. The other two (first year students) in my group had been studying in the same building for their test on Monday, and our research person for this was mdy teacher today (zhang laoshi). We interviewed the boyfriend of one of the high school girls that was from our host family. He wasn’t that interested in international affairs, for some reason. then an old guy passed us on the road and we started talking to him. The guy was 75, had been a farmer all his life. The high school couple followed us up the road. We walked with the man up to his plot of land, a little ways away. He was picking up firewood for the day, and we helped him gather it. It looked like it had already been cut, we were just picking it up and bringing it back to the village. We got a days worth, and then helped him tare down a drying shed since he had extra labor.

He was really a cool guy. didn’t know American president name, didn’t even know the mayor of beijing. Very concerned about food, he’d pick up extra chestnuts of the ground. An interesting guy, and quite nice.

We went back to lunch a bit late, our family had been looking for us. I waited with yu jia at the basketball court while matt looked around the old guys house. There was a Canadian guy there. He was from Saskatchewan originally but lived in beijing. He did English translations for chinese websites, but was looking to rent a house here for a more quiet atmosphere (on weekends). I later learned rent here is like 1-200 kuai a month, really low.

Lunch was great, as always. Added to the other dishes there was a different tofu dish, and a noodle dish that was really good.

Next up we met at about 2:30 for research. Actually we got there early and had trouble communicating with some 8 year olds first. The women affairs chair (lady’s) son was a college student and we met with him for a few hours. He was really interested in western culture, and quite different from the previous people we’d talked to in the village. We chatted for a good couple hours. He played guitar for us for a while as well.

After that was done we went back to my and matt’s house and talked with rebecca for a bit about our thesis for having to write up a paper about this research.

Dinner was great. a porrige, baozi (huge), potato dish, tofu dish, chicken with bones. cauliflour + tomatos + eggs.

Afterward there was debriefing. We talked about our experiences for a while. Not that exciting.
Oh, there’s a wedding tomorrow, and I’m expected to represent our group and make a short speech congratulating the bride and groom. That should be exciting :)

Ed. This is where my battery died that night. The last part is somewhat rushed as I realized the impending shutdown of my laptop, but a quick read suggests most things are there.

Got up at 7 as always. I got up and grabbed some baozi before getting on the bus at 8:30. The bus took close to 2 hours. We ended up directly north of beijing. We left the bus at the town center, currently a make-shift market, but also doubling as a taichi and basketball court. The party offices were next-door. They had a new theater that we sat in while the party secretary met with us. Apparently the town has been getting a ton of money lately from the central government. The area is being preserved as a natural area. (the area around has many ming-dynasty tombs, although this town isn’t near any, it’s still in the protected area.) That means there are subsidies for families that set up small bed-and-breakfasts for tourists, and the government will support families moving away from farming lifestyle. (they said moving towards more commercial lifestyle so that the farms around can get replanted with trees.) The government will supply rice and food subsidies to the residents in exchange.

We walked the length of the town, and then met up with our host families. I guess of interest is that the main road was newly and well paved. Every family pretty much had guard dogs. There were new street lights all over the main street that were solar powered.

I’m staying with matt. Our host mother is nice. She has one highschool aged son (17) who is home for the weekend, a son in college, and a daughter that works at the beijing airport. She gave us a huge lunch with lots of good stuff (zaizi are a sort of miniature apple, also salted cucumber pieces, peppers and pork, pieces of chicken with onions, and a tofu dish.)

After lunch we went into our research groups. Me, matt, rebecca, and Prof. Zhang. We were going to ask questions regarding media differences and differences in worldly knowledge between the city and village. (this was my suggestion; way to take the initiative me.)

We asked a lady we found in the square, one of the village committee members, and the security guard at the village secretaries compound. Turned out there was internet in the village, but only the young people used it. People did typically have cellphones. And papers were common. It wasn’t that rural, only a couple hours out of beijing, and so most people were getting beijing newspapers and going into the city for the olympics and such.

The security guard was cool. he was 75, and left when he was young to be a salesman in a mall, but then came back once he got old. He had a piano, but it was broken. I offered to zhang laoshi to buy him a new one, and she said to talk to her once we got back to beijing, they’re about 100kuai / 15USD apparently.

We departed shortly later for dinner. Dinner, and really all the meals at the rural village, was great.

After dinner, I got a call from the teachers, the group was meeting in the theater to watch a movie. Went over there with the host brother. nobody knew how to operate the theater. It didn’t have a plugin for a computer, and nobody brought dvds. They didn’t have any dvd’s with english subtitles or dialog.

Eventually we went over to one of the houses to play mah zhong. I sat over on the side and did a bit of math on my computer while people were getting taught to play. There really wasn’t that much time, because the village pretty much is asleep by 9:30.

Went back, the host mother had waited up for us watching TV. Went to bed. The bed was a traditional kang. That means it was right behind the kitchen area. The area under the wok could be opened to the kang, which is just a large brick ledge with a sheet over it. That way it ends up staying warm all night, quite ingenious.