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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.

Got up at 6:30, since it was hot in my room and their was a mosquito buzzing around my head. I got a couple bug bites on my face in the night, which was annoying.

Had class in the morning, which was alright.
In class, the teacher said that there had been a big sale going on over at wudaoko to the east of campus, so I biked over there. There wasn’t a sale, but I hadn’t explored the area before, so I walked around during the lunch period.

I stopped by the campus baozi place on the way back to get a quick lunch.

At two was the core class, this one was on business practice, where a business consultant talked to us. She said that she ran a course where she framed strategies in terms of the art of war, and gave a couple case studies on various similarities. One being the milk situation, and another being how foreign car manufacturers infiltrated the domestic market.

After the class was over, the program people showed up and talked to us about the weekend for a bit. We’ll be gone from tomorrow through sunday, so back either monday morning or sunday night. There’s an expectation for us to do research while we’re there, so I’ll be doing something related to my disp, probably looking at the differences in media consumption between city and countryside.

Next was calligraphy. We just talked for the three periods, and went through the older scripts that the original chinese writings were written in. We didn’t really do much besides look at how some basic characters have evolved between the three older scripts.

Next, I came back to the dorm. I wrote out the characters for monday, since I won’t have a chance while I’m away. I had a quick dinner, and then spent an hour doing review with my language tutor.

At about 9ish, after the language practice, I watched King of Kong with max and matt. Max had been wanting to see the movie for a while, and I remember enjoying it at mudd. It was better than I remembered, a very decent documentary.

Probably going to try and get a fair amount of sleep for tomorrow, and the adventure in the countryside.

Got up at 7.

Chinese class this morning.

Came back, finished up the math homework, and then started in on the chinese homework. There are about twice the normal amount of characters for tomorrow.

Got a bit of my disp homework done.

Went out for a couple hours in the afternoon to take a break. Ended up buying some hot chocolate for when i’m not in the mood for tea, and some ink for the calligraphy.

Came back this evening, wrote some emails, and studied the characters for a while. Also did the rest of the chinese homework.

Talked with people, and found out that pitzer has apparently a really flexible international studies major, and so maybe I could do a second major in that and have less work left. their catalog however is less than revealing and out of date. To be expected I suppose.

Edit: Looked again. You have to declare junior year, but there’s a class they say you should take as a freshman, what’s the deal with that? This seems ridiculously lenient, only needing like 7 classes of your choice to graduate. Mudd requires 12 though for off campus majors, good thing I’ll have that too.

Got up at 7, forgetting that there wasn’t class this morning. (tuesdays are afternoon class.)
Realized as soon as I got to the classroom, and headed over to the cafeterias for breakfast. Got a fried egg and some baozi, and then came back and wrote out the characters for tomorrow.

Spent the morning doing math homework for tomorrow, and studying through tomorrow’s homework. Ended up being fairly productive overall.

Went to class from 2 to 4, class was the normal with nothing particularly out of the ordinary.

Afterwards, came back to the dorm for a bit, spent a bit of time studying characters to get them more firmly into my head and then went out to dinner.

Had boiled hot peppers with meat and scrambled eggs which were quite good, just a little bit of bite left in them. Came back and headed over to the theater to see the play.

It was long, a bit over 3 hours. and was quite interesting. The dialog was not Shakespearean english, but rather a form of english that people who’d studied for 2 or 3 years got follow along with.

There were two vertical bars on the two sides of the stage with subtitles, although they often lagged behind, and there were a couple scenes where they accidentally got turned off.

The acting wasn’t bad, a combination of american and chinese actors. The chinese actors seemed to be students at the college, I don’t know where the americans/britons were from.

The set wasn’t bad, the stage is clearly well funded, the background was a full movie screen, as it had been in the orchestra, so they were able to take advantage of that. The other main set piece were curtains that were cut into vertical strips. They could be pulled by the actors seemingly to any point on the stage, since sometimes they would be clumped to form trees, and other times spread out to separate the stage into pieces.

Lighting and sound were also done fairly well, although the sound cues were a bit overwhelming sometimes.

The audience seemed to have mixed feelings. A bunch of people left at the intermission, probably mostly due to the poor subtitle tracking that had been going on leading up to that. I guess if you’ve spent the last hour not really understanding what was going on, it’s not really worth staying for another two.

Came back, have been busy for the last hour finishing up remaining bits and pieces, and figuring out what’s going on this weekend. We’ll be gone friday through sunday, and they want us to come up with a topic to do research into while we’re there. I’ll be working with matt and rebecca to look at the differences in propaganda and media consumption between rural and urban china.

Getting up early tomorrow, Need to do some work on my disp tomorrow especially, and also get prepared for the weekend.

new apple laptops should come out sometime tonight. From the rumors that have popped up this afternoon, they look like really nice machines. The dual Graphics could be a real boon, as will having a sturdy case on a small machine again (apparantly the 13″ will end up with an aluminum case rather than a plastic one.)

Got up at 7, had chinese class for a couple hours. The test and dictation were fine.
Came back, went through the next lesson. The set of new words for tomorrow is smaller than the past few days, which was nice.

Finished studying that mid afternoon; caught up on some emails later in the afternoon, also did some math homework.

Had dumplings for dinner, they were good, I added lots of garlic.

Went to taiji this evening. Not very many people there, so I did a somewhat abbreviated practice.

Came back this evening and found that most of the classes for next semester have been posted. Tried to figure out a schedule for the spring, although it all depends what happens with chinese. Sent my pomona professor an email asking what I should plan to do.

Hopefully I can do something like:
Chinese
CS 131 (programming languages)
Algorithms
Modern China (english Mudd Humanities course)
Graph theory / Advanced topics in Number Theory
PE
Advanced Chinese Conversation / CS Colloquium
(User Interface Design)

For 15 or 18 credits.

At 18 Credits, Remaining for the CS Major are:
Clinic (2 semesters)
Number Theory Or Scientific Computing

Basically, the deal is that if I can somehow take the chinese class to get through advanced chinese rather than through intermediate (count this year as getting through two years, either by starting in second half of advanced or doing a more intense schedule somehow) then It becomes very very possible to double major with chinese. There are essentially 5 classes I’ll need to take as a senior to complete everything, which would still mean only like 12 credits a semester.

It’s really about the practicality of being able to get through advanced chinese in the spring.

Got up at 8 ish, though I was a bit sluggish getting moving.

Spent much of the morning studying characters, although to a break midmorning to grab some food. It was a nice day; I finished watching the movie (a world without thieves) and the ending was quite good.

At 1pm, Lucia came over and we went over vocabulary for about an hour. Read over all the dialogs, and I am feeling reasonably ready for the test.

At 3, I met with Sun yu, my disp tutor. We met in one of the coffee shops on campus, and talked about the plan for research. We came up with task items, on my part mostly coming up with sets of interview questions, and doing some reading into IP law in both US and china. She was able to contact an independent film maker she knows, and also said that interviews with street vendors and consumers would be easy to get. When I have free time I’ll try and track down some other interesting subjects, hopefully some of the professors that wrote maze, the large online p2p network.

Came back for a bit, watched ‘the guild’ with sergio and rebecca while studying some of the next lesson. Went out to dinner after that.

Got back at about 6:30, and left after a few minutes to go to the orchestra concert I was signed up for.

It was quite good, there was a full orchestra, and it seemed that one of the violin players was a special guest of some sort.
Most of the songs were disney themes or orchestrations of music, the schedule was:
Pocahontas
The Land Before Time / Dinotopia (one of the two)
(possibly pipi long stoking)
Lotus Lantern
Lion King (Can you feel the love tonight)
Snow White
Black cat
-intermission-
Mulan
Aladdin (A whole new world)
Finding Nemo
Tom & Jerry
Tarzan
(possibly Swan Princess) in three acts

In most cases I didn’t recognize the songs, and the rather than having a single movie clip playing there were a montage of clips accompanying them.
Overall, quite fun.

Came back home at like 9:30, and finished previewing for the 13th lesson, and did another pass through the other 4 before bed.

Got up at 8 am. Got a bit of chinese studied, while waiting for the day to begin at 9:30. At 9:30, I got on the bus to go to the 798 art area.

This area is one of the major creative districts in beijing. It was originally a factory area on the outskirts of the city, but the cheap rent for space attracted lots of artists, and now it’s entirely an art area.

The bus got there probably at 10:30ish, and we had until 4pm to explore. I wandered off by myself for most of the time. The art was cool, a lot was painting, and most of that was fairly traditionally styled – not that exciting to me. There were several paintings that were quite cool, and much of the mixed media or larger installations were really cool.
(many places had no-photography signs, so I didn’t get quite as many pictures as the place deserved.)

Stuff was quite expensive, tourists coming probably in general stick to the basic gifts like t-shirts and books, so those were exorbitantly priced (like $120 kuai for a tshirt), while the actual art prices were cheaper than one might expect to find in the US.

I ran into mary and her tutor and we stopped for a late lunch / snack. The place we ended up at tried a little bit too hard; the ‘salsa chips’ turned out to be individual chips with a small square of cheese, a dab of strawberry jelly, a sliver of ham, half a cherry tomato and a slice of olive on each.

Some of the more exciting things I saw were a store for bandi panda, which I’d seen in the US (artist that takes pictures with a stuffed panda toy), and lots of prints of a guy who takes portraits of himself in impossible places. (forgetting his name.)

Came back to the dorm uneventfully, and met with my tutor for an hour shortly afterward. We mostly did conversation on the last four lesson (the ones I’ll be tested on for monday.) We’re meeting again tomorrow to read through the essays provided.

Studied some more characters, and then spent an hour and a half doing taichi. I finally figured out where the taichi people meet, which is in a gym I haven’t been to before. the deal is that the gym has the center separated from the track, and the middle of the gym is used for badmitton courts. From the 8:30 – 10 period the track on the edges is opened up for taichi and taikuando and the like, so there were lots of little groups practicing, as well as several larger ‘class-like’ sessions going on.

I’m still not quite as flexible in some ways as I should be, but if i’m able to stick with it, I ought to get better.

Came back, watched part of the movie ‘a world without thieves’, which was assigned as homework over the weekend. It’s quite good so far. Continued studying characters as well. Another fairly busy day tomorrow; so I’m not going to stay up any later tonight.