美国和中国大不一样 (The US and China are Quite Different)

During class we so frequently talk about differences between the United States and China that I thought I'd list some of them here.

Food:

The campus cafeteria has five or six different stations, all Chinese but each offering slightly different food. Following are examples of a typical day's lunch from the campus cafeteria. Actually, the first picture is remarkable in that, while small like every meal at the cafeteria is, it has a good amount of chicken in it. Usually, the cafeteria's cooks will sprinkle minute portions of meat into a plate full of vegetables. Thankfully, the food is cheap (ranging in price from $00.80 to $1.50 a meal), because my appetite has grown since I started going to the gym again. Sometimes I get two meals because one is just 不够 (not enough).

You'll notice that those pictures have drinks in them (the one in the second shot being Green Tea-flavored Sprite.) However, Chinese people usually don't drink anything with their meals. They believe that it is bad for their digestion.

And on the topic of drinks: I really hoped that the bottle in the first shot was grape juice. In fact, it was grape "drink." You'd be hard pressed to find actual juice at a restaurant here. I eat oranges in the morning to get some fruit in my system. It's probably not enough though. I should look into getting vitamin supplements.

Also, there are never any napkins at restaurants unless you request them! This is especially a problem for me because at a typical dinner at Yale I go through five or six napkins. I've settled for awkwardly wiping my mouth with my fingers or the dry part of my chopsticks and waiting until I get back to my room to wash my face.

Here's a menu from the cafeteria:

Maybe tomorrow I'll try the The Temple Explodes the Squid.

Last weekend the secretary of our program organized a group trip to see Toy Story 3. If you haven't seen it yet, I heartily recommend it. I thought it was amazing! But I bring this up because before we watched the movie, we thought it apropos to have dinner at McDonalds.



Chinese McDonalds sells "taro pies" instead of apple pies. I bought one out of curiosity but didn't really like it. Here's what it looks like on the inside:

Purple!

The food tasted the same and I was glad to have something other than Chinese food for once. I wish there were Mexican or Italian or Greek restaurants near campus. One of the things I loved about Yale dining was that I knew I could have nachos every Monday. I asked one of my teachers and my tutor if they knew where I could get Mexican food. They both said they had never eaten Mexican food and didn't know what it was like. They both also recommended that I go to KFC because they had heard KFC had a Mexican-style chicken dish. That's not exactly what I had in mind.

BUT speaking of Mexican chicken, check out these chips:

Mexican Tomato Chicken flavor. Tasted more like barbecue. The supermarket also sells cucumber, blueberry, "Italian Red Meat," and "Hot & Spicy Fish Soup" flavors.

Lifestyle/Miscellaneous

Like I mentioned in my last post, the Chinese have really taken an interest in the darker-skinned members of our group. My friend Xiao Mei, who is from Nairobi and with whom I tackled the Chinese subway for the first time, even began charging 3 kuai for pictures with her.


These are guards at the Imperial Palaces carrying watermelons.

Chinese people prefer to be fair-skinned, so they whip out their umbrellas at the first sign of sunlight. When the weather gets especially hot, the men hike up their tshirts mid-chest, revealing their bellies.

Fashion here isn't very different from American fashion, but men's hairstyles definitely differ.


My ticket for Toy Story 3D. Note that Chinese movie theaters have assigned seating. Or maybe just this one does.

We took a "black taxi" to the movie theater:



Here are pictures of when some students tried to teach our teachers American hand symbols like "the akward turtle" and "good luck."



Also, you can't walk to class in the morning without passing old people practicing Taiji on the sidewalk. I've gone to a couple of Taiji classes but it's hard to stay focused because the movements are so slow.

Lastly, people smoke indoors.

A Recap of The Great Wall, Wangfujin, 什么的

Saturday Morning: Journey to 长城， the Great Wall

We woke up bright and early for our first group trip, which was to one of the most iconic monuments in the world: the Great Wall. HBA brought us to a section of the wall called Mutianyu, which is supposedly less frequently visited by tourists. It's probably because I'm so out of shape, but scaling the wall that day was one of the most physically demanding things I've done in my whole life. Climbing up the steps to get to the monument was hard enough, but nothing compared to the rocky, rugged hike along the length of the wall, which included both steep inclines (on which you needed to use your hands) and tiny steps that were hard on your feet. The blazing hot sun didn't make things easier, although it did help me get a very nice back-of-the-neck tan.


If the thrill of knowing I was on the Great Wall of China wasn't enough compensation for the fact that 我浑身疼得要命,　出冷汗 (I felt terrible pain and was sweating from head to toe), the view made up for it!

My Yale classmates gave me much hate for wearing my Harvard shirt haha. But I'm proud to be an HBA student. When else am I supposed to wear it? Definitely not in New Haven.

Actually, the second level students here are evenly split between students from Yale and Harvard (there's also one student from UC Berkeley.) During class, the teachers often drill us on vocab and grammar structures by asking us questions about our universities, leading to playful disses now and then. For some reason, the teachers decided to include the following sample sentence in our review packet:

哈佛大学没有帅哥和美女多的是 = "Harvard University doesn't have many good looking men or women." Ha!

Apparently you can slide down the Great Wall! I wish I had known that before I started my descent. Two hours and a half hours of climbing is a great work out though. It's a good thing too, because I haven't once gone to the gym on campus.

Saturday night, I was too exhausted to check out the Beijing club/bar scene, so I went out to dinner with some friends and walked around the Wudaoku shopping area near our university, where we saw street vendors selling everything from electronics to puppies. One of the men wanted to give us puppies as gifts. I wish I could accept; they were adorable. 可爱极了！

Sunday Afternoon: Tiananmen Square and Wangfujin

My first time on the Chinese subway was with some other students to the famous Tiananmen Square, a place my Chinese Politics class covered heavily last semester.

I love how the Chinese portray the American boy! Haha. Pretty accurate depiction of day-to-day wear I'd say.
A Chinese girl asked two of my classmates if she could take a picture with them. I'm guessing she hasn't seen too many dark-skinned people haha.

Actually, Chinese ideas of race are very interesting. Because I have European features, my teachers are always surprised to hear that my family is actually Ecuadorian American. And I may have misunderstood, but when I told my host father where my parents were from, I'm pretty sure he said that he had thought I was Indian. That was a first...

Afterwards we went to Wangfujin, which according to one of the program directors is "Beijing's answer to Times Square." On its famous Snack Street you can find really exotic edibles, the craziest being live scorpions! Do enough people really buy them that there are always living ones on display? Such a mystery.

Sunday Night: 跟中国家庭见面：Meeting my Host Family!

HBA students are paired up and given Beijing host families. We don't actually live with them, just visit them on weekends and have meals with them and things of that nature. On Sunday night, I and the Yale girl I was paired with, (who was actually my language partner in the fall), accompanied our host dad and little brother (English name = Reagan, Chinese name = ?) to a nice restaurant for Father's Day. There we met our host mom, both sets of grandparents, plus an aunt and uncle and little cousin, whose birthday it happened to be. Pictures soon if my host dad sends them to me like I asked him to.

The food was good, and the best part were... mashed potato smileys!

I thought they were just for the two little boys, but the grandparents were eating them with their chopsticks so I happily joined in.

Other highlights of the week:
1. I got a haircut for $2 US! It wasn't a quick haircut either. The guy washed my hair both before and after and really took his time. I didn't know how to tell him what I wanted so I just let him do his thing and I liked the result.

2. During my Wednesday individual class, I only had to ask my teacher to repeat herself twice!

3. Tonight we're going to see Toy Story 3 (in English)!

Also, my Chinese father invited me and the other Yale girl to go camping with the family. We don't have time to, but "dad" still expects us to be their "camping coaches." I've never even been camping.

As one of my classmates says, "噢，中国。" = "Oh, China."

我的第一个星期: My First Week

Class is super intense here at HBA. We have about five hours a day, divided into a "big" class (which in reality only has about 10 students), small class (five students), and one-on-one conversation practice with a teacher. Everyday we learn the equivalent of a week's worth of material: upwards of 20 grammar structures and about 60-80 new vocabulary words. Or, at least we're supposed to learn this much. I've actually been picking and choosing what I want to study. I focus very much on grammer, but with vocabulary I weed out the words that I know won't do me much good (ex.: monosodium glutamate & Quanjude Duck Restaurant... I'm pretty sure I can get by without knowing those). Even with picking and choosing, I have about five hours of homework a night, except for Thursday when I studied for 8 hours for my test this morning. It's very, very exhausting but I'm noticing immeasurable improvement and I'm having a good time.

I haven't really gotten the hang of ordering food at restaurants yet, so I've had way too much King Pao Chicken and insubstational noodle dishes with only traces of meat. I haven't been getting any fruits or vegetables so I need to do something about that pronto so I don't lose weight or get sick. It's hard to have a balanced diet here.

Every Tuesday and Friday we eat lunch with our teachers. Today's meal was a little disappointing however because our table was served FOUR tofu dishes and two vegetable dishes. I needed some actual sustenance but I had to settle for just one small piece of chicken. I don't understand how vegetarians do it.

One difference between dinners here and those in the US are that in China, food is brought to the center of the table, where a lazy Susan allows everyone to take a little bit of each dish. I haven't seen individual ordering yet.

Here I am with my first week's "small class" classmates, who were also my lunch partners for most of the week. The Chinese lady in the center was our teacher this morning. She was really nice, but then again I've liked all the teachers here. (We rotate teachers for "small class" everyday.) (Also I like that we're all wearing Yale colors here. I haven't made many Harvard friends yet.)

Arrival

I've been here in Beijing for about a week and am only now getting around to updating this blog. Sorry for the delay! Anyway, I'd like to recap the events of my first couple of days.

I got to Beijing safe and sound. At the Shanghai airport, I and two girls from Yale had to literally run to catch our connecting flight. It was pretty stressful but we got on the plane just in time... only to hear that due to a sandstorm, take-off would be delayed for five hours. It happens that we were able to take off after only twenty minutes. At the Beijing airport the three of us were greeted by an HBA teacher, even though it was 2:30 in the morning. It shows just how dedicated the teaching staff at HBA is. I was very impressed and grateful.

(I also want to say that in writing the above paragraph I had to stop myself from using Chinese grammar, like "就。。。了" and "才," which respectively emphasize earliness and lateness. I'm improving :) )

The next day I had to take care of some essentials like having my internet set up, buying groceries, and taking our placement exam. We also had our orientation where we signed the infamous language pledge, meaning that we can't speak anything but Chinese while we're here. (I broke the pledge just an hour later in order to have my cell phone set up for use in China, but other than that I've kept it.) I thought this program might be a repeat of my trip to Paris last summer when students left their French behind as soon as they left the classroom, but luckily the students here at HBA have been really good with keeping their promise.

I'd like to say that I'm not even sure if this post was written in correct English because 1. I'm exhausted and 2. I haven't spoken English in a week. If my sentences sound very awkward or simple I apologize.

A final thought: sometimes in my head I play a game where I'll try to say what I'm thinking in Spanish, French, and now Chinese to see if I know how. My French is starting to go.

Getting ready to go

It's 1:17 a.m. here in New Jersey, which means tomorrow's the day I drive to JFK and fly to China, where I'll be living for the next six months. That's a pretty sizable amount of time. How do I fit half a year's worth of stuff into two suitcases?

For the next six months I'll be studying Mandarin Chinese through the Harvard Beijing Academy and the Associated Colleges in China programs thanks to the VERY generous Light Fellowship at Yale University.

I'm really enjoying my time here at home, so I do feel a little sad to leave. Especially because I know that only a few hours after I land I'll have to take a placement exam, and I haven't reviewed as much Chinese as I should have. Class is going to be really intense-- I'll be cramming two years worth of Chinese into six months-- so this isn't exactly a vacation. But I'm sure I'll get into the swing of things. I'll definitely miss home, but I know I'm going to have an awesome time in Beijing!

I have some audio recordings of myself speaking Chinese from when I sent out my HBA application. It'll be fun to listen to them at the end of my stay in China, when I'll be fluent (!!) in the language. A year ago, I didn't speak any Chinese at all. I really just decided to take it on a whim after watching this Youtube video:



After finishing L1 and L2, the stuff in the video seems really easy. And come December, my level of Chinese right now is going to seem just as basic. It's pretty unbelievable.

I'd like to close this intro entry by giving thanking the Richard U. Light Foundation for sponsoring my trip. I'm so lucky that Yale offers its students opportunities like this.

I can't wait.