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."