Leaving Beijing for a Week

One of HBA's "一大特色"s, or distinctive qualities, is that at midterm every student sets off for various parts of China (or chooses to stay in Beijing) for a week to write a research paper on the topic of his or her choice. There were some really great destinations to choose from, including Shanghai, Qingdao, Inner Mongolia, and the Chinese countryside, and we could also choose to stay in Beijing to study architecture, art, or business. I chose to go to the Shaolin Temple, arguably the most famous Buddhist temple in the world and a fount for ancient Chinese martial arts. So, for the next week I'll be waking up at 5:30 a.m. and learning Kung Fu with Buddhist monks, kind of like the karate kid!




It might have been a mistake to choose Shaolin because I'm already lacking sleep as it is, but how could I pass up a chance like this? Besides, after HBA is over I'll have two and a half weeks before ACC, my fall program, starts, and during that time I'm going to be travelling to Shanghai and other places (still haven't made up my mind...)

We took midterm exams this morning. I can't believe HBA is already halfway done, and that we've studied a semester's worth of Chinese. I realized while I was studying that I've forgotten a bunch, but I think my growing ability to communicate with my Chinese teachers, tutors, host family, and even random people I come across shows how effective HBA is.

The other day I was taking the metro to Sanlitun, a really famous street in Beijing known for its bars, clubs, restaurants, etc. I knew the pinyin for the stop I needed to get off (pinyin is a romanization system for written Chinese, which doesn't have a phonetic alphabet. For example, the word 中国 means "China," but a non-Chinese speaker wouldn't know how to pronounce those characters. So, using pinyin the word is written "zhōngguó." The accent marks indicate how you should raise and dip your intonation).

Anyway, I knew the pinyin for the metro stop that I wanted but couldn't read the characters on the subway map. So I asked a girl to help me find the stop, and she answered me (in English) that she was going to the same stop. I continued talking to her in Chinese and she followed suit, and we had a nice conversation on the train. However, I found out at the end of the ride that she isn't even from China! She's from Indonesia. Being a foreigner, I couldn't even tell she had an accent.

She was really nice, (I already forgot her name...) and she told me that she actually is friends with some Yale graduates who studied in Beijing a few years ago. She also told me about a Christian group that she's a part of and she invited me to attend. I think I might want to take a look at it after HBA ends. But the reason I bring it up is because in our follow-up e-mail, she censored the word "church" as "ch--ch" and "ministry" as "m-n-stry." Was she worried that the Internet Police were looking for these words in online communication? I thought it was kind of strange. This week, the head professor of HBA, Feng Laoshi, gave a presentation on religion in China. I attended it but fell asleep...

Oh well, I'm sure I'll learn all about religion here while I'm kung-fu'ing it up with monks at Shaolin this week!

Some random pictures:

We had a picnic at Beihai park!

Pepsi makes underwear!


Delicious Texas Barbecue-style dinner for the Fourth of July!

I'll have tons of Shaolin pictures and information in a week. Zaijian!