also... I have been putting up pictures on picasa - the google web Album...

http://picasaweb.google.com/checkerbloom

Oh man, it has been a while, so here is the quick run down...

Back in October I went with a couple of friends to a more deserted section of the Great Wall (nothing in China is deserted) and we slept in an ancient guard tower. It was freezing but really fun! The sunrise in the morning was totally worth it.

Two weekends ago I went with three other friends to Tai An and climbed up Tai Shan - I think the most famous of five famous mountains in China because Kong Zi (Confucius) climbed up. According to legend, whoever climbs it to the top will live to be a hundred years old which sounds pretty good until you descend back to the polluted city below... We stayed in a hotel at the top and got up at six to watch the sunrise with the other tourists - I can only imagine how crowded it is up there during a holiday week.

Final Exams are next week so, in the Chinese style, we are plowing ahead in the book. I will have gone through 2 complete books at the end of next week; we do two chapters a week. Despite all this Chinese I still fee; like a complete beginner and too often get the blank stare when I speak Chinese outside of campus.

After the semester we're going to the south, Shanghai and HanZhou and SuZhou to travel for a week which should be really fun.

I still can't get over the delicious street food of Beijing - my favorite are the roasted sweet potatoes... oh man it smells like Thanksgiving and Christmas and deliciousness. Speaking of Thanksgiving, it is almost here and I think we are going out with my Environmental Issues in China and the US class for Peking duck... Chinese style.

Also, one of my friends studied in China in high school and lived with a host family in Beijing for a year. She gave me her Chinese mother's contact information so I have gone over to her apartment a couple of times now and she's teaching me to make some Chinese dishes - which are soooooo tasty - jiao zi (dumplings), bao zi, gong pao ji ding (kung pao chicken). I'm excited to try it at home!

I am going home for winter break then coming back for second semester in Beijing despite the warnings I got about the sand storms... I'll bring my aviator goggles......

Happy Thanksgiving!

Back in Beijing

I’ve now been in Beijing for about three and a half weeks in which I have come to discover why exactly the Chinese have the reputation of hard workers in the US. Because I am doing the immersion track I have class Monday through Thursday from 9 to 12, oral class from 1:30 to 3 and a one on one tutoring with my teacher (lao shi) for another half hour a day. Finally, I am done with my class of the day only to go back to my room to do homework and study for the daily dictation the following morning. Every Friday we have a review session and take a rather massive test from 9-12. Afternoon class is shorter because we only have to do an oral test. Pretty much the Chinese are super hard core about their studies. At the end of our second week the boss sat in our class and after having decided so, we now have to memorize a dialogue every night and recite it the following morning. Fantastic. It’s super hard to tell if I am getting any better because I still practice my blank wai guo ren (foreigner) stare whenever spoken to by a Chinese person.
I’m also taking an environmental class taught by an American University professor but a bunch of Peking University students are also in the class with whom we are going to have discussions about today’s environmental issues and what we should do about them. Nobel prize maybe?
Aside from homework and school work Beijing is an incredible city. Crazy, polluted, way over crowded but incredible all the same.
Our first weekend adventure with the group was to go to the Great Wall at Simatai. The Great Wall is definitely one of the most appropriately named constructions. To get to the wall you have to walk up a mountain and once on the actual wall it is like doing stairs for and hour to an hour and a half. These aren’t any normal stairs either; the Chinese guards must have had tiny feet and super muscley legs to conquer those stairs. Some of the steps were probably five inches deep and while some steps would be maybe two inches high, the following step would be like 15 inches. And this is pretty much all the way up. Every now and then there would be a guard tower which apparently are spaced so far apart that with a bow and arrow the guards could reach anyone between the towers.
The Great Wall was refreshingly not crowded for Chinese tourist standards and by the time we reached the top, exhausted and drenched in sweat I had a pretty good idea as to why. Just the same we got to the last watchtower before being fined for trespassing at lunch time and the Chinese had all crowded into the tower with their snacks having picnics on the Great Wall. It was really cool to step into the cool tower from the sun to walk in on maybe 40 Chinese people sitting in picnic circles snaking and laughing away. Like the good tourists we are becoming we sat down to our own snacks.

This past weekend we went to the Summer Palace in Beijing (actually really close to BeiDa – maybe three bus stops away). The week before and this past weekend were part of a National Holiday in which no one (except us and touristy places) work or go to class. Turns out to not be a good time to go to any tourist attraction in China. The Summer Palace, despite the rainy, cold weather that usually turns people off to strolling outdoors, was packed. The place is enormous, complete with a huge lake and mountain. Of course, as the emperor of such a nation you need a mountain and lake on which to relax. Even though the Summer Palace was so big, there were people shuffling about everywhere. I’m becoming a lost more sympathetic to the One Child Policy…

Also because of the Golden Week (National holiday) people were all over BeiDa’s campus because it is so well known and so beautiful. It was definitely nicer today to not have to push through the throngs of tourists on my way to class…

PICTURES!

Alright, here's the link to what I have thus far! (Beyond what I've wrote about too)

http://picasaweb.google.com/home

Dali

After Lijiang we went to Dali which was a lot like Lijiang with a new old town and touristy shops everywhere. This was better than Lijiang though, less cheesy. Also the hotel was REALLY nice…. Definitely a major perk. When we first got there a bunch of us went for a walk to the three pagodas (two of which were old, one was rebuilt). We walked through some pretty deserted industrial-ish streets before finally getting to the pagodas. We definitely took a back way that not only showed us the common people but the enormous spiders of Dali and the south of China. We’re talking monster spiders, like up to three inches end to end. Not all of them were that big but when you’re walking under their webs housing ten plus spiders they could’ve been any size.

We got to the pagodas at 7 p.m., exactly when they closed so we headed back to Old Town and our hotel. We stopped at a little hold in the wall restaurant on the way back where we all sat on little stools and chose what we wanted to eat from a rack of veggies against a wall. The woman who owned the place was so nice and brought out some of the best food I’ve ever had in China. We had eggplant, corn and soybeans, tofu, pork and some other things I don’t remember but were equally good. The woman was so nice and her cooking was so good we went back the next day.

But first, the following day we took a boat cruise on Erhai – a giant, beautiful lake in the midst of mountains and right next to Dali. Unfortunately the cruise turned out to be a pretty disgusting tourist cruise where we were taken first to a little island to climb to the temple at the top. A lovely thought really until you get off the polluting boat to see the vendors lined up on wither side of the path to the top all trying to sell you things and get your money. Back on the boat we watched a tea ceremony with several dances performed (supposedly) by the minority group there. Unfortunately this was not nearly as cool as I thought it would be… the music was a-blaring and the dances and tea were not too good. Oh well. If I had to choose a low part of the trip that would probably be it.

Ah, I forgot a monumental dinner in Lijiang. This one afternoon we went boating on a lake and afterwards we went to a village for dinner. Because we only got there at maybe 4 or so we were first lead down to a garden where we learned to play Ma Zhong, but on the way to play, we past a slaughtered pig on a cart. Going up to dinner the pig was gone and but there was definitely a few drops of blood? on the stairs up to the dining room. Sure enough dinner consisted of hog ear, pig feet, and a wide variety of other pork dishes. I gotta say, the ear wasn’t really my cup of tea but the feet were pretty good. We also had a chicken and fungus soup which was pretty good too.

Also, I am working on uploading the pictures… here’s the link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/checkerbloom/2008_08_29?authkey=yom1D2qcHDI#

Old Town Tourist trap

Lijiang

So we had to meet at 4:30 a.m. the next morning to go to the airport and catch our 7a.m. flight to Lijiang. Before leaving the hotel in Chengdu we got “to go breakfast”s.

Ok, quick tangent: Chinese breakfast is no pancakes and waffle experience. I have yet to discover something that is specifically a breakfast food here. In the US you have your cereal, pancakes, oatmeal, toast, all the good things you can usually find at hotel breakfast buffets. Not so much here. Chinese style breakfast is a lot of regular Chinese food. Fried rice, pork, noodles, cabbage, etc. It’s definitely fine to eat but there’s nothing particularly delicious or special about breakfast. Sometimes, when you’re lucky they’ll have watermelon.

So anyways, this to go breakfast was … for lack of a better word, interesting. We all got a plastic bag with a water bottle (nice and hydrating but as we were getting on a plane we couldn’t bring it through the gate with us), an apple (delicious choice), then a little box or food which included some funny little cakes with green powder sprinkled on top of the tasteless spongy cakes, a hard boiled egg, a Chinese hotdog type thing no one ate because at 5 or 6 a.m. it’s hard to find the courage to take a bit out or a Chinese hotdog. I am going to have to try it at some point but all I can thing about is the comparison to American hotdogs. I mean, if the Chinese normally eat pretty much everything that goes into the good old Oscar Myers, what exactly goes in the Chinese hotdogs? Sometimes it’s better not to think about what you’re eating. If it doesn’t make you sick its fair game. Bummer you can’t know how it will react with your digestive system until after you eat…

So we got to Lijiang. Lijiang airport had one runway and one carousel for the bags. The whole airport building was probably the size of my house in Wisconsin… decent size but not really as big as I usually consider airports to be. The countryside was absolutely beautiful going to the city. The city itself was pretty cool too. It’s more of a working class city with this big “Old Town” taking up half of it. Old town, where we stayed was initially really cool. All the buildings had amazing wooden carvings, cobblestone streets. Unfortunately after an hour of being there it started seeming a little bit… fake. We asked the program leader and she said that indeed there was an earthquake in 1995 or 1996 and the old town was rebuilt as a first class Chinese tourist trap. That discovery certainly took some of the charm – no wait, a lot of the charm out of the Old Town. Apparently everyone who works there has to be in traditional Naxi (the minority group from Lijiang region) costumes. The Han people (about 98% of the Chinese population) seem to be fascinated by Chinese minority groups and therefore use them as tourist attractions.

Our second day (out of four) in Lijiang we went to Jade Dragon Mountain. This was absolutely incredible. We took a cable car up to a higher spot on the mountain and walked around for a while. Unfortunately it was really cloudy so we couldn’t see the top of the mountain but it was so beautiful with the trees and waterfalls covering the mountains I didn’t much care. Towards the bottom of the mountain there was a lake that was this bluish/ turquoise color. Apparently it is because of the presence of minerals in the water (copper?). Anyways, it was probably the most beautiful place I’ve seen in China so far. I’ve got pictures that will be posted… soon.

The rest of Lijiang was not too eventful although I did buy some tea at a shop in Real Town Lijiang. I just got some cheap tea thinking it would all be the same and it smelled good. Wrong. It is not good and now I’m stuck with half a jin (I think a jin is 500 grams) of this awful tea. It might be good English style with lots of sugar and milk except they don’t have much milk in China…….

Chengdu

So I know it’s been about three weeks since I was even in Chengdu but that’s okay….
We were in Chengdu for two nights and one full day. We got to our hotel at about midnight and hit the sack. The next morning we took a bus to the Panda Research Center. That was really cool. There were a bunch of enclosures with pandas of all ages. The older ones were pretty lazy. I guess all they do is eat bamboo and sleep all the time; probably because they don’t get enough calories from the bamboo to move. The younger pandas were much more active wrestling and playing with each other. They also Probably the best part of the research center were the baby pandas… they have a few baby pandas in various stages of development. The oldest one was a month old and had its spotted fur already, lying in the ‘panda position’. We just decided to call it that because it seems like all the pandas sleep all stretched out on their stomachs. Anyways, there were smaller pandas too that looked oddly like rats… pink and hairless with a fairly long tail that seemed to shrink as they grew up. They were about 4 or 5 inches long from their head to the end of their tails.

After the pandas we had a free afternoon so I went with some people to a Buddhist monastery in the middle of Chengdu its called Wenshu Yuan. The monastery was really incredible which multiple courtyards and temples. At one point an older Chinese man came up to me and my friend to tell us some history about how in WWII the stayed in Chengdu to attack the Japanese. I think that makes us best friends.

For dinner we went to a hotpot restaurant. Hotpot is kind of like Chinese fondue. There are two different broths in the center of a heated table and you get a bunch of raw meat and roots and such. You dump them in and wait a couple of minutes, then dip in your chopsticks, fish around a bit and come up with something. My chopsticks skills are still not up to par so it was a rough and messy meal – but fun just the same.

Beijing to Xi'an

So, here’s the first attempt at a blog….

I got to Beijing on August 29th after a super long 13 hour flight which ended in some horrible turbulence thanks to the layer of smog over Beijing. The plane just plummeted probably 100 feet twice! That was a little too much to be fun. The man next to me, a young Chinese businessman was like, “don’t worry, it’s fine it’s okay!” Poor guy. He was trying to comfort me and I’m pretty sure he was more freaked out than I was. But we landed safely – I think the turbulence is normal coming into this city.
Anyways, when we got into Beijing there was someone from the program waiting for us which was really good because I was not quite sure how I was going to be getting from the airport to the hotel where we were staying. We got to the hotel which turned out to be beautiful and super nice because China is one of the few places where the dollar is still worth something (it’s almost 7 yuan/kuai to the dollar). We spent a couple of days tromping around Beijing and then left on Sunday for our study trip.
Sunday night we took an over night train to Xi’an – about a 14 hour train ride… That was pretty fun except that we were woken at about 5:30 a.m. by the line of slightly older men queuing to hawk some major loogies in the sinks at the end (our end) of the car. We finally got to Xi’an at 7:00 a.m. and maneuvered our way through the masses at the train station. I think the best way to understand how many people are in China would be to hang out at a train station. There are just so many people waiting for people, pushing through people, arriving and searching for things in every direction. Also, the Chinese don’t really seem to believe in lines and the only way someone is not going to cut you off is if you cut them off. It’s exhausting. Somehow we all (some 60 American tourists) managed to get to our buses which took us to probably one of the nicest hotels in Xi’an. It was right in between these two major towers, the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower.
After breakfast (and a much needed shower) at the hotel we were carted off to see the Terracotta Warriors (Qin dynasty). They were incredible and not at all what I was expecting. Instead of a few statues of soldiers standing tall in the grass (I am still not sure why I was expecting that...) it was a series of three pits with rows of soldiers dug out from underground. In the Chinese touristy style it looked like the soldiers were still being worked on (with some tools and blankets in the pits) but the truth is nothing has been excavated in 10+ years because as soon as the soldiers hit the coal polluted air they would fall apart, so nothing has been done for some time as they try to figure out how to excavate without further damaging the soldiers and horses.
In the afternoon we went to the city wall – the old one as the city has expanded maybe five times past the wall… and rented bikes for what we thought would be a nice ride around the outskirts on the old city. Not so much. Instead we rented the bikes, which turned out to be horrible bikes, and started our journey atop the wall. The cobblestones are awful on bad bikes and the wall was a lot longer than expected but it was still really cool to see all the older rooftops of Xi’an. After finally finishing the wall we had a group dinner at an apparently famous jiao zi (dumpling) restaurant just next to our hotel. There we were served some 15 courses of jiao zi with all sorts of fillings. Some that I remember are, spicy chicken mushroom, pork (the Chinese love their pork), tomato, beef, shrimp, chicken – which were folded to look like chickens, wild rice, vegetable, and a whole bunch more I just can’t quite remember. It was really good and I left stuffed. After dinner a couple of us explored the streets of Xi’an and wandered through a night market and some really cool side streets on the city.
The next day we went to the great mosque – mostly built in the Ming dynasty as early as the seventh century. It is one of the oldest, largest and most preserved mosques in China and definitely deserves all of these titles. There were maybe 5 or 6 main courtyards with all sorts of small courtyards off the main row. The walls blocked out most of the city noise so while we walked through a VERY crowded market to get there, inside was really quiet and peaceful.
That afternoon a few of us took a taxi to this huge pagoda, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. That too was beautiful and we opted to pay to climb its entrance fee to climb the seven stories to the top of the pagoda. From there we could see exactly how much we could not see due to the pollution and enormousness of Xi’an. Buildings and city stretched for miles. I suppose it didn’t help that is was raining off and on though either…
Anyways, later in the afternoon we left to take a plane for Chengdu…