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…