1st post...欢迎到北京来

你好美国, Hello America

So I've been in 北京 (Beijing) for about a week now and I thought it was about time to get this thing started. In my posts I'm going to try to incorporate both things about daily life in Beijing and also tell some stories of stuff that's happened so far. The first week has been really eye opening. We did a lot of orientation stuff for the first few days - getting to know each other, the area of the city, and the FOOD.

Some notes on Chinese dining 中国菜

- Dinners and sit-down meals tend to be BIG shared entrees. They're big on using the lazy susan.

-I haven't seen a fork yet. My chopstick skills are pretty good and I think I've gotten better. Some people came here not knowing how to use them at all and I feel really bad sitting stuffed with rice while they dig around struggling to hang onto a pea.

-Vegetables are amazing. They cook or steam or whatever everything with different sauces and seasoning... I've never been so excited to eat eggplant and snow peas.

-Knuckles? Besides the normal chicken wings and cubes of beef and whatever, they also serve chicken feet, knuckles, and other parts that don't really have much meat on them at all. I've made some mistakes ordering some of these things at restaurants based on the pictures. Even though some of the food is odd it makes sense that they utilize every single type of meat and part of the animal considering the history of famines in China.

-CHEAP! The other day I went to a Ughyer restaurant with some friends where we ordered several entrees, tons of chuanr (think kebobs) and two large beers and I think we ended up spending around 6 or 7 bucks each.

Last night 12 of us went out to an all you can eat hot-pot place. These are pretty common places that are like melting pot but distinctly Chinese. For 58 Kuai (about $8.50) we got as much food as we want to cook in our hot pots and as much beer and 白酒 (baijiu) as we wanted. We also all took shots of snake wine (White wine with a snake in some form or another in it. Supposedly it has some healing properties...I still woke up with a hangover). Baijiu is this very common rice wine/vodka that a lot of people drink with dinner. It's everywhere and pretty potent.

-Yes, I have seen dog on a menu.

Classes! 课

I'm in the language intensive program with around 50 other people. We have Chinese class from 8AM to 12:15PM every day and we have to learn I think around 70-80 characters a day in addition to doing whatever written homework we have, which is pretty intense. We have 听写 (tingxie - dictations) everyday and have to be prepared to know any character from the vocab lists. Everyone has tingxies in college Chinese classes but these are harder because we have to learn a whole new list of vocab words every day.

I'm also taking two area studies classes: Sociology and Marketing in China. Neither of them have started yet but they both sound cool. In sociology on Wednesdays we get to go on a lot of field trips around Beijing.

Beijingers 北京人

All the Chinese people we've met so far have been extremely warm and nice to us. They are really big on hospitality and they've been extremely helpful as we try to figure out our way around the city. They seem to really be willing to bend over backwards to make sure you're ok especially when you speak Chinese to them. I don't think a Chinese person coming to America would find people as willing to help them as we have here.

THE Square

Today we went to Tian'anmen square and the forbidden city on a group trip. It was really cool to see all of the extremely detailed architecture that went into the emperor's palace. It was packed with thousands of people. A lot of the Chinese tourists were from outside provinces and haven't seen too many non-asians before and they wanted to take pictures with us, particularly the blondes. It was pretty funny. See Picture.

What's that kid doing? 那个小子做着什么？

Toddlers in China where these pants with flaps that open when they have to go to the bathroom. No diapers. When the kids gotta take a piss the parents undo the flap and the kid just goes where he's standing. No one even flinches when it happens in huge crowds and the kids don't even try to go for a corner or behind a tree, trashcan, or wall. As we were walking around Tiananmen square and the forbidden city I had to avoid a few puddles.

End of post 1

I'm gonna wrap up this post by saying that so far I'm really loving Beijing and I can feel my Chinese getting much better already. Tonight we're going to a Beijing Acrobats performance and Monday we take a language pledge where we are not supposed to speak english around campus AT ALL. The rule is that if we want to speak english we need to be in our dorms with the doors closed. It's pretty serious but I think it's going to be extremely beneficial for my Chinese so I'm kind of excited for it. Also next weekend a bunch of us are taking a train to Harbin to see a yearly ice festival with massive ice sculptures. We're also going to check out this tiger/lion/liger zoo. More posts to come...