Pimpin All over the World

So! I had a quite adventurous day yesterday! But lets start from Thursday. Thursday, Jeremy, Elaine, and I along with our new Hong Kong friends went to a beer pong tournament. We lost to German people. It was horrific. Yesterday was a really adventurous day.I  went to the Black Rabbit Music Festival and saw Ludacris and 30 seconds from Mars. I went with my friend Jordan and one of her friends. Ludacris was awesome and we were basically on the second row. Up yonder is Jordan and of course Ludacris. Rudy said you could make a drinking game of everytime I mentioned Ludacris last night haha. We went to Bar Streeet in Beijing which is called Sanlitun or Sanlituar. Also we ate one of my favorite things in Beijing...Chuar.
It's when they grill meat and or veggies on a stick. Here's some good old Beijing Chuar for you!

Chuar is very beijing. Up there is Medieval Dave. We have two Daves on our trip so one of them is nicknamed Medieval Dave because his hair makes him look like he could joust or something. It was a lot of fun. Our friend Ross got rather drunk and bought like 3 rounds of tequila shots for everyone. His explanation at the time was that he had too much money and needed to buy everyone shots. haha. It was just good times with good people last night.

Oh!

Oh!

Okay, So on Friday our program is leaving for 9 days to go to Qinghai and Gansu. These are both cities in Western China with high populations of minorities. This will be such a great opportunity to see what western and rural China daily life is like. I am so excited about this trip because I know it is really going to give me a new perspective on rural China that is outside of the glamour of the capital of Beijing. Some of our activities will include visiting several mosques and monasteries, meeting with Tibetans, exploring several National parks,and really getting to know Western Chinese culture! 

I'm not going to lie to you. I have the flu now. It's quite unfortunate...I'm getting better though. 

Elle croit que tout change, et seule elle a changé

So I have several things to discuss today. I am pretty sure that after my culture class on Tuesday and my Chinese foreign policy class on Wednesday- I will generally have a lot to say. Today in my Chinese class, we gave presentations about landmarks and famous places that we have been to. Because I had my pink life scrapbook, I retrieved some photos to use to discuss my trip last summer to Shanghai. This is when it really sank in how much my trip to Shanghai, Hangzhou, and a little bit of Beijing affected me. Marketus told us at orientation how different our first trip to China would be from other trips. He also said that every trip to China would be different from each other and that is important to never think you know everything about China. I feel like Beijing can never be like Shanghai. I have such a special place in my heart for Shanghai and all the adventures I had there. My experiences in Beijing will never compare to my first visit to China, but they will be amazing in new and different ways. I also don't know how I will reflect on the experiences I am having right now in a year. Maybe, it will have the same tone that Shanghai does now.


It's funny my friend Andrew Salsberry told me something about the day that he left for Spain for a year. He told me that he looks back on the day as a happy day. When I left for China, I cried from Concourse A to Concourse E at the Atlanta airport and it was really sad at the time...rather it was bittersweet. It was my first, I'm sure of many, international flights by myself. I was literally traveling to the unknown with no real friends, no concrete idea of what I was getting myself into, and with blurred expectations about what the next few months would mean for my life and my career. But Today, I look back at the experience as a really good experience and a new beginning to my life in China.


Oh also....I WANT TO CLARIFY!
Many of my friends are reading this thinking my life in Beijing is just crazy party fun yay! Well...not really. Sunday night through every other thursday is more like this:

This is me studying until I fall asleep with my books in my bed. I have at least two hours of Chinese class Monday through Friday with three hours on Tuesday and Thursday. I also have homework and a vocabulary everyday. I have also have a three hour Chinese foreign policy class on Wed and a three hour Chinese Contemporary culture class on Tuesday. After all of these classes, we've got a nice 2-3 three of studying to do.

So friends and (my mom) this is not just one big Beijing party. It's a lot of work and then we go out on the weekends and rage.

I'll write more later- I have to go meet my language partner!

The past and the pending

First of all, this song is my favorite Shins song. It's a really beautiful song. Today, I had my Chinese culture class and we discussed Mao Zedong once again. For all of you who may not be extremely international affairs savvy- he is the founding father of the People's Republic of China in 1949. He started as a revolutionary in the 1920's and was extremely influential in shaping Chinese society politics, and economy up untill he died in 1976. Just Wikipedia him http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong. As I have said before,  Mao did a lot evil things during his political career, but he brought the country together after the Century of Humiliation( the time period from the Opium wars to the Japanese occupation to the founding of the PRC in 1949). The unification of the country trumps all of the atrocities that Mao and his government committed.

Anywho.
Everything in Beijing is going well. Yesterday was really my first day of kind of missing America, but I'm really glad to have this experience. I really do see a huge cultural difference between our American, Irish, and English friends. I'm not just talking about different slang that we use. Sometimes they say slang terms and we just look at them like What did you just say? There's a different sense of normality and a different sense of humor between the different people. One English boy got so pissy because I asked if they celebrated Halloween in England....I did not know if it was a big deal like it is in America. But of course, they don't play beer pong. And then again, I don't know if it's the sample size of the British people we are exposed to or if it is a cultural thing. I mean other than Canada- I would say the United States and the UK have the most cultural similarities. It makes me think what about what will happen when I can go there in Chinese. I mean if I am already seeing these cultural differences between Brits and Americans- how crazy is it going to be when I can have those conversations in Chinese. I am kind of getting there. I am at that terrible stage in my path to learning the Chinese language where I'm just really awkward. I have a decent amount of vocabulary, but I want to form complex sentences and discuss substantial topics.It's just a struggle. I'm definitely at that pre-teen stage of learning a language. I want to say more than just I want this. How much does that cost? I am American. I want to discuss culture, economics, and politics with my language partner, not just talk about the weather.

It's weird and interesting when you visit a place and it's so different than you remembered...or your preconceived notions about the culture are not exactly spot on. For example, I had these preconceived notions that freedom of speech was so scandalous and not to talk about uncomfortable subjects, but it seems a lot less severe in Beijing than I imagined. Like we talk about controversial subjects on campus in a university or just in public.I am not going to go protest for human rights or anything in Tianan'men Square naturally. Urban Chinese people have access to technology and information- yeah it's monitored by the government but a lot of Chinese have VPNs which allows them to search the entire world wide web not blocked off by the Great Firewall of China. I am really interested to research the limitations of freedom of speech in China. One crucial element of life that I noticed while working at Bahama Breeze- serving tables and dealing with corporate bullshit buercracy is that some things only matter when they need to matter....or Some things only matter when they have strategic importance in the case of China. In certain instances, speaking your mind does not really matter...but in other cases it does.

It's a nasty day of pollution. Today, I was thinking- What are the health implications going to be in the next few years for China's population. I almost want to compare it to processed foods in America and how that's effected America's obesity crisis and how children are hitting puberty at 8 years old. What are the health implications for urban citizens to breathe in smog everyday?! Look down and you can see Beijing on a nasty day on smog.

It's crazy how it works out. I was really apathetic to environmental concerns when I lived in the United States. Seriously...I was like let the hippies take care of it, but I don't want my children one day to grow up in this shit. It's such a wake-up call....but in all fairness Beijing on a good day is beautiful. There are mountains like 5 miles away that we can only see on a clear day.

Spotted!

Antoinette and Sydney are in my room studying  and there's a beetle. We just called Jeremy in here to destroy the beetle. Mission accomplished. Sydney was like this is the first bug I've seen in here except for the spiders. I was like the spiders? We had spiders in here!?! Well no we didn't. Dave does two "mechanisms of torture" using his hands kind of like puppets".The first one is talons where he uses a talon hand gesture to tickle people. The second one is spiders where naturally, he's makes a spider hand gesture to tickle us. He's such a silly bastard. Our little group on the trip is Rudy, Syd, Antoinette, Dave, and me.

Antoinette

Me Syd and Antoinette

Dave and I

 We hang out with the British people and these two Irish guys. Today, I met a boy from Afghanistan. He worked at the U.S. consulate in Kabul and as of tonight I've decided to tutor him in English. His English is good enough to the point that I can explain what a complex word means in simpler words.I also met an Auburn graduate today. He is Southern and I have high hopes for our friendship. I am just so relieved to meet another southerner ahhh! Syd and I also made friends with a girl from Hong Kong who speaks California-esque English. She's a sweetheart and I can tell we are going to be friends! She's 18 and going to Cambridge next year. She's me and Syd's asian baby.

I'm still waiting to see if I am getting an internship or not. Hopefully, I'll be an intern at this research institute at one of the local universities. It would be delightful especially since I completely rewrote my resume. It's really sinking in that A. I'm graduating next spring. B. This is my last year of my undergraduate C. This is my fourth year of college. They seem to all go hand and hand, but literally the reality of all three of those things has hit me at different times.It seems really trivial, but I'm just like wow- I actually need to start making some decisions.  Then of course the big question- What am I going to do with my life?

I've started writing notes on my Iphone at random times in the day. Weishenme (Why) you might ask...Well because sometimes especially in China you are overwhelmed by some type of cultural experience and at that specific time you really want to write down your sentiments towards this experience right when it's happening. I started this yesterday- so it's a new deal...but I mean there's nothing worse then going to write my blog and having nothing particularly interesting to say...like oh Today in Beijing I ate jiaozi. They were sooo delicerse (spelling totally intentional...Chinese people can't ever say delicious or famous. It's so fucking precious.) I mean when I look back on my blog in a year or two years- that's not the kind of shit I'm going to want to read about. 

Like something very small happen yesterday that I found very interesting. We were riding in a rickshaw yesterday in the Hutong area of Beijing. Rudy and I were making small talk with the Chinese guy who was peddling us on his bicycle. He was telling us where he was from some region in Central China. He told us in Chinese that he was not Beijingren because Beijingren don't do this kind of work. It's such a little slice of how the hukou system in China works. I don't know if you know about the hukou system, but it basically segregates rural and urban Chinese into two different classifications of citizenship. Urban citizens reap the social benefits of city life through free educations and other social services, but rural Chinese do not. The hukou system is part of the reason for China's economic success because the Chinese government does not have to provide social services to rural Chinese and that saves them quite a bit of money. Migrant workers come to the city and work for nothing because their rural citizenship does not guarantee them any type of social welfare. More or less, China's economic prosperity rides on the backs of underpaid migrant workers from Rural China. They are the one doing all the dirty work that urban citizens would never do.

Rudy and I and of course the man who bicycled us around

Also..while we were watching a video about Mao in our culture class. Dave wrote me a note telling me that I was a counterrevolutionary who needed to go work in the fields.

Here's one little note that I wrote on my Iphone especially for my blog!

September 10th, 2011

So it's noon in Beijing and we are sitting on a bus in the most intense traffic. It's been like an hour just sitting in Beijing traffic. There are people walking around near the street and Dave commented on how everyone was walking around like a zombie movie.  We proceeded to talk about how everyone would happen if we were in fact in a zombie movie...You know who would die first, who would survive, and how the movie would start. Dave would be the narrator of course. We got into a fight about which was better New Jersey or Atlanta.We walked around Traditional Hutong district in Beijing. I bought a Mao propaganda poster for our dorm. It says Everything will be better after the Cultural Revolution...if you don't know what it is...look it up. It's so ironic, but I think it's really interesting or...you yi si. The Cultural Revolution is a really dark time in Modern Chinese history and Chinese society is still dealing with the consequences and implications of that time. We went and saw a traditional Hutong household and walked all around the city. We learned how to make Jiaozi or dumplings at this Chinese woman's house. Here's some pictures from Hutong. They are not clutch quality because I forgot my camera and just used my Iphone!

Also Spotted is the title. It's a little game I created. It's pretty much about objectifying International and Chinese male students alike. When one of my American friends or I spots a good looking chap-we call out spotted! A new dimension of this game has been added tonight. When a hipster asian is spotted, one must say Spotted....HA! HA as in Hipster Asian. What can I say- I am a genius.If you don't know what a Hipster is....google it.

love you!

Wo ai Ni

Food poisoning buhao.

Well...It happened. I got food poisoning. I had really bad stomach cramps that were different from any other cramps I'd ever had. I went to the hospital and they told me I had food poisoning. Thankfully, it hasnt been too terrible. My cramps are still pretty bad and I threw up once, but that's about it. It was from a pork dish I got at a cafe in my dorm. I'm feeling better now though.

We started our culture class today. Our prof is getting his P.H.D. at Yale and writing his thesis on the Chinese and Burmese border clash. We watched this video on the Mao years in my class. It's really interesting since the beginning of the founding of the PRC, the Chinese government has always put the economic interest of the state before the well-being of it's citizens. From the Great Leap Forward's creation of the largest man-made starvation to the current disregard for environmental and labor standards, the Chinese government has consistently cut corners in order to boost profits or bail themselves out of economic crises. Mao Zedong is such a cult figure in China and it's really difficult to paint him as one person or another. Don't get me wrong. He did a lot of really horrific, terrible, and monstrous things to say the least , but he also unified China. He took a country that had been beaten down for years by foreign occupation and humiliation and gave it back it's pride. Now China's the second largest economy in the world. I was thinking about this today : Is the juice worth the squeeze in regards to China's economic prosperity? China's economic growth has lifted millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class...but it has costed countless lives, exploited millions of migrant workers and Chinese people, and tremendously polluted the environment to the extent that people are inhaling loads of smog with each breath they take. Most Chinese people agree that Mao did what he had to do at the time to unify the country. Would China even be the economic powerhouse they are today if they played fair in the global economy? Doubtful. All these question bounce around in my head. China really is amazing though. It's so crazy to think that they have came so far from a agriculturally based and politically weak society to the second largest economy in the world in a little over 60 years. It's fantastic... It took the US almost two centuries to become the global hegemony...post WWII. Well I'm getting dinner now with the Brits of course.

TATA for now loves...

and btw make a skype date with me soon.

 

Fast times in Beijing

Soooo it's been a long few days..full of excitement, academics, and adventure.
Academics
I am in the 3rd level Chinese class out of the four classes that are offered through my program. A very loosely read and hardly understood interpretation  of my Chinese class sylabus led to some misunderstandings in the first few days of class. I was initially a little overwhelmed because we had to read dialogue in characters, write in down in pinyin ( a system for Chinese so that you can pronounce a word correctly with the right tones e.g. 美国 is měi guó, and then we had to memorize the dialogue. I didn't really know how to manage my time and properly memorize it at first. I am getting the hang of everything now and I do not feel overwhelmed by the work load. Our proffessor is the most adorable Chinese woman I've ever seen in my life. She's really trendy and pretty. She cracks jokes in Chinese all the times...it's seriously priceless. We were learning the two different words in Chinese for hating something or hating someone. She explained hating a person like this : "It's like when you love someone, but they don't love you back SO YOU HATE THEM!"  


I already feel like I am learning so much inside and outside the classroom. I'm really glad to be here.


Now on to ADVENTURES!

My gym

Lunchtime with Rudy at the Cafe!

Where to start?! I have not written in my blog in a few days which means I have a lot to catch up on. First of all, let me explain my typical day in Beijing. I wake up at 7-7:30 and go buy a coffee. Up until a few days ago, I had never drank a full cup of coffee. EVER. I decided coffee was a better alternative to soda and weirdly enough I really really like the feeling of drinking coffee. I always get iced coffee. I can definitely dig it. I study Chinese until my 9:00 am class. We recite the dialogue from above and then we take a new words quiz. We study new grammar patterns for the first hour of class, then in the second hour we learn new vocabulary words. On tuesdays and thursdays, we give oral presentations about Chinese culture in Chinese. We gave a presentation on giving gifts and the cultural differences regarding eating and manners between Westerners and Chinese people. I actually really like giving presentations. It's really good practice. After class, I go eat lunch with Rudy and Sydney...and the very occasional Antoinette and Dave at the Cafeteria or dining hall or Canteen as our Brit friends like to call it (but hold up...I'll get to them :) !)  I usually come back to the dorm and study a little before going to the gym which I am now a member of.  Then one of my favorite parts of the day! Dinners with the Brits and that one Irish guy- Aaron. Everyone from my program lives on the 11th and 12th floor. The Brits live on the top floor, the 13th floor and we go and eat at all different Beijing restaurants. They are all very nice and fun. 


One day,we all went to get pizza at this bar called Helens which is next to two of our favorite bars slash clubs- Propaganda and Sensation. Our new Irish friend Aaron was absolutely positive that his way of getting to Helen's was the right way. Well as it goes- it was not. It was a street too early and after he had identified that it was in fact not the right street, we tried to find a road to connect us to the next parallel street. We thought we found a road that would do that. We did not. About 15 Brits, Americans, and two Irish guys walked through this sketch mcsketch walkway. It was a dark smelly ally and when we eventually did get back to the main road, we were literally about 15 ft closer to the restaurant an hour later haha. It was an adventure nonetheless. 

I also met my language tutor.(Up!) Her name Tu Lei. She's really cool and funny. She won't speak English to me but she told me that she understands what I am saying most of the time. (yay!!!) We went on this three hour Walmart trip. There are three floors!! AHHH! 

It was a really fun weekend. The Brits, Irish, and my fellow Americans all went out. Thursday night, we all hung out in Ross's room. It was about fifteen people all hanging out in a tiny room. We played a nice game of Never have I Ever and learned quite a bit about everyone. We started out playing circle of death and one of the rules that I chose was that all the Americans had to speak with an English accent and all the Brits and Irish had to speak with an American accent. I have never laughed so hard in my life. Thursday was a night full of laughs and memories. We went out to Sensation on Friday and Saturday. Yesterday, we had to wake up at 9 am for this scavenger hunt all across Beijing. It was terrible. Everyone was really hungover and it was hot. We had to meet at Summer Palace at 3 am.


This post is from a few days ago.