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