First Week of Classes

The first week of classes was pretty interesting.  I had started in Yiben Shang (First book vol.1) with Jessica, Brandon, Kurt and Theo, other students form BYUI and we all thought this level was way too easy.  The Hanyu (Chinese) class was not too bad, but the Kouyu (speaking) and Tingli (listening) classes were too easy.  We started out doing things like pronunciation and tones in both of those classes.  They were super easy and not difficult at all. I really liked our Kouyu and Hanyu teachers a lot but thought our Tingli teacher was not that great.  So after a week we all decided to move up to Yiben Xia (first book vol. 2). Unfortunately we weren’t able to stay in the same class but Jessica and I ended up in the same class as Lauren.  Emily joined us a little bit later because she felt her class was a little too difficult for her.

I love my class now.  In our class we have 6 countries represented.  After everyone moved around and got settled we really started to build great friendships.

Alessia is from Italy.  She is also very intelligent, pretty and one of the brightest in our class.  She studies at a university in Venice. She is also one of my desk mates. She has been teaching me a little bit of Italian on the side.

Josie is from Sweden.  She is a very sweet, intelligent, beautiful girl. She speaks English because she attends Leeds a university in England. She is very mature and often keeps the class in check when we are being ridiculous.

Alessandro is also from Italy.  He is one of my good friends in class.  He sits in front of me when we do not have Tingli (our Tingli class has assigned seats where I sit next to Alessia).  He acts kind of like a shier version of Jack Sparrow.  He is very good at Chinese and has helped us out a lot when we do not understand. He also studies in Venice. I help him out on one of our class dinners and built a really good friendship from it. 

Kieran is from England. To be specific he is from Liverpool.  He became friends with Lauren first and that’s how I met him.  Once we moved into their class we became friends as well.  He’s a very considerate person but doesn’t take any crap from anyone either.  He very mature for his age as well (20). He studies at Leeds as well.

Roberta is from Italy as well.  She is beautiful, a little shy, but likes to joke around with Kieran.  She likes to party with people, and she studies in Venice as well.

Amber is from England. She is a very pretty girl. Her father is Asian so she sometimes gets mistaken as Chinese by the people around us.  She has pretty bad memory sometimes but that makes things interesting.  She loves planning class trips and fun activities for us to do. She studies at Leeds.

Anthony is also from England.  He is very tall and is pretty young for how he looks (19).  He is the butt of many jokes but he can dish out a few of his own as well.  He and Charlotte bicker with each other quite a bit.  He and the other students from Leeds like to part together.

Kang Han Byeol is from Korea.  She is a tiny little girl at, I think, just under 5 foot.  She is a cute little girl and it is funny to think that she is about my age. She, Lee Eun Won and Seo Yuri have taught me how to swoon a Korean girl with cutesy actions.  They are always saying that it is cute.

Ahmed is from Dubai.  He is also one of my good friends in the class. He is like our class father.  We call him Da Ge (Big Brother) because he is the oldest in our class at 32.  He is married and has three children. He is here for 4 years because he works at the Airport in Dubai and they sent him here in China to learn Chinese.  He and I got to be close friends because we had a long time to chat while we were helping Alessandro after one of our class dinners.

Charlotte is from England.  She is a very funny, spunky girl.  She doesn’t take any crap from anyone and loves to chat with people especially the Koreans. She studies at Leeds in England.

Lee Eun Won is from Korea.  She is a pretty, sweet girl.  She likes to laugh and likes to party with the other Koreans 

Kang Hyuk is from Korea. He is one of the best ones at Chinese in our class.  He studies very hard and during school actually took the HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test).  He loves to play basketball.  He gave me a Korean name (myung lyak(SP?)) and likes to call me Myung Lyaki.  

Seo Yuri is from Korea.   She loves to laugh.  She has been teaching me how to swoon a Korean girl.  We have been teaching her how to say some funny English phrases such as “Girl, you be trippin'.” And “Who dat? Who dat in da corner?”.  She is a sweet girl and likes have fun.

Cha Jin Hyuk is from Korea.  He is very quiet and doesn’t say very much in class.  He likes to play Soccer.

Lauren (sitting) is from America too.  She is like my older sister.  She and I pick on each other.  She always jokes around in class saying that I am handsome and what not.  She is a very nice and pretty girl as well.  She’s fun to be around.  She graduates this year from BYU-I and when the semester is over she is planning on staying in China to find a job.

Jessica (in both pics) is also from America.  She is like a younger sister to me.  She and I sit next to each other when we don’t have Tingli.  We pick on each other and make jokes especially during our Kouyu class. We have a lot of fun in class. She also attends BYU-I

Emily (right) is from America.  She is a sweet, intelligent girl.  She studies and works very hard to improve her Chinese.  She is very fun when you get her out of her shell.  She is very helpful when I don’t understand something, and I can always count on her in those cases. She also studies at BYU-I.

Xin Myung Hun is also from Korea.  He is a pretty interesting guy.  He likes to party with his friends and sometimes the effects of his partying carry over into class.  For a while he has a creeper stash which I’m glad that he got rid of.  He speaks Chinese pretty well.

  

My favorite teacher is our Hanyu teacher, which is a good thing because we have her every day we have class.  She genuinely cares about every student in her class.  I apparently am one of her favorite students because during one of our xiuxi (breaks) another guy from our program came in and we sang “you raise me up” by Josh Groban and she said “when BaoMingLe (my name in Chinese) sings my heart melts.  So ever since then she gets me to sing things in class.  Our “punishment” for loosing class competitions is to sing, dance, or perform something.  I love her class.  She lived in America for a while and is married to a Taiwanese American guy.  She is a beautiful woman and is very caring.  When I did well on my Midterm she said that she was proud of me, especially since I improved so much from my first test (which I did HORRIBLE on: 51%). She is teaching for one year and then she will be moving to Florida with her husband.

 

Our Tingli teacher is my next favorite.  She likes to have fun with us and frequently has us play games.  She likes to make sure we understand what she is saying that that we understand out Shengci (vocabulary) because there is no English in our book at all.  I would describe her as a milder Asian version of Miss Frizzle from the magic school bus.  She is very interesting.

Lastly is our Kouyu teacher.  She is a very nice woman, I just don’t like her teaching style.  She was the same teacher as our Tingli teacher in the first level I was in.  She doesn’t really engage us very well.  She stands there (frequently at the corner of my desk) and teaches us the vocabulary and the Yufa (grammar).  Once she finishes with what she is saying she has us try to make a sentence from it. For a while she was getting us involved in the class with games but since there was no reward (accept maybe her drawing a flower on the board…) or anything the losing team had to do we sort of lost interest in her class, which is really sad because Kouyu is a very important part of a language.  She studied in Italy for a year so she learned how to speak English and Italian while she was there.

I’m really glad how things turned out with my classes.  Our class does a lot of fun things.  The first major even was a class dinner.  We went to a Korean BBQ and though there was a lot of drinking going on, we still had fun. This is where Alessandro, Ahmad and I became good friends.  Alessandro was wasted by the time we finished dinner, so Ahmad and I took him home.  This was not just a get in the taxi, take you home and leave you there in the bathroom hugging the toilet type of deal.  No, Alessandro was so drunk that he couldn’t really stand.  So we had to drag/carry him down the 4 floors to the street, in which took an hour in itself because once we got in the elevator he collapsed.  Once we got him off the Elevator he collapsed in the lobby, puked a little as well. We finally got him to the street, he puked some more and eventually found a taxi that would take him.  We had left the restaurant at 11pm and we didn’t arrive to his place until about 12:45am.  Outside his apartment he collapsed on the ground once again and said that he was going to puke so we let him sit there for a little while.  Ahmad and I stood there making sure that he didn’t fall over and crack his head open on the concrete.  After about 15mintues of so of talking we decided to move him finally.  Alessandro had fallen asleep while sitting there.  Finally allowing us to move him to his 12^th floor apartment (we said we wouldn’t move him again) arrived and immediately he went to the bathroom and hugged the toilet, and fell over.  Ahmad and I were afraid that he would hurt himself so we convinced him to go to bed. This turned out to be a bad idea…We had gotten him changed out of him dirty cloths, gave him a new shirt and some shorts to sleep in and of course this didn’t matter.  He was still throwing up so we gave him a bucket.  That didn’t do anything because he was throwing up in it and then dumping it on himself and the bed from tipping it back too far.  At one point he had asked for some water. Both of us went to get him some and came back to puke on the floor and him passed out on the bed.  I noticed a dark spot on the bed and made the mistake of touching it.  Yep it was vomit… I guess I’m learning not to get as grossed out by this kind of stuff, but still wanted to wash my hands.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to until I got back to my place since I couldn’t find any soap in the bathroom.  Ahmad and I waited for a little while before returning back to our rooms at 2am.  Yes that’s right.  We spent the last 3 hours helping him out.  Alessandro was so grateful the next morning that he texted me and said thank you. On the following Monday he came to class and told me that I needed to stand up and give him a hug for being so kind to him.  Ever since then the 3 of us have been pretty good friends.

Although I may not agree with some of the things that my classmates do, I still love being around them and being a good example to them and having fun with them.  I’m excited to that we have gotten so close. I never would have guess that I would have friends from those countries.  This trip has been full of surprises.

Great Wall Trips

For the first couple of weeks in China, it was impossible for me to sleep longer than 7 in the morning.  First of all, the beds were super hard and so that made things very difficult to sleep. Second of all, the room that I am staying in has a massive window.  It covers pretty much the entire side wall.  Our room is huge but there are some small things that are rather annoying with it.

1.      The window is huge, providing a nice view of the street outside, but it lets in so much light that it wakes us up before our alarms and sleeping through it is pretty difficult.  Also, it allows quite a bit of noise in which used to be a problem for me to get to sleep.

2.      Since our window is so large, both our A/C and our Heat do not work very affectively.  Heat and A/C were lost to the small cracks.  For a while it was getting super cold at night because the Chinese government decides when Heat and A/C is used. 

3.      Our room does not have Wireless internet, which gets pretty annoying.  We have to use hardwires, which was not too bad at first, but now the cord does not want to stay in my laptop and I have to tape it to my computer.

4.      Every once in a while or room reeks of smoke or putrid disgust for a few minutes. It comes in through the bathroom since our bathrooms are pretty much connected to the persons next to us and he smokes and cooks nasty things over there.

 That morning we got on a tour bus and made the 2 hour trip to the Mutianyu portion of the Great Wall (I have now been to this part twice, once with the BYUI group and once with our school). 

 The Great Wall is a pretty impressive sight.  Mao ZeDeng said that if you are a good Chinese person you will make a trip to see the Great Wall.  Well now we are good Chinese people.  It took about 15 minutes to walk up to the wall from the ticket booth.  I decided to walk up to it rather than take the cable car, because let us be honest, what is more impressive to say, “I rode a cable car to the Great Wall of China” or “I climbed the mountain to the Great Wall of China”.  Yeah, the second was does sound much more impressive. The Wall is absolutely massive.  Not tall, but long.  It is only about 20-30 feet tall, enough to keep people from climbing it (though there were plenty of spots where you could get into the wall by the climbing stairs), but is literally thousands of miles long.  The section that we went to had tons of stairs and it took me about 2 hours to get from one side of it to the other.  By the time I reached tower 1 from tower 8 my legs were ready to be done climbing.  At the Tower 1 there are 2 ways that you *can* go.  I emphasize this because one way the government has posted a sign saying “NO ADMITANCE” and the other you have to climb up through a window to get to.  Of course I did both.  The one through the window was not very far before you could not go any further.  The path was only about 3 feet wide as opposed to the 10-15 foot wide path that the rest of the wall was.  Past the sign was the wild portion of the wall.  By wild I mean that the government does not keep up this part of the wall, so many parts of the wild wall are overgrown with plants.  After walking through what was 15 minutes of overgrowth I came to the next tower.  This tower had been destroyed from years being beaten on by the elements.  It was by far the coolest part of the wall for sure.

With time running short I decided to go back.  I ran into Seth and Meredith and chatted with them for a while until Adam, Josh, Abby, and Brett came by and I joined their group.  I took some pictures for them and off we went to the Alpine slide.  The Alpine slide was so much fun.  We were on these little plastic and rubber sleds that had breaks to adjust how fast we went.  First was Josh, second Adam, third Brett, fourth me, and taking up the rear was Abby.  Since the slide is so long they allowed multiple people on it at certain intervals.  If every goes at quick pace you zoom down and you can actually get some air at certain parts.  Since Josh was stuck behind a slow person we stopped multiple times to allow some room between us and the person in front of us.  A few times we crashed into each other, one of those times, Adam broke his camera and watch in Josh’s bag (which later Josh gave Adam his camera to use since he used his phone anyway).  Afterwards we travelled back to the school and relaxed.

The second time I went to this portion of the wall was in October with the school.  Most of the people from our group went to a different part of the wall with the church but since I thought it was too expensive I didn’t end up going with them.  The school offered this trip for free so I decided to go again with my classmates.  I have gotten pretty close to our classmates for various reasons, but the Italian guy in the class and I have a pretty good friendship since I helped him out in a time of need (will talk about that later).  We spent most of the time talking to each other on the way.  When we got to the wall we walked up again. This wasn’t as fast as it was last time since we decided to go to tower 10 rather than 8 and make our way over, and because we had to make frequent stops.  People were getting out a breath and some of them wanted to make a stop for a smoke break, which made no sense to me.  If you are out of breath climbing the stairs, why constrict your lungs even more by smoking… but regardless I still love my classmates.  We made it to the top and decided to walk a far as we could to the other side.  Lots of complaining on not being able to make because there were so many stairs were exclaimed and others didn’t want to go that far because of how steep the stairs were.  Josie, Alessandro and I made it all the way to tower 2 before we turned back for the Slide.  Josie convinced me to take it again since I was the one that wasn’t too thrilled about doing it again because of money reasons (“You have not done it with us yet! Suck it up, be a man and just do it!”).  This time was not as enjoyable as the first.  This was due to the women in front of me.  We all wanted to go fast, but the women in front of us were going as slow as snails down this slide.  Not wanting to crash into them I was watching my speed.  Eventually this backed up 8 people on the slide.  Finally we made it back to the bottom and made the 2 hour trip back to the school. 

 

Anyone travelling to China needs to see the Great Wall.  It is a very impressive sight.  Even if you don’t stay very long is it is a great experience.  If I could I would have spent all day on the wall going from one side to the other, but having only a few hours on it each time I couldn’t.  Every year there is a marathon that people can run on the Great Wall.  Eventually I would love to do this.  I would have to do a lot of training for it since right now 10 miles at an 8:25 minute pace kicks my butt and that is on relatively flat ground. Eventually I will come back to china and visit the other sections of the wall.

The Next Few Days were a Blur

The next few days after I had arrived seem to blur together and since im really bad about keeping a journal, I have a very limited idea on which day I did each activity.  The next morning our group met in the lobby to get ready for registration and a quick trip around the neighborhood (so we knew where the grocery store was).  We got all the information that we needed for it and headed down.  I’ll be honest, for a school that seems pretty organized; this was not organized at all.  It was pretty straight forward:  go from desk 1-8 in order.  However, when we got there it was just taking so long that the woman in charge of our group while we are here, just took us out of line and started us in a random pattern.  We got to one desk and they told us that we needed to get our photos taken for our student ID’s.  However while waiting in line, she got impatient and said “here, I’ll finish this up but you must promise me to wait in line for the photo”.  At this point we were all just kind of fed up with all the disorganization of it all to complain that we just did what we were told. 

That night we decided to go to the Wudaokou.  We set off as a group to the subway, in the hopes that we would be able to catch a taxi there eventually.  We had found one and I quickly hopped in with Betsy, Drew, and Dallin.  When we arrived at Xizhimen station, where the rest of our group with end up to transfer to the Wudaokou station, we waited quite a while for them to arrive.  Eventually we left hoping to meet them in Wudaokou.  There were plenty of times where we have been split up and randomly made it back together.  This was one of those times.  We had pretty much given up on finding them when we got to Wudaokou, so we decided that we would walk around by ourselves.  That’s we heard a voice above the city noise yelling our names.  It was Brother Galer trying to get our attention.  In such a big part of the city it was kind of surprising that we met up with them again.  However if theres one thing I have learned, waiguoren (foreigners) stick out like a sore thumb.  Now every time we see a white person, we usually comment on the waiguoren, as if we have been living here for such a long time that we consider ourselves Chinese.  Essentially at Wudaokou we just walked around.  One thing to note was that we found a baozi place, which isn’t that big of a deal now but it was back then.  Baozi are steamed buns with some sort of filling, meat or vegetable, that can come in a variety of sizes.  The reason why this was so exciting to me was because my Chinese name is Bao, the same character as this delicious xiaochi, snack, and I came to hear about it on my mission when the elders asked if I had ever eaten one.  These Baozi were on the bigger side and although they were not the bbq pork flavor that I had in Australia while I was on my mission, it was still just as good. After this we walked around some more, got a drink at this place called City Drink, and being tired we made our back to the School. I found out later that Wudaokou is pretty much the party part of Beijing.  This is where all the students go when they want to go to bars and out for clubs and what not.

The following morning we had our placement exam.  This exam was the hardest exam that I took.  I didn’t understand a lot of it, but basically it was asking for the antonyms of certain words which I couldn’t read half of them , or if I could, I didn’t know the antonym or didn’t know how to write it.  Most of the test was left blank or had pinyin on it.  The last part was really pathetic though because we had to write a composition that was about 100 characters on the topic of xuexi hanyu, learning Chinese.  At the time I couldn’t read the hanyu part so I left it blank. I was debating on writing I don’t know what these characters are on the test but decided to leave it blank. Had I written that the people grading the test would have gotten quite the laugh at that.  Next was the oral test.  We had to read a paragraph which wasn’t too bad, and then talk to the examiner about it.  I thought I had done pretty well for that section, with some obvious slip ups.  The major one was when I had finished he said to me in Chinese that I could leave, and I just stared at him.  I had absolutely no idea what he had just said.  Eventually after saying it a few times he said in English “you can go” and I was off on my way.  If that wasn’t a failure I don’t know what is. Eventually I found out I was in the lowest class offered without being in the elementary level, which was kind of a slap in the face (later on I would transfer up to the next level because the class was too easy).

After the exams we went to Tian’anmen Square.  It is only a 30minute subway ride to it from our school.  When you come up out of the Tian’anmen West Station, the Forbidden City is on your Left.  Right across the street is Tian’anmen Square, and it is a lot bigger than I thought it was.  This is where such events as the 1989 massacre (Student protest mowed down by military) and the tank man (man stood in front of tanks) took place.  This place had street lights every so often in the middle of the square and on each post were cameras keeping track of what happened on the square.  Anything funny going on a police van would come and take the people away.  One man was handing out flyers on the square and was taken away in a vehicle.  Protests here are pretty much useless.  First off you must notify the government and petition to have a protest at least 5 days in advance, which the government usually didn’t allow it, and if you did do it chances are you would get picked up. 

After learning more about the square we made our way over to the silk market and looked around there for a little while.  The silk market is one of the many bargain shopping places in Beijing, and the bane of my existence here in Beijing.  Im no good at bargaining because im too nice, and have gotten ripped off a ton there.  They’ve got everything you can think of.  You can get custom made, fitted suits that are only about $100-200 depending on if you get a vest and how well you can bargain for.  If you do well with bargaining you can get a lot of things for pretty cheap. Most clothing, food, and movies are very cheap here on the street.  You can get a DVD for about 5-12 kuai ($.80-$1.80) depending on the quality of the movie.  I have purchased entire seasons for only $10, most of which have been good quality. Once we had finished we travelled back to school to get ready for tomorrow in which we would travel to the Great Wall.

So here I am...in Beijing

So here I am, in Beijing, China.  How did I get here you ask? I’ll back up real quick to how I got to China.  I am a college student at Brigham Young Universtiy – Idaho and for the first time in the universities history they offered a full semester study abroad at Capital Normal University (CNU).  I first heard about this during my second semester at school, which happened to be my first semester living in Idaho.  I had been very apprehensive about living in Idaho since this was my first time attending school outside of Michigan, and I did not really know anyone there but my cousin. I had been missing my friends at home a lot the day when Brother Galer, my professor, announced that there would be a semester abroad in Beijing, tentatively of course. So when this news came, it came as a sigh of relief to know that I was where I should be at that very moment. 

After it officially came out that the study abroad was going to go through, I jumped on the opportunity as quickly as I could.  Soon after my application was in, I was accepted into the program and a little while after that was officially accepted to CNU for the semester.  Over the summer I prepared myself for the trip, which was a trip in itself.  I had gone to Africa with my friend Jordan that spent some money intended to go towards China.  I was not planning on that trip being as expensive as it was and so I had to get a part time job for a little while to make up for it.  That ended up being the best idea as had I not, I would not be here at this time.  With the help of the job I got my visa (2 weeks before I was due to be in China) and with the help of my parents, until I got my loans, I got my plane ticket (3 weeks before I was due to be here). 

I was scheduled to leave Michigan on the 23^rd of August from Detroit.  When I arrived, I checked myself in and had my tickets all set.  However, between the time I got my bag checked and the time it took me to get to my gate, my flight was cancelled!  My original flight was scheduled to fly through Chicago (which apparently had a horrible thunderstorm) and then onto Beijing.  When I checked with the desk agent and asked what was going on she notified me of the issue.  She fixed it so that I would travel on AirCanada to Toronto and then on to Beijing.  This would get me into Beijing earlier than expected.  What a relief right? Well guess again.  When I arrived in Toronto I had to check in with the airline to get my ticket.  The agent informed me that the plane was over booked.  She said that according to the system I was confirmed to be on the flight, but she did not have a seat for me.  Perfect… I did not have my phone on me since I was not expecting to need it and since I would be able to use it in China, and there was a possibility that I was not even going to make it there when I needed to be. I would not have been able to let Brother Galer know that I wasn’t going to be there.  Fortunately, the airline asked people to accept a travel voucher as well as $500 to give up their seats.  This meant that I would be on the flight.  I was really sweating it because of the timing, but was very grateful to those who were willing to give up their seats.

The flight was great.  I sat between two Chinese women. I got to practice a little bit with them as I was sitting down.  One of them, as the flight crew were asking us what we wanted to drink, asked me to translate her drink to the crew.  I did not know what it was, but with the help of the other woman and acting it out finally got out what she wanted.  She was very appreciative to me nonetheless.  As we landed I helped the same woman with her luggage and an endless amount of “谢谢!” (thank you) came from her.

Wow right? Finally I was in
Beijing, on time (not early as expected because the flight was delayed) and no other problems right?  No, wrong… I was supposed to take a shuttle to the university at 4pm, however I never received my luggage until 4:15pm.  The thought crossed my mind that maybe I would find someone that was with the group waiting for me to take the shuttle.  I took a lap around the lobby, but could not find anyone that was there.  So after taking out some money I proceeded to get in line for a taxi, got in and sat in silence and amazement at the scenery for the next half hour or so as my driver took me to the school.  After many trial and errors on how to get into the building (I was dropped off on the opposite side I needed to be) I checked in, and got up to my room.  I did not have anything to do, no internet, so I lay down on my bed and took a nap.

Around 7:30pm my “roommate” Brandon showed up.  I say “roommate”  because we were not actually supposed to be roommates, but ended up being one of the guys from my CHIN102 class back at school though we did not speak very much to each other.  He served his mission in Australia as well just in a different mission.  Both of us were pretty hungry so we tried ordering food over the phone.  Neither of our Chinese was very good so we ended up hanging up and eating downstairs.  We ate at the “Japanese” restaurant which was very good, and then went out to get some essentials that the school didn’t provide (AKA toilet paper… which was the first excursion into Beijing, Success!)  After unpacking and a little of TV we went to bed.

The beds were not very comfortable at all. When I first sat on it, I hit hard on the mattress, which surprisingly squished down enough for me to hit the hard box spring.  Lying on the bed might be more comfortable if I took the tiles from the floor and slept on top of those, and do not get me started on the pillow.  Let’s just say that a piece of paper might have been fuller than it.  Obviously just kidding on that but it was pretty flat.

Over the course of the first 2 days, I had 3 rooms and two roommates, unpacked three times, and lugged my things up and down an accumulation of 23 flights.  My first room was on the 3^rd floor, however after hearing that we needed to switch out roommates, I ended up on the 10^th floor unpacked there and then was moved down to the 3^rd floor again in the corner room with my roommate Drew, where I am currently at. Overall the first day in Beijing had been enjoyable even with all the mishaps that occurred.  Now to focus on having fun, and studying hard to improve my Chinese.