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.