first post from China!

Greetings from Beijing!  Having been here for nearly two weeks (yikes), I have decided to finally update this blog.  So far my time here has been both exciting and exhausting!  The first week was mostly spent in orientations and sleeping - between the fourteen hour flight and thirteen hour time difference, I felt like I lost over a day and it completely exhausted me.  I also realized after I got here that I had no good way of getting my daily dose of caffeine (the Chinese aren't so big on coffee - the place on campus only starts selling it after noon, which is just so wrong), so that week is kind of a blur to me now.  

And then at the end of that week, our language pledge kicked in, and suddenly we all had to try to make friends and get to know each other in Chinese. For a while there, none of us were feeling too chatty, but by now it's starting to feel more natural.  Oddly enough, no one else that we come into contact with seems to find it strange that we only talk amongst ourselves in Chinese, even though it is clearly not our native language and sometimes makes it very difficult for us to communicate with each other.  On Thursday we went out to eat and got to be friendly with the family at the next table.  They complimented our Chinese repeatedly and kept trying to share their food with us and making their daughters interview us about life in the US.  Only at the end of the meal did they finally think to ask, "Why do you keep speaking Chinese to each other if you all know how to speak English?"  

This past week was our first week of classes, and it's been pretty intense.  We begin the day at eight with 大班课 (large class) that has six people.  We start that class with a quiz in the form of a dictation.  Chinese classes are big on dictations, since there's no alphabet and associating written words with sounds is a little trickier than with most languages.  Then we go over grammar and vocab relatively quickly.  After 大班课 is 小班课 (small class) with three to four students, where we basically go over the same material, but more in depth and with more participation from us.  Next is 讨论课 (discussion class) where two to three of us and a teacher have one or two assigned topics to discuss.  Often it's kind of like an informal debate on something related to our lesson.  And last, we have 单班课 (one on one with the teacher), where we basically just have a fifty minute discussion where we have to demonstrate that we're doing the work.  The teachers come prepared with questions, but really you can talk about anything as long as you remember to use new grammar structures and vocabulary.  Questions I have been asked in 单班课 so far range from "What do you think of Hu Jintao's visit to America?" to "Why do the Republicans not support Obama's healthcare reforms?" to "Do Americans often abandon their disabled children?" to "When you look for a boyfriend, what kind of guy are you looking for?"    

It's been intense, but it's also been a good two weeks.  The other people on my program are all great, and our campus is really interesting too.  We're at Minzu Daxue, which basically translates to "Race University."  The Chinese government recognizes fifty-six different ethnic groups in China. One of those is Han which makes up somewhere around 96% of the population, and the other fifty-five are considered 小数民族 - ethnic minorities.  This college was created specifically for them, so there's a lot of diversity on campus.  We haven't interacted much with the other students yet, and now most of them have left for break (they get about a month off for the lunar new year), but after break we'll have assignments where we have to interview them.  So far, the main way in which we have benefited from the diversity at Minzu Daxue is in terms of the food available.  We eat out for basically all our meals, since there's no kitchen in the dorms.  Fortunately the West Gate of the school has a ton of restaurants, and they have a wide variety of food available, including a lot of Muslim food and Mongolian hot pot.  It has all been quite delicious.

We are also staying in an embarrassingly swanky dorm.  Other students are crowded into tiny rooms that they share with seven other students, while we have the most gorgeous building on campus.  When we first arrived here, there were five us splitting a cab from the airport and we didn't know exactly where we were going.  When the cab pulled up to the door, there were two pretty young women there to greet us wearing traditional Chinese dresses and furs.  We immediately began panicking, trying to figure out where our crazy cab driver could possibly have brought us.  I had heard that foreign student dormitories could be very nice, but it seemed impossible that it would have hostesses in fur coats.  It was the correct address however, and it turns out that the building we're staying in was originally built to be a luxury hotel.  They were unable to get the permits they needed to open and wound up just using it as a dorm, but it still has an upscale restaurant on the first and second floors - hence the hostesses.  The rooms look like hotel rooms, too.  It is about three hundred billion times nicer than any dorm room that has every existed at Oberlin.  We even have people who come every morning to collect our garbage and make our beds (every morning - on the weekends they begin ringing our doorbells at nine with great urgency).  Actually, the one complaint I have about my room is the bed.  It looks very comfortable, and when I got all done unpacking the first night I attempted to plop down in it and nearly broke a limb.  Seriously, it is like a rock.  I actually had to pull the fitted sheet off to check and make sure my bed was not secretly a boulder.  Forget about sitting in bed with a book - you would bruise your tailbone. (Maybe the Chinese have different standards for what makes a comfortable bed?  I remember from my last visit during the summer that a lot of people slept on what appeared to be a wooden set of Venetian blinds because they swore they stayed cooler that way.)  Nonetheless, I feel very lucky to be where I am.  

I have much more to say, but this post is already quite long.  I've learned my lesson, and vow to update this blog more than once every two weeks.  But for now, 一会儿见！