Meeting with Parntip

Penny took a picture when Parntip and I were reunited on our bus outside the Royal Palace in Bangkok. I wanted Mum and Dad to see it, but basically she lived with our family for a couple months with AFS teacher exchange and I saw her twice while we were there. Penny just sent me the picture yesterday, so I wanted to get it on here.

Proof of My Undying Love for the Olympics and Therefore Beijing

My New Best Friends

I just realized I made a post about Beijing and failed to mention my new best friend who I met on Friday!!!! We went to the Pearl Market after seeing the Temple of Heaven and I spent the afternoon bartering on a number of things like a Chinese flag from a man that also makes stamps with your names on them. He asked me what my name was and I told him, but then said that all my friends call me Snacks and that in Chinese my name is "little eats" which I said in Chinese. He laughed and got excited and grabbed a pad of paper and wrote it out in Chinese and it was right, but I told him I didn't really want a stamp so I told him if I decided I did I would come back later for it. We then proceeded upstairs where I bought a pearl necklace and then up another floor where there were little shops with more pearls. We saw some beautiful pearls in one window and the girl came out to talk to us, so we asked to see those earrings, which were in white gold and were 450 yuan, which is about 60 dollars, so we asked to see what else she had. Vivyan and I ended up spending the next three hours talking to her, looking at necklaces and different settings and differently sized pearls and it was so much fun and I ended up spending abou 250 yuan on two necklaces and two pairs of earrings which I think we got good deals on. We loved her so much that I kept saying we were best friends and she kind of agreed, but at the end we bought her and the other three women in there ice cream from downstairs and out on the street and brought it back to them with three new customers from our group, Bea, Brooke, and Catie, and then they loved us even more, so I bought another necklace. I talked to the girl, Sarah, all about pearls and what the differences are and where they come from and how you can tell good pearls and asked her if we could come back and work there and they just laughed and said yes. Now I will go back there and get some more great pearls, and can get a good deal on them, so if anyone would like me to buy them some for a good price (about 5 dollars for a pearl set in sterling silver with a white gold covering and then another 5 for a chain - roughly 10 for a string), let me know the colors (white, black, pink) and what you want and I will go back and give my new friends some more business. It's probably my new favorite thing to do, buying pearls, so don't worry about asking me. I'll just give you the bill when I get home (hehe). I can't stop thinking of my own new pearls, so I am going to run, but I will be going back to my new friends at least two more times, probably. Aaand I might be working with them in the future and learning everything there is to know about pearls.

Getting Settled in Beijing

Now that I've been in Beijing for a week and it seems people have given up on reading this thing, I will try to update y'all on what life is like here now that we are "settled" and having "normal" classes.

We got to Beijing on April 10 from Hanoi, Vietnam, which was a great time, but it was nice to get into our rooms and get settled. My roommates are awesome and the best I could have asked for. We are all three perfect for each other and get along so well and have the same schedule and interests, including in other people, so we are loving living together at this point. We have a DVD player now and 4 beds for 3 people so we have a nice couch and have had a few sleepovers with our extra bed. It's pretty much the best room ever, I'd say. I already bought a bunch of DVDs and we are working our way through them, but I will have to get some more to enjoy late at night on the nights before class.

Classes are good, if not a little bit long, but they happen so little during the week that I can handle it and shouldn't be complaining. We have two different classes and each meets twice a week for two hours each time. The earlier one is a Political Science class and the later one is the Economics one. I love Roy and Penny, so sitting through their classes is not bad, I can handle the four hours of them. On the days we don't have class, we have excursions to various areas around the city that relate to political economy. Last Tuesday we went to a farm two hours away from the university right on the border with the neighboring province, but still within the municipality of Beijing. It was a long drive and we saw some fruit trees and little gardens, but it's weird because the people there cannot make enough money off of their farms so they basically farm for fun and make money from family members who move into the city to work. We all have a sector that we are responsible for knowing a lot about and mine is rural farming, so it was strange to learn that the people aren't actually farming to sell to anywhere and are hardly making enough for themselves to survive on, just what they need to eat. There must be bigger farms around, but the students we've met in Beijing say there are no BIG farms like there are in the US. I will have to keep looking as we make our way into more rural areas, like tomorrow, to see what the farming situation is in a country with so many people needing so much food.

On Thursday we had some optional sightseeing to the arts district (798, see this link) and in the afternoon met a guy who came on the Beijing program in 1992 who now owns a production company in Beijing making small independent films in a culture that really doesn't have much space for that. They keep pushing the envelope, though, and he has seen more and more interest and success of his films as time goes on. He was a pretty cool guy, and we got to go out to a roast duck dinner afterwards. That was delicious, BUT they BRING YOU THE DUCK'S FACE TO EAT!!!! P.s. ducks are pretty much my favorite animal and I'd never eaten one before, so seeing their face while I was eating it was like the saddest thing ever. Luckily they eat very little duck at these dinners and a table of 8 or 10 shares a duck.

This weekend we've spent some time exploring, like visiting the Temple of Heaven and the old Summer Palace (We still need to see the new one which is supposedly very beautiful and doesn't just have ruins that I have a hard time believing are real...). I was supposed to go see a mountain outside the city with a student I met here this morning, but it was too early and then the weather wasn't very good, so we are planning on going next Saturday.

Tomorrow we leave for Fenyang where Carleton has had a relationship with the school for a very long time, since the early 1900s. The Carleton in China program, the first study abroad program at Carleton, was there for years and the city is still very closed off to the outside world. It is very difficult for foreigners to get in there, so we are apparently going to be treated as celebrities, teaching in the school and having celebrations and toasts with the city officials. I hope we make it back alive from the autographs, coal-filled air, and extensive amounts of festivities. I will hopefully be back in touch with the world by Friday.

I've learned some Chinese, but only the characters, so I can translate them directly to English, but don't know how to read them in Chinese. I am hoping that Roy will follow through on his offers to pay for Chinese lessons for all of us, because I will definitely take advantage of that, although ordering in restaurants has been tons of fun. I know the characters for such random things as: noodles, chicken, tea, cigarettes, alcohol, China, middle, Olympics, Beijing, Mountain, exit, stone, petroleum, area, and shop. I started learning characters because I liked the way the pictures looked on the signs I saw in the street, like the character for tea which looks like a cross on a mountain that's crying because it's being bombed (look that one up), or cigarettes which looks like a guy pushing a box that has another guy in it. So basically Shilpa and Zach think I am crazy for asking them the most random characters ever, but I have learned a bit and maybe I'll start to figure out the tones soon... not likely, but I will keep practicing my characters.

I hope you're all doing well, don't forget to Skype me sometime. If you don't have my skype name, shoot me an email and I will hook you up. Until next week, probably, take care and update me on your lives!

Summing Up Southeast Asia

Before I get into the details of China, where we are finally settled and into classes and exploring, I think I should update you all on the wonders of Southeast Asia, a place I've fallen in love with, just from our three weeks there. Here are the highlights by country:

Thailand - Seeing Parntip in Bangkok was great. She gave me some presents for the family that I have to carry around now, including snacks she wanted me to bring back for y'all, but I will be the first to admit, keeping in line with my newest nickname that everyone here (including the students we meet along the way) has adopted: Snacks, that I have eaten all those snacks and will just have to tell you about them later. They were tastey. Bangkok is a really strange city. We saw Thai silk at the Jim Thompson house and then on our second time through Bangkok saw the side of it I had only heard about. We went to a touristy street with vendors all along the side and hundreds of foreigners wandering looking for adventure and we were offered "ping pong show" and the like (it involves ping pongs and female body parts apparently)... it was accompanied by a great noise, which I am avoiding for the rest of my life, but needless to say we turned down every offer. The best part of Thailand was our time in the north around Chiangmai, both in the city and in villages north of there. We spent three days trekking in the jungle and sleeping in little villages on bamboo floors and that was so cool. We'd met up with a Carleton grad who now lives in SE Asia doing who knows what and the adventures we experienced with Barry were absolutely amazing. It's fun to meet people along the way who show us how they live and why they love the region so much. We saw the Golden Triangle area and spent an hour in Laos across the river in the weirdest little shop I've ever seen. Chiangmai was a cool city, with a night market and a fun night out with the bartender and a waitress from the restaurant at our hotel. That was something i missed in Madrid. We were always with our group and never really branched out to local friends other than the monitores who were paid to be our friends. That's been a highlight so far.

Burma - My favorite country so far on the trip. We met up with students in a program, the Pre-Collegiate Program, run by a woman from Chicago. They are accepted into the program after their normal schooling through high school and they spend a year in it, getting them ready for a foreign university. the kids are incredible and all smarter than me by a lot. We were shown around Yangon by them and really got to see some cool things, including a "social venture" that makes and sells products at very low prices to farmers in rural areas. We were really taken care of in Burma and the people were all so incredibly nice. It's a country that no one wants to travel to because everyone thinks so many things are going on with the government and the military, but when you're there all you see is how amazing the people are and how much hope they have for making their government better and being the people to make that change. It's like going back in time to a place where everything is just real. I've never felt as much in and about a PLACE as I did in Burma. It was something I can't really describe, but being there just made me feel more than I ever have anywhere I've gone. Even being in Spain where I could communicate with anyone and could get anywhere and understood everything, I never felt anything like I did in Burma. Maybe it was that I just didn't understand everything and I knew I couldn't, so my view of the country and people and situation was just so different than it would be anywhere else. I am trying to learn Burmese this summer so that someday I will go back and be able to communicate, but I loved that country. We spent a couple days in Bagan, which was an ancient city at a time when if people died their money would go to the government, so in the ends of their life they used their fortunes to build temples. It's quite beautiful and striking. We spent the days their to recover from our excitement in Yangon and get ready for Vietnam.

Vietnam - Roy kept telling us that Vietnam would be "in your face"... I would say this is mostly true. The people are really intense and don't really care about being friendly and nice to foreigners which was a shock after being loved in Burma and Thailand, but was a nice change, too. We spent some nights in Hanoi, a great city that is very walkable and has a beautiful lake in the middle and then 500 hours on a bus to go to a village in the north for a bike ride and sleepover in the village and then to Halong Bay, which is absolutely beautiful. We took a junk out to Catba Island, in the bay, and jumped from the top of it into the ocean (6 times for me... naturally. not as good as the rocks in the Carrabassett River, but nothing can really be as good as Maine, right?). Catba Island was really cool, too. Wes and I walked out the hotel door in the first fifteen minutes, planning on going for a walk or bike ride to a beach or something, but were harassed by some men trying to rent us their motorbikes, so naturally we got one. We spent the next 4 hours, for 50,000 dong (about 3 dollars) zooming around the island. Don't worry, Mum, I was wearing a helmet and Wes had driven 4-wheelers before. We saw some Canadians climbing rocks in the middle of a farm, went to the opposite end of the island where we saw the sunset but feared running out of gas and sunlight for the ride back, met two other Carls on the way who were fun to zoom around with, and went in a cave that has a hospital used between 1963 and 1965 so people could be treated during the war. I thought when we went through a big steel door into a hospital in a cave that our guide would lock the doors and it would be like a horror movie, but luckily that didn't happen. All three of us thought we might die at a few points, but we made it out of the cave alive and our bikes weren't stolen. We met some British guys who we had seen in Hanoi a few nights before and did magic tricks with Georgie, Rob, and Tom in a little expat bar on the island for a few hours. Back in Hanoi, Vivyan and I spent the day walking around, shopping, and not buying much, but it's a really cool place with a lot of French influence.

To sum up, Southeast Asia is awesome. I am going to have to come back to see Cambodia and Laos, but at least I got a flag in every country, made some awesome friends, and got to know this group much better. I'll write more about that later, as well as where we are now, which is at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. I'm going to go eat some noodles now and get ready for another class, but tonight we're doing Karaoke down the street and I am WAY excited. Love to everyone!

Back in thailand

So I haven't had any time to write, but in the time I've been gone I've spent a week in Thailand in Bangkok for 2 days and Chiangmai and up north for about 5, then went to Burma (Myanmar) for a week, which has been the biggest highlight so far. We met up with a bunch of students at a great "Pre-collegiate program" school there, the place a recent Carleton grad attended before coming to Carleton, and it was great to have some young people to show us around Yangon, where we were for most of the time. Now I am back in Bangkok for a night and off to Hanoi and other areas in northern Vietnam tomorrow. I wish I could write more now or had some good pictures to put up, but I've just started taking pictures and am pressed for time right now, but you all should know that I am in love with Burma and am plotting a return following Carleton. I will try to be better about this blog, but I will get better once we're in Beijing for sure. Until then, I miss you all and hope you are learning as much wherever you are as I am here. This has been a life-changing trip already and I am sure it will continue to be so. Lots of love, keep in touch or I might not come home.... :)