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!
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