Harbin

So I've been in Harbin for about two and a half weeks now. My flight back from Tibet had it's own complications (of course) - we had a stopover in Chengdu, and about two hours after we took off from Chengdu to Beijing the pilot decided to turn back to Chengdu because of some sort of vague "technical difficulties." It's always great to hear that there's something wrong with your plane and they didn't figure it out until halfway through the flight... The other question was if we were already halfway there why didn't we just go the other half?

Anyway, I made it to Beijing eventually. I stayed over one night with the same family friends that I did last time, and then my orientation started the very next day. It was definitely a fast transition and I still had a long leftover list of things to do (such as putting up the pictures on my blog), which wasn't ideal. We had about two days in Beijing before heading up to Harbin, most of which was spent imparting your generic orientation information: don't do anything extremely stupid, in case of emergency call this or that person, etc. etc. We also took our written placement test, which was a harsh reminder that reading and writing characters is something that I need to work on - I can speak fairly well, but even the most basic characters sometimes slip my mind. It's kind of like piano lessons when I was younger; I could usually repeat what my teacher played by ear, but I never really learned how to read the music.

The orientation was also a chance to get to know the other students before the language pledge set in. Everyone is an American college student except for one Japanese girl who goes to school in America; that's a bit of a change from the rest of my time in China where I've been hanging out mostly with either Europeans or people who are already several years out of school (or both). That being said, I think I'll get along well with everyone, although I could tell a lot of people are into going out and partying; I'm still pretty much partied out after Shanghai, but we'll see how I feel after a month or two when it's negative fourteen degrees and there's nothing much else to do.

While in Beijing we got one afternoon off - I spent it at the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace was built as a retreat for the emperors, abandoned, and then rebuilt by Empress Dowager Cixi with money that was supposed to go to building a naval force. The whole place is built around a big lake with marble bridges around the edges. The actual palace bits weren't the most interesting parts for me; I spent most of my time strolling around the edge of the lake and enjoying the nice day. I can see how the emperors would have liked the place: it was definitely my favorite sight in Beijing. There were lots of other tourists there, but everyone was mostly hanging out with their families and strolling around casually, rather than elbowing each other to get the bet spot to photograph things. As opposed to the Forbidden City (which I wanted to escape almost as soon as I entered), I wished I had more time to relax and wander around.


[At the Summer Palace: 1 - Chilling out on the Long Corridor, 2 - Reading a book by the lake]


[3 - Cleaning up the lake, 4 - One of the actual palace parts]

After Beijing we took the overnight train up to Harbin. After arriving at 7:30am, we checked into our dorms, dropped off our stuff, and then immediately got whisked away on a campus/city tour. I don't think most of us remember where they took us or what we saw, considering it was 8:30am and we had all just got off an overnight train. Then we all had our oral placement tests. Thankfully mine was one of the last ones, so I was able to get a couple of hours of sleep beforehand. That probably helped me not get placed in the remedial class, especially after the written test. That night we had dinner with our one-on-one teachers; before coming each of us selected a subject we wanted to learn more about, and the staff here found a professor with applicable knowledge to teach an individual tutorial on the subject. My topic is "Women and Sports in China," and my professor is a gym teacher here at the university who is currently training his teenaged daughter (perhaps the tallest Chinese female I've met) to compete in the high jump. From that first dinner I could tell we were going to get along great; while all of the other teachers were still talking about what books they planned on having the students read, my professor had already ordered two forty-ounce beers (Harbin Pijiu, or "Ha'pi" as it's called) and poured me a glass. We were the first two people to start eating and the last to stop; he nodded approvingly when I told him I'm supposed to be gaining muscle for winter rugby season.

The next day we officially started the language pledge; from then on we have not been allowed to speak anything but Chinese unless on the phone with friends or family from home. It's been difficult because, although my travels have helped me to get really good at asking for directions and bargaining for things, I'm still not quite at the point where I can express complex thoughts or concepts. My roommate has been really useful in helping me improve my ability, though. We all have Chinese roommates that were matched up with us by the program directors. In my case they did a really good job, because I get along wonderfully with my roommate. Her name is Wang Saiwei, and she's from Zhejiang province (south of Shanghai) and majoring in Communications Engineering. I'm not really sure what that involves, but her homework seems to have a lot of circuit maps in it. Anyway, I was worried I was going to be stuck with a really girly girl who wore pink all the time and who couldn't take a joke. While my roommate does have her share of Chinese moments (remarking that I ought to find a husband who can cook since I don't seem to be very good at household chores, etc), she's got a good sense of humor and will make fun of me right back if I make fun of her. It also makes my homework grades a lot better to have her look everything over before I turn it in.

So my roommate situation is good, and classes are getting better as well. The first week was a bit hectic, as I hadn't decided on what classes I was going to take so I ended up attending several and having to do all of the homework for all of them. We are all required to take the one-on-one tutorial and a one-on-two class. The one-on-two class is essentially a drill class in which we have an "easy" textbook that we are all supposed to be able to read with few problems; each class we read the text out loud repeatedly and the teacher rips apart our pronunciation and tones. It's slightly demoralizing to have her stop me every sentence and tell me what I said wrong, but I think my pronunciation will be a lot better once she gets done with me. The funny thing about the "easy" textbook is that it's the textbook that they used at Fudan for one of the more advanced classes - here even the lowest level students are supposed to be able to read it with no problem so that they can just focus on pronunciation...

My one-on-one class, despite really liking my teacher, got off to a bit of a rough start. My teacher knows a lot about the subject, but I don't think he really understands much about how much a person who's had two year's of Chinese will understand. The first class I didn't understand almost anything he said and by the end it was a big game of charades where he was acting out things like spearing boars and ceremonial funeral rituals (the topic was the origin of sports in China). For the next class, I asked him to write out the most important points and some vocabulary words so I could look them up first and then have some idea what he was talking about in class. What he gave me was two sheets of handwritten cursive Chinese that even my roommate had trouble reading. After that class I convinced him to stick to one sheet per class and to type it up. Since then, it's been much much better. Now that I understand what he's talking about it's actually pretty interesting.

Besides my one-on-one and one-on-two, the other two classes I decided on are Business Chinese and Literature. Business Chinese is the hardest class offered, so of course I had to take it. In the long run that will probably be a good thing, but it also means that the in the first couple of classes we were already reading things like "the government is re-organizing poorly run, ineffective state-owned enterprises and issuing new regulations allowing private enterprises to participate in reform by means of contract, lease, merger, and acquisition." Yikes. Literature class is no joke either. Besides the hundreds (literally) of vocabulary words we are given for each story we read, I also usually have to look up about a third of the other words in the story, too. Previously, I think I have grossly underestimated my capacity for memorization; I used to whine about having to learn 45 words every week and a half for Chinese class at Stanford, now I have more than that every day. I also have to re-evaluate my grade expectations, because I have to consider that I am coming from behind in terms of my character knowledge. Also, I don't think Stanford did a good job preparing me for the classes here; there are a lot of things that are common knowledge to everyone else who has had two years of Chinese which I have never heard before. I've even gone back through my old Chinese books from school to see if I was just forgetting things, but it seems that I've just never learned them. So when some grammar pattern I've never seen before comes up on a test, it's understandable if I get that one wrong. But I still don't like getting B's. Oh well, we'll see how it goes.

I'm also taking an extracurricular class on cooking. The teacher is this cute little 82-year-old Chinese man who is also a history teacher here. We've only had one class so far - it was an introduction on the history of cooking in China; he spent most of the class drawing pictures of animals that ancient Chinese people liked to eat. Next week we get to go to his house and start the actual cooking bit of the class.

Outside of class, I've been looking into the sports facilities in the area. I want to put on some muscle weight before rugby season starts, but so far I've only managed to get slightly chubbier. My on-one-one teacher has gotten me access to pretty much all of our university's sports facilities, and I've tagged along a couple of times when he takes his daughter for a training session. Turns out there's a pretty decent track here, but the weight rooms are pretty lacking: they don't have any free weights, most of the machines are broken, and what they do have is too heavy (the bars for the benchpress start at 35 kg). Plus there are always lots of shirtless Chinese guys telling me my technique is wrong. Luckily there are also some private gyms in town. The really basic ones only sell yearlong memberships, which ends up being about the same price as a three-month membership at one of the fancy schmancy ones. I went to visit one of the fancy ones (the one with the cheapest membership), and it was the nicest gym I've ever been in - it was probably ten times the size of the gym I belonged to over the summer in DC, with every kind of free weights, weight machines, cardio machines, classes, anything I could think of. I'm really tempted to join, although after taking a look at my bank account balance it might not be the wisest thing.

Between class and trying to find athletic facilities, I haven't really had much time to go exploring. I have gone to go check out some of the big indoor markets around town when I was looking for an electronic dictionary where I could write the character on the screen to look it up (otherwise it's a five-minute process every time I don't know a word). The indoor markets here are usually four or five floors, each packed with stands hawking their merchandise, which gets more expensive as you move up the floors. For example, the first floor is usually trinkets and little jewelry/hair accessory type things, the second floor is often household items and school supplies, then the third floor is small electronics like cell phones/cameras/mp3 players, the fourth floor is then sometimes more expensive electronics such as computers and computer accesories, then the fifth floor can be more upscale actual stores rather than stands (selling anything from desk furniture to clothes). The places are fun to explore and it's a good confidence boost for my Chinese, as people are usually so surprised that a foreigner can speak Chinese at all that they give me all sorts of compliments.

Being so close to Russia, there has been a lot of Russian influence here - some of the other sights I've been to with the other students are St. Sophia Church (built by the Russians in 1907) and Zhongyang Dajie (a touristy shopping street with a lot of Russian architechture). It was nice to get out off campus, but neither of them were particularly remarkable. This weekend the whole program went to a vineyard about an hour outside of town (and I do mean the whole program - all of the students, all of our roommates, all of our teachers, and the teachers' families). The grapes were really good (the seeds came all the way from California, USA!), but their wine was the worst I've ever tasted. It might have even tasted worse than baijiu, which is a Chinese alcohol that tastes roughly like terpentine. Luckily we only spent 5 minutes drinking wine before moving on to the vineyards, where we were given clippers and baskets and set loose on the vines. We were allowed 3 jin of grapes for free (one jin is about half a kilogram), after which it was 10 kuai ($1.25) per jin. I got my 3 jin (down to the last liang, or tenth of a jin), and headed back home happy.



[1 - St. Sophia Church; At the vineyards: 2- Me, and 3 - Wang Saiwei (my roommate)]

Currently I'm taking the day off class to recover after eating sketchy meat twice in a day caught up with me (it wasn't pretty), but I should probably get back to the dozens of vocabulary words I should probably be learning.

Up to top