California Dreaming...

...on such a winter's day. And I do mean winter - it's been below freezing since October, and still slipping. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad if there also weren't gales of wind blowing in my face every time I step outside. And maybe the gales of wind in my face wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the dust everywhere that the gales pick up. Oh well.

Well, it's been a long time since I've updated; schoolwork and the lack of a convenient internet connection ensured that. Things have been busy since the last time I wrote, mostly with classes. We had midterms about a month ago, and then we had a week of vacation (my parents came and we travelled around China - I'll write about that in the next post...). Anyway, so now I'm back in Harbin, and I've finally managed to put off my homework for long enough to sit down and finish this post.

All of my classes have been going pretty well, and I'm managing to hang in there and even improve my grades. In the Business Chinese class now we're discussing topics that I probably wouldn't be able to discuss knowledgeably in English either, like stock market regulation and determining interest rates. In literature class, the short essays we are reading are getting more and more interesting as our reading ability improves, and I think my knowledge of characters has also improved by leaps and bounds. Our one-on-two drill class continues to be just that, a drill class. We've also done a couple of field trips to places like the fruit market and the hospital in order to make us use some of the specific vocabulary we've learned.

My on-on-one class (a tutorial on the topic of Women and Sports in China) is also getting more and more interesting. We finished the history part of the class, and now we've started to take trips to actually see the Chinese physical education system in action. Initially I sat in on elementary, junior high, high school, and university gym classes - now I've started taking trips out to the area's specialized sports schools and professional sports training centers. The class itself is a nice break from the formula followed by the other classes of memorizing long lists of new words, discussing the text, and then having quizzes every day. I still have to learn a lot of new specialized words, but then I get a chance to go out and use them in interviews with people rather than taking quizzes on them. The one part of the one-on-one class that I was dreading, though, was the essay. During midterm week, we had to turn in a 1500 word essay on our topic, and then give a 15 minute presentation on our essay. It took me the better part of a week (and multiple revisions by my teacher, my roommate, and my roommate's friends that she called in for backup) before it was at all presentable, but to look at pages and pages of words in Chinese and think that I wrote all of it makes me pretty proud. At the end of the quarter we have to incorporate the midterm essay into a longer, more developed one. Once I've finished writing that, I'll translate it and put it up on the web, in case anyone wants to read it (hey, who knows?).

Outside of class... I do homework. And excercise. And occasionally sleep. By the time the weekend rolls around I tend to be too tired to do much interesting. I mostly just watch movies in the dorm with my suitemate when I have a chance to rest, so I still haven't seen all that much of Harbin or the surrounding area. But I'm not too bothered by that, as I figure that the main point of me being here is to learn Chinese, not to be an expert on Harbin. Luckily, though, our program recognizes that we're all too tired to go out and do much exploring, so they usually plan some sort of optional activity every weekend that we can sign up for. I'm not normally one for planned group activities, but I'm really too busy to get out any other way. And we usually don't end up with a super-huge group anyway, as most people choose to sleep instead.

Close to the beginning of the quarter we went on a trip to this Cultural Revolution themed restaurant where all of the employees dressed up as the red guard, carried around Mao's little red book, and chanted slogans. It was pretty entertaining, especially as a lot of the people there were old cadres who got up to drunkenly sing the propaganda songs on stage with the performers by the end of the night. The big drawback was the incredibly high volume - I think most Chinese people must be half deaf by the time they reach adulthood because of the constant exposure to overamplified sound. Another, quieter trip was a day of hiking out at Songfeng Shan, a mountain a couple of hours outside of Harbin. It was a nice, relatively easy climb. The leaves were great autumn colors, and it actually kind of seemed as if we were somewhere in New England. The most elaborate weekend activity was a three-day trip to Dalian, a fairly developed city along the coast. Our group made up an entire train-car full of people, including all of us foreign students, our roommates, and several teachers (as well as a guide who didn't do much but get paid to stay in a nice hotel with us and eat on the program's expense account every day). Dalian was a good break from Harbin. Most imporantly, as it has a lot more foreign investment, it also has a lot more nice restaurants, which we spent the entire weekend availing ourselves of.



[1-Holding up Mao's Little Red Book at the Cultural Revolution themed restaurant; 2-The view from the Hike at Songfeng Shan]

For a change from my general weekend laziness and dependence on other people to plan activities, or maybe because the weather wasn't depressing enough, one weekend I went up to the museum at the concentration camp that the Japanese ran in the Harbin suburbs during World War II. One of the classmates I went with is Japanese, so she spent the whole time pretending to be Korean. It was an worthwhile experience, even if the place was mostly full of clay figurines of Japanese people throwing Chinese people into furnaces or harvesting their organs. The concentration camp's main purpose was to carry out medical "experiments," putting people in freezing rooms and seeing how long it took for them to get frostbite, for example. (Other examples: removing various organs and playing around with them to see how they worked, infecting people with diseases in order to try out cures, etc. etc.) The museum had just a teeny-weeny bit of propaganda, so some of the exhibits didn't really actually demonstrate much, despite the emphatic captions ("These were the boots a Japanese soldier wore when committing atrocious crimes." Really? Did you see the guy wearing these boots?). But chilling, nonetheless.



[In what was once the frostbite lab at the Japanese concentration camp]

Speaking of propaganda, another interesting experience was the anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. All Chinese students got the week off (we still had classes), and the week before there were innumerable formal functions to celebrate the CCP turning the big 5-6. We had a reception for all of the foreign students at our university, where we were all subjected to three hours of (you guessed it) overamplified sound and inane "cultural" performances. The free food wasn't even that great either. So I wasn't too inclined to accept when the next day our director came around looking for someone to volunteer to represent our program at Heilongjiang University's reception. But nobody else would do it, so I ended up getting stuck with the job. Heilongjiang University is the public provincial university here, so their reception had a lot of party officials and other high-up types. Of course I showed up in blue jeans and my rugby jacket, as they had only told me that afternoon I had to go, and I didn't have time to find someone to lend me nice clothes. It ended up being quite the affair - it was held at the fanciest, most expensive hotel in Harbin, with an incredible buffet and four stations with chefs preparing Peking duck, sashimi, and some local dishes. And all I had to do was listen to a 15 minute speech on how all of Harbin's foreign friends have helped the city's economic development... bla bla bla... cooperation... bla bla bla... progress. That was probably the best meal I'd had in months.

Another cool sight (besides concentration camps and decked out government events) is Fuzhuang Cheng, or "Clothes City." Fuzhuang Cheng actually consists of two buildings, one selling ready-made clothing and another where you can get your clothing tailor-made. It's the latter building that's really the most interesting. The first floor is completely made up of fabric vendors, either in stands or their own little open-front stores. Fabric is sold either by the meter (for the kind of fabric you might make a nice suit out of) or by the kilo (for the kind of stuff you might make a t-shirt out of), and there is everything from bright purple fake fur to tweed. After picking out the fabric you want, then you take it up to the second floor, where all the tailors have set up shop, each with examples of their work hanging out front. Once you've picked a tailor and explained your requirements, it usually takes about 4 days to a week before you can come back and pick it up. I haven't actually had anything made yet, but I'm planning on getting a pants-suit made because it's just so much cheap (comparatively, anyway). The other interesting bit about a trip to Fuzhuang Cheng is the food vendor stalls surrounding the complex. Last time I was there I got suckered into eating a chuanr (i.e. a shishkebob) of barbecued silkworm larvae. Mmmmm.



[A bird's eye view of Fuzhuang Cheng, on the row where they sell buttons and lining]

It also turns out that the main campus of Heilongjiang University (the state university) is across the street from Fuzhuang Cheng. Normally this wouldn't really mean much to me, but it turns out Heilongjiang University is the best place in town to go swimming for cheap (8 kuai each time, as opposed to 200 extra dollars to get access to the pool at my health club for three months). I found out about this from my one-on-two teacher, who is also the assistant director of our program. She comes in pretty handy, especially every time I want to know where something is in town (from a good Japanese restaurant to a cheap swimming pool to a place to find an electronic dictionary). She can usually tell me where the place is, what buses I can take to get there, what time they open and close, how much it should be, anything else I ought to know/bring, and then draw me a map of how to get there from the bus stop. Anyhoo, her swimming pool recommendation turned out really well - despite the communal showers and the Chinese people who like to stare, the place is clean and usually has lots of open lanes. Partially because of the dearth of places I can go running inside as the weather gets colder, I've managed to go swimming a couple of times a week.

So, I guess you can say that the couple of months haven't exactly been eventful, but they haven't been uneventful either. I've settled into the rhythm of classes, found some places to work out, and even managed to get out and about on a handful of occasions. I know, not terribly exciting (despite the fact that I still managed to write a short novel for this post), but that's what I've been up to. Sometimes I miss the freedom and the sense of exploration I had while in Tibet and way back when I was in Guatemala, but I know this is really the best way to actually learn Chinese, which has proven to be just a tad bit difficult. I'm sure the rest of the semester will be more of the same, but I'm sure I'll still find something to write (way too much) about.

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