拉肚子

picture: Taken on Friday while walking along street in Beijing - no
where in particular.

Today was a surprisingly tough day. Firstly, because it was a
completely regular day. However, it was the second day of the second
week: week one was tough but constantly had exciting things going on.
Speaking Chinese all of the time turned out to be not that long, and
there was a quick jump in everyone's fluency as they started to use
the language to really communicate. The first weekend was exciting,
the Great Wall and for most PiB students, some adventures into the
nightlife of Beijing. Yesterday, class again - reminding everyone that
there is studying to do. Today, class again, yesterday was not a
fluke. It's also starting to get tough to keep everything that we've
learned over the past week up and active with all of the new stuff
from each day.

I, for one, am realizing that the exciting jump in my Chinese ability
last week is going to need to be backed by a lot of work. For example,
I opened my flashcard program to do some review, so instead of just
the lessons for tomorrow, I activated all of the lessons we've covered
so far. There were over two hundred flashcards that were scheduled for
today.

Another factor that made today tough was that I was actually hit by
the fabled 拉肚子! La1 du4zi literally translates to "pull stomach" and
the meaning refers to having bouts of diarrhea. The textbook we use
for second year Chinese was written by the head teacher of PiB and is
clearly about life at PiB. We had an entire chapter about 拉肚子 - so
thankfully I knew all of the vocabulary and my friends were very
understanding. That's all of the detail that I'm going into, I
promise. One of tomorrow's chapters is 厕所, ce4suo3, or a discussion of
public toilets in China.

书法课

picture: Entirely unrelated to today and today's entry. Just an
amusing sign that I saw - I don't really have any idea about what goes
on in the building.

Today I had my first 书法 (shu1fa3) or Chinese calligraphy class. Simply
put, it was awesome and I'm excited about it.

Of course the teacher was a nice young woman who just talked to us in
Chinese about calligraphy for a while � the meaning of calligraphy and
the essential components of it. Along with showing some examples (some
of them were the pretty classic examples) of how Chinese characters
started as pictographs and then moved on to talk about different
essential aspects of calligraphy. It is an distinctly an art, unlike
the mere writing of Chinese characters.

There is abstraction to calligraphy; it is always made of only two
colors and is composed of lines and shapes that don't attempt to mimic
world images. However, unlike other arts, employs words and the
meanings of these words to also retain the characteristics of
literature. Another important aspect of calligraphy is that it allows
for personal creation; the characters are a framework in which to
create. Lastly, the self and the emotions of the artist will show
through their paintbrush. Well, this is my understanding of what she
said.

After this introduction, we picked up our calligraphy supplies;
inkstone, paintbrush, rice paper, protective mat and got to work.
Apparently, there are eight strokes that, once mastered, are all that
are required to write every character. Of course it turned out to be
one of those things that sounds fairly simple. I had even been
thinking before class that it would be somewhat boring because I know
how to write Chinese characters now that I study Chinese, and well,
that's all there is to it. Right? Wrong.

Those eight strokes turned out to be very, very hard. All of them are
incorporated nicely in the character 永 yong3, (which means
everlasting, eternity, forever, etc � a pretty weighty character to
contemplate itself).
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/21/25638630_dffc02146e_o.jpg shows the
strokes in the character. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera.
Documenting our pathetic attempts at such deceptively simple strokes
would have been well worth it. Everything from too much ink on the
brush, misbalance of line weight or shapes made our marks on the paper
look like confused children's. After struggling through the strokes,
the teacher went on to discuss how looking at someone's calligraphy
literally gives you a window into their being � particularly when they
write their name. Therefore, our first project will be writing our
names. She then began to ask a few people for their names and
demonstrated writing them. It looked so easy � but don't be fooled.

Hopefully I'll have some pictures of this later.

南京南京！The City of Life and Death

It's Sunday night. I have class in less than eight hours and I
definitely haven't finished my homework. Tomorrow is going to be very,
very long and I definitely haven't started on any of my work for
tomorrow. Instead, this afternoon, I decided to watch a 南京南京！ with
some fifth year students.

What better place in the world to watch a movie about the brutality of
Japan than China? It might be a once and a lifetime event.

I think it probably was.

My chest still hurts.

The Great Wall! 长城

Today we went to the Great Wall of China.

Yay!

In Chinese, the Great Wall of China is called "长城" which literally
translates to "long wall". Today, I realized how accurate of a
description that is. Yes, the wall is pretty great - but that's mostly
to do with its incredible length. It's very beautiful, but if it were
not as long as it is, I think it wouldn't warrant any "great" in its
title.

The reasons why I'm saying this are because I spent at least 3 hours
walking along it today and it was friggin' long, man.

Why is it always feel like if I want to write more, I have to
sacrifice more sleep? I think I'm going to go to bed - that was a lot
of climbing.

Pictures are pretty self-explanatory, no?

Friday night! 后海

Tests over for the week; homework over - we went out for an adventure.
I want to say that I'll write up a good account of things tomorrow,
but so far I haven't been very good at writing things up at all.

Pictures:
1. A street. We did a lot of walking.
2. A picture of the sun over Houhai, a pretty patch of water; I don't
really know the history behind it, but it's a nice tourist / anyone
relaxing area of the city. It has a lot of bars as well. It was
unbearably humid today, the smog was terrible. I didn't bother taking
a lot of pictures over the water because all of the color was gone
from everything and it was just smoggy a couple hundred feet away
across the water. So this is the sun, around 6:30. It is pretty
though...
3. After a good long wander, an a comparatively expensive dinner at a
comparatively not-so-good restaurant, we decided to have an adventure
on the way back to Bei Shi Da (北师大, our host university). We went
through some hutongs; which are some of the older, less modern parts
of Beijing. It was kind of dark and more than a little sketchy, but
not as sketchy as that alleyway to the park...

Tomorrow, the Great Wall!

个别谈话 "one-on-one"

picture: An older picture - I haven't taken my camera out of my pocket
often while in Beijing. I mostly see the same couple places right now,
but I should probably take some pictures of them to share. Anyway,
this is the town by Peng Lai. Peng Lai was a summer, oceanside retreat
built by an emperor (I've already forgotten which - but he was a
pretty long time ago, even by Chinese emperor standards). Many famous
poets traveled there to get inspiration and write poetry. I traveled
there with my parents. There were lots, lots of Asian tourists. There
is definitely a different way of touring for Chinese people. I found
it be very goal-oriented: it felt as though there was little point the
in-betweens; instead it is streamlined to "see famous sight!" and once
seen, get the hell out. I digress.

After we saw the pretty castle on the cliffside, we saw the home of a
famous general. (I wish I had time to look some of these things up,
but I'm already spending more time writing this than I should...) I
took this picture after we had left to go search for some food. As
much as Yantai is a rural outpost compared to Beijing, I think this
town was as much a rural outpost to Yantai. I realized that a picture
might be worth a thousand words to describe this scene. Just after the
picture was taken, I also saw someone on a bike, smoking a cigarette
and sending a text message while navigating a rotary. Only in China.

Right now, I'm busy studying for my first test tomorrow. I can't
believe that we already have a test. Then again, every day this week
seemed quite long. A large part of it has to do with starting class at
7:30 in the morning, I think. In the afternoons we have more class -
although it's not really class.

In the afternoon, we have 50 minute-long one on one sessions with a
teacher. It is by far my favorite part of the day - even better than a
good dinner with my friends. It's great because it's nothing like a
class: it's simply a Chinese young woman (okay, well there is one male
teacher for the second year students) who is very nice who will talk
to with a student for an hour. The topics are fairly varied, even
though our vocabulary after only having studied one year of Chinese is
very limited. Gaps in vocabulary can be averted by hand gestures and
attempting to describe related things until some understanding is
reached. It's quite fun and relaxing.

More class

picture: Beijing's shiny, revamped subway. I believe one of my friends
described it as, "It's like being in the future! ...except it's now!"
Obviously the lines leading up to and nearer to the Olympic stadium
were better than the ones farther away, but the worst that I saw (not
that I saw that many stops) looked like one of the nicer Boston
T-stops. Also, there were flatscreen color TVs in all of the cars, as
well as on the platforms. There was also a TV in the bus that I rode.
I'm not really sure what they were showing, I think it may have been
mostly a couple looping commercials with a news report or something
equally boring. No one seemed to be watching them, probably because of
this.

Not much to report about today - I had class and then I did homework.

The use of westerners in advertisements and other imagery could be a
very, very interesting sociological research topic. In fact, I'm sure
lots of people are concerned with this. I'm working on collecting more
examples and some clear thoughts on this, but unfortunately, for now,
I'm tired.

Class at 7:30 in the morning is simply too early.