Beijing, China: June 18, 2008

Today was my second day of real classes. Our days are fairly long-from 9 to 5 with a one hour lunch break at noon. But if it helps, it’s all good. I managed a conversation with my tutor about my ancestral background. She got so excited when I mentioned that some of my family hailed from Canton.

From 9 to 12 we have comprehensive Chinese class. Basically academic learning, like we’d normally do at school just much much longer…. After lunch we have either oral practice or listening practice, depending on the day. The last bit is reserved for time with the tutor where we just practice conversation and ask any questions we might have.

We speak Chinese all day, and are supposed to in our rooms and out and around. Full immersion afterall. Most of us manage with various degrees of success. Colgate does a good job of teaching functional and real stuff I think. And my advisor/most recent professor was extremely picky about pronunciation. There’s some people who when they speak I hear her going over in my head “qu! qu! bu shi “chew””. It’s almost painful to hear the blatant miss-pronunciation of words that I had to drill for years (not that I’m perfect. Ho no, not even close).

Walking to class today I found some of the semi-feral cats on campus. Apparently they get fed by the students so they become fat(ish) and friendly. The white one, he looked a little like Simon with the two colored eyes, was very happy to see me, but the orange kitten ran off into a bush so its mother followed. I saw a tabby the first day here and at first I thought it was dead. I have never seen a cat sleep so soundly with so much traffic going on around it, though I imagine they’re used to it here.

The food here does not agree with my stomach yet. My taste buds yes (I have never had such good broccoli in my life), my stomach no. I’ve been going through traveler’s adjustment^™, though no jet lag surprisingly. In other words-mildly ill for a few days, but nothing terrible and I hear it’s typical and only lasts a few days at most. Bread is the answer in case anyone needs the advice for later. Whoever decided it’d be a good idea to mix ground up grain with water and put it over a fire was a genius and deserves a Nobel Prize.

Food is also seems to be open to anything. The place I eat lunch at has bullfrog dishes, sea cucumbers/slugs, whole stewed turtles, and other strange things (one restaurant had donkey. Haven’t seen horse, snake, or rodent yet though). And they all have heads. Fish always come with heads; some birds come with heads minus skull…And today I saw some salad that came sprinkled with ants. Crunchy.

I have discovered the rules for managing the roadways. You can stand in the streets to wait to cross so long as there are no cars in that lane coming immediately. Get out of the way for moving cars, stopped cars are free game. Bikes will avoid people on foot so keep walking wherever you feel like, and with two people walking into each other’s path figure it out. While I’ve never seen the practical use of it in the three days I’ve been here, it’s also a good idea to walk across a road with another person. Hopefully they’ll be able to block any rogue car.