Catching Up

Wow. Well this week was the one month anniversary of arriving in China! And I can't believe this is only my third post. Don’t worry, everything is still great here! Lets see, I guess to catch everyone up, I need to start at Friday the 8^th. That was the day we did the Peking Opera face painting! For those of you who don’t know, the Peking Opera is a very traditional and very old Chinese art. It is, obviously, an opera but there are only 4 characters, each distinguished by the different color/style of face paint they have on. We did the blue character, which I think is the clownish character in whatever story is being told. But first, our teacher taught us a Peking Opera martial arts move, which included a sword (don’t worry, the one we used was wood). Here’s our teacher and a couple friends “performing”:

Then came the face painting! We had partners and we each painted the other person’s face. The teacher would come around and do one step for us, then we would repeat on the other side.

 Before

My canvas, Anna

First were the eyebrows.

Then the eyes and cheeks. The pattern on the cheek is supposed to be a lotus flower and on the eyes it’s a lotus leaf.

The mouth came next. It was supposed to look like a handlebar mustache (that’s not what the teacher told us. I came up with that one myself). A lotus leaf on the forehead and then time to start filling in!

Black around the eyes.

Red in the mouth, gold in the cheeks, pink on the forehead lotus leaf, blue everywhere else, and voila! You’re done!

The walk back to the dorm was the BEST. I was totally living it up, staring people down and scaring the pants off of them. So much fun! When I got back, I pressed my face into a piece of paper and made this:

Pretty sure I can pass it off as modern art. Anyway, getting the paint off was a pain in the butt. I literally scrubbed for about 10 minutes before it all came off. Totally worth it!

The next day, we woke up early and headed out to volunteer at the autism institute. A little background on mental disorders in China: most Chinese refuse to believe they exist. To them, anyone that is not healthy and perfect in every way is a burden on society. Therefore, the institute that we visited was on the outskirts of Beijing because that was the only place they could find land that would allow them to do their work. Even then, the community still has been very unsupportive of them. The government as well has not given them any money or any rights either. The director has had a really hard time acquiring and maintaining his permit. Every year it’s a struggle for them to stay afloat. Considering all of that, it was quite the experience! We were working with the 8-15 year olds, of which there where about 40. For being so poor, their set up was actually pretty nice. They had a trampoline, a stage, some playground equipment and a few porch swings. My friend Hannah and I found this one kid who was kind of off in the corner with his fingers stuck in his ears. We took him to the other room because it was quieter and then sat with him and tried to get him to open up. We tried to do art with him, but the only way he would draw anything was if I put the pen in his hand and then, with his fingers still in his ears, I would hold the piece of paper up and he would jab at it with the pen. He seemed to like that, but he finally took his fingers out of his ears and realized he like drumming on the floor with the pens even better. After lunch I kind of lost track of him, but found him again before we left and he had done this amazing pattern on a piece of paper! I told him that if was very very pretty and he should be very proud of himself. That got a smile out him. Overall it was a very enriching, enlightening and enjoyable experience.

Last week was pretty uneventful. Just a typical week of school here in China. Friday night was interesting though. We decided that we wanted to explore the bar scene in Beijing a bit more than we had so far, so we decided to take the Subway to this area called Suanlingtar and go to a salsa-dancing club they apparently have there. Except when we got off the subway, we couldn’t find this place for the life of us! So we ended up at a German restaurant where I had the most delicious beer I’ve ever tasted (which isn’t saying much). Like Mom said, we were in China looking for a salsa-dancing club and ended up at a German restaurant. How very international of us! On Saturday we celebrated one of the girls on the program’s birthday by going to KTV. For those of you who don’t know, KTV is karaoke. Yes, I did karaoke. I was actually really impressed with the place we went. Each group of people gets an individual room, and we paid to get ours for 2 hours. The room had a nice leather couch, a huge table and a flat screen TV with a karaoke set. It was pretty cool! We’re planning on doing it again sometime.

The rest of the weekend was pretty typical and so was the week up until Wednesday when we woke up to 3 inches of snow! We were totally not expecting that. I took these pictures on my way to class:

After class and on our way to lunch, my New Zealand friend and I had a snowball fight. She’s pretty good at those for coming from New Zealand. That night, Hannah and I met up with my roommate for dinner. Kate (my roommate) has a friend who is a native Beijinger, so we went to dinner with the two of them. Afterwards, we went to a Hong-kong chain restaurant that only sells traditional, Chinese dessert.

Uncle Lenny, you where right, I wasn’t too sure about it.

Starting on the left and going clockwise we had red bean soup with vanilla ice cream, some coconut custard thing with black sticky rice and mango, some kind of tart and a mango and grapefruit soup. It was all pretty good, but I especially like the coconut stuff (and the vanilla ice cream, of course).

On Thursday, my New Zealand friend (Davina) and I went to the optometrist on campus and bought glasses! Yes, I know it sounds weird, but they where having a sale so I got new frames and new lenses for only about 16 US dollars. Quite the steal! I pick those on Monday and I’m so excited!

I think that just about catches everybody up on my life here. We’re leaving for a weekend excursion to Nanjing in about 3 hours, so I’m really looking forward to that! We’re taking an overnight train and everything! I’ll make a specific post just for this little side trip. If anybody has any questions about anything, for example, the Chinese people, what classes are like, my daily life, the food, anything like that, feel free to send them to me at melaniergoebel@yahoo.com and I’ll answer them on here. That’s all for now! Lots of love being sent home from China!

Back to School

你们好朋友们! Sorry that it's been a while since I posted. As you can probably tell from the title. classes have started and life here has gotten really busy. Since my last post lots of exciting things have happened. I'll try to give a really brief run-down here.

Two Sundays ago, a group of friends and I headed over to the Lantern Festival here in Beijing. The Lantern Festival is always held 15 days after 春节 (Spring Festival/Chinese New Year) and, from what I can tell, it's a time to get together as a society and celebrate chinese culture through traditions like fireworks and lanterns. So we rode the subway for about 30 minutes to the are where the lantern festival was held. Getting on and off the subway was an adventure because it was super crowded. My group use me as a plow simply because I'm the biggest one. Let me tell you, dragging 8 外国人 (foreigners) through a subway car and subway station gets a ton of weird looks. And then when we emerged from undergound, the crowd was even worse than in the subway station. It felt like all 1.4 billion Chinese had showed up for the lantern festival. Once we had gotten our bearings, we wandered around the area for a while looking for the lanterns. However, that day, the Air Quality Index was over 500 (150 being the recommended limit for going outside in the US), and we didn't find out until we had wandered around for a few hours that the actual lantern show was cancelled due to the smog. Shortly after we found out, we fought our way back through the subway and headed home, because we had class the next day! Here's some pictures from the Lantern Festival:

The gate going into the Lantern Festival

One of the allies we went down

A giant "chun", the character for Spring

Happy Confucius

Whatever this is. It looks cool.

Guards trying to control the crowd

Some of the few lanterns we got to see.

After being out of school for over 2 months, classes finally started up on February 25. As for my schedule, four days a week I have 汉语(writing and reading) and 口语(speaking). Two days per week I have 听力(listening comprehension) and on Mondays I have a 3 hour area studies class on traditional Chinese Philosophies such as Daoism, Confucianism, etc. Each class (besides the area studies) is 1 hour and 50 minutes, with a 10 minute break half way through and a 20 minute passing period (which is totally necessary, because the campus is HUGE). So despite having class for 7 hours some days, I thoroughly enjoy being back in school. Also, I have quite the variety of students in my classes. For example, in my speaking class, there are 3 Americans (including me), 3 Japanese, 1 Korean, 1 Taiwanese, 1 French, 1 Italian and 1 from Kazakhstan. My reading class is kind of the same, with about 4 Americans, 3 Swedish, 1 from New Zealand (who is a good friend of mine), 1 from japan, 1 from Taiwan, 1 from France and 1 from Belgium. It’s really interesting talking with all of these people during and between classes. They have a lot of questions about American culture, just like I have about their culture. And I’ve learned that some knowledge that I take for granted and always thought was common sense, I have to try to explain to some of these people that I meet. It’s really been a humbling experience so far.

Thursday the 28^th was a really interesting/exciting day. We had an AQI over 500 (the highest so far) AND a dust storm, all in the same day! I was out getting lunch when the dust storm first hit and my friends and I had gravel bouncing off our faces and grit getting into our eyes. But the funny thing is, the dust storm settled down in about an hour and it blew all the smog out of the city, so the AQI was at 26 by the time I went to bed! Thursday night we took a trip to the Chaoyang theater and saw a Chinese acrobatic show! It was absolutely incredible. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera with me, so I couldn’t take any pictures. We saw a lady juggling umbrellas on her feet, a girl doing pointe on the shoulders and head of a guy, 12 people on a bike at the same time (typical China) and 8 motorcyclists going around in circles in a giant metal hamster ball. Like I said, incredible.

On Friday, I had another interesting experience. I was at lunch with my friends Anna, Armida and Carol. Carol is on the same program as us, but she is probably in her 50s. She’s this little, adorable Taiwanese lady who immigrated to America about 20 years ago after graduating from the Taiwanese military academy and serving as a captain in their army. So she’s pretty BA. We call her the “Mom” of our program. And she’s pretty much fluent in Chinese. Anyway, we were at lunch and about to head out when Carol turned and said hello to some older guys sitting next to us. The said hello back and asked where we were from. We responded and then one of the guys stood up, shook our hands and started on this rant (Carol was translating) about how much he loves America and hates China and how he really wants to go live in America etc. He was so passionate about it that he started to tear up. That run-in with this fellow is in my top 10 most patriotic moments. Just made me so proud to be American.

Here in China, there is no drinking age, so I've been enjoying one or two responsible drinks on the weekend and, in tribute to Grandma, Weve and the rest of the Goebels, I had two grasshoppers last weekend. Let me tell you, those suckers are delicious. And for those of you wondering, the beer here isn't very good.

On Saturday we went to an area called Houhai where we got to ride a rickshaw through the hutongs (kind of like the ghetto, but safer ),

Eric and Nana in their rickshaw

 visit a traditional Chinese home,

The alter to the ancestors

The adorable lady who graciously allowed us into her home

climb up to the drum tower,

So. Many. Steps.

see the drums,

and witness the bi-hourly drum performance to mark the time.

This is a horrid picture, but I can't figure out how to 

upload the video I took. I'll show it to all of you sometime.

Afterwards, we got to explore the area a bit and go shopping. By the gate, there was this fantastic little, blind, old, homeless man playing the 胡琴 and singing his heart out.

I gave him 5 块, (which is less than a dollar, but still a lot in China) just because he was so awesome.

We returned back home, Sunday was uneventful, this school week has been normal and everything here is dandy!

Wednesday we did our first Target Language Themed Meal where a small group of students go to a themed dinner with a teacher, and are only allowed to speak Chinese the whole meal. Our group went to a restaurant where they served food from western China that is eaten predominantly by the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority here in China. Most delicious food I've had here in China.

On Friday the 8th, we're going to do Peking Opera traditional face-painting and traditional Chinese paper-cutting. And then on Saturday we're going to a local Autism Institute to volunteer for about 6 hours. Overall, I am thoroughly enjoying my time here in China! Lots of love being sent over the pacific ocean to you all back at home!

Orienting to the Orient

大家好! I made it safely to China! And boy, has this past week been interesting. The flight actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. The 13 hours totally flew by! When we got drinks, I asked for a coke and got this:

The ingredients on my German coke can.

On a flight from Chicago to China, and I got a German coke? Whatever, it was delicious.

Sunrise over Greenland

We arrived in China at about 3:30 Monday afternoon. We went straight to the dorms to get settled in. A couple of the girls from my program and I went out to get dinner. After trying hard to order, I decided that the language barrier is more of a brick wall. Because I couldn’t read anything on the menu, I just pointed to what I wanted and ended up with this.

It was SO GOOD but also really spicy, so I could only eat about 4 bites of it or so. The next day was Tuesday and we met as a group in the dorm at 6:45am, which sounded really early at the time, but I had no problem waking up thanks to that accursed jet lag. First thing we did was get our PKU student ID's and then we split off into groups and followed one of the tutors to a place where we can get breakfast by booping our ID card. Once we got there, we went up to the window and they had a couple of options we could have. I got some corn porridge and a baozi, or large dumpling. The porridge was weird. It kind of had the consistency of mucus but was almost completely tasteless. But it was warm! Which was much appreciated on a freezing cold day like Tuesday was. Oh yeah, no spoons, we had to sip it straight from the bowl.

The baozi was decent; it had some green leafy vegetable thing on the inside. After breakfast we went to a conference room where we had a short orientation, then hopped on a bus and headed off to Tiananmen Square! For those of you who don’t know, Beijing is set up like a dart board with what’s called “ring roads” that circles the city. Anyway, Tiananmen square and the Forbidden City are right in the center of that dartboard. Tiananmen square is designated by the government as the central place for political announcements/rallies/whatnot. But that also means it is also the central place for political protest. On our way into the square, we had to have our bags scanned. They were checking for fuel to make sure we weren’t self-immolators that were there to protest. There where also fire hydrants set up all around the square to stop people who try to self-immolate.

Heading towards Tiananmen Square

 Part of the Forbidden City

When we were in the square I got asked by two photographers to take pictures with random people, which I then would have had to buy, so I told them no. But it was weird because nobody else was asked for pictures. I think it is because I’m a white girl, but I also tower over everybody else, including all the girls in our group. It’s always amusing whenever we gather together as a group to listen to one of our teachers talk, because the Chinese people gather around us just staring and sometimes taking pictures.

 Right next to Tiananmen Square is Mao’s Mausoleum, which we got to go into. We couldn’t take our cameras in, so I don’t have any pictures, but in the interior room of the mausoleum was Mao’s body in a crystal casket with the communist flag pulled up like a blanket over his chest and two guards standing watch. As we passed through, I noticed some Chinese citizens bowing to him.

The outside of Chairman Mao's Mausoleum

After Tiananmen Square and the Mausoleum, we went to this awesome little restaurant called "Old Beijing Folk Delicious Food". There we got the iconic Peking Duck (delicious), some beef (also good), shredded pork (yum) and some other tasty stuff. LOTS OF FOOD.

And we got to gaze upon this lovely painting while we ate:

Cute.

A quick side note here: for those of you who don't know, eating sit-down meals in China is completely different than back in the States. In general, we all sit around a circular table that has a lazy susan in the middle and individual place settings and we all order a dish. The waiters bring out the dishes and sets them on the lazy susan and then we each eat off of each other's food. Okay, end of side note. After lunch we took the bus back to PKU and went on a campus tour. Our group stuck together after the tour and went to a supermarket called Wumei to pick up some supplies. Wumei is kind of like Wal-Mart, but it's under the ground, literally. Then we went to buy phones which was kind of an ordeal because we couldn't communicate very well but we all ended up with super simple and pretty cheap phones that only 349 kuai (about 59 dollars), including the plan.

On Wednesday we woke up early again and had some more orientation stuff and then went to lunch with some of the teachers. At the place we went for lunch, somebody ordered a fish soup. A couple minutes later, the fuwuyuan (waitress) came in with a live fish flopping around in a net asking if that one was okay. We said it was and about 10 minutes later, here comes a fish soup with the entire fish hacked up and cooked floating around in some broth. I tried a little bit of it, but when I pulled out part of the spinal column, I couldn't eat it anymore. After lunch we went to the Summer Palace.

The Summer Palace is the place where the Emperor would go during the summer because it wasn’t so hot as in the Forbidden City (which is where the emperor lived otherwise). It was really pretty, but I think we’re going to try to go back in the spring when everything is green again.

Thursday has been the most interesting day so far. First, we were waiting in the lobby of the dorm so we could walk to campus together and we ended up meeting 2 people from New Zealand! They had sweet accents. I told the New Zealand guy that I was from Illinois and he goes “Ah yes, the birthplace of Lincoln. You guys should really get rid of your penny.” Hahah umm, okay. It was really cool getting to meet other foreigners. We also took our placement test on Thursday. It was a brutal, soul crushing test that totally sucked, but actually placed me really well into the right classes. I’m one of just a couple students in the lower classes, but I’ve also had less Chinese than them because they’re all mostly juniors. It's also really interesting talking to other people on the program and finding out how they learn Chinese at their school compared to at U of I. Following the placement test, a couple guys wanted to buy some cellphones, so I went with them to help. I ended up ordering the phones for them, in Chinese! And then we went to a supermarket called Carrefour and I talked to an employee there about a mattress pad! I was so proud of myself for actually being able communicate with people.

Friday and Saturday were pretty uneventful besides that fact that we went out to some bars. They reminded me a lot of bars in the States and were even playing the same kind of music. 

This past week I was also quickly introduced to the hygiene or lack thereof here in China. The first thing is what we have come to fondly refer to as squatty potties. They're pretty much refined holes in the ground that you have to squat over to use. We've been lucky though because all of the ones we've been to have had toilet paper. Another hygiene aspect is the Chinese hock and spit loogies all over the place. My gag reflex has kind of gotten used to hearing the sound so much.

As for the smog, it really hasn't been bad most days. I think it was Thursday that the Air Quality Index got over 200 and I wore a mask for the first time. Saturday night it was over 400 so we took a cab home. As I'm writing this right now, the AQI is at 387 and I can't see very far out of my window due to the gray haze.

One of my favorite things I didn't expect from China is the continuation of fireworks after the new year. Not a day has gone by when I haven't seen some fireworks exploding in the sky, day or night. And no, the irony with the smog is not lost on me.

Sorry for the long post, but there was a lot to tell about in this first week. I'll try to post once a week, but the internet here is really bad and my blog site is super temperamental, so please bear with me! Lots of love being sent from China!

Smog

For anyone out there who has been following the news, I'm sure you've heard that the smog in Beijing is nearly out of control. Over the past couple of weeks, Beijing's pollution levels have reached 40 times the limit recommended by the WHO.

P.S I think it's totally ironic that this guy is smoking

My grandparents also mentioned that a factory in Beijing burned for 3 hours without anyone noticing because the smoke blended in so much with the pollution. Not to fear though, because face masks are all the rage in China. And if they're not the rage, then they're definitely a necessity. So today, this kid got her 50 respirators in the mail. Yay health!

Now I'll totally blend in with everyone else in China, if only in the mouth area...

Survival Kit

So, I was home alone today when the UPS man stopped by. This is a pretty typical occurrence  but it's usually for my mom's work. So today I went and got the package and casually glanced at the address label. It was for me! I don't know about anyone else, but I always get super excited whenever I get real snail mail. I opened up the package and inside was this awesome survival kit from my study abroad provider! It had a shirt, pen, notebook, luggage tag and backpack (of course, a free backpack comes the day after we buy a brand new one online, but I'm not complaining)! It's really weird, but this thing is actually starting to feel real now. T minus 27 days!

Gambling

One week ago today, I went gambling. And by gambling, I mean I got surgery on my foot. Which doesn't sound like a big deal, but the healing time for this kind of surgery is 4-6 weeks, and I leave for China in, now, 5 weeks. But it had to be done.

Okay, so a year and a half ago, I broke my foot by playing kickball barefoot. Of course, I managed to miss the ball and kick the ground. Ouch. I had what's called an "avulsion fracture" on my first metatarsal (by the big toe) which means that a chunk of bone got pulled off by my tendon. I was in a boot for about 2 months. But once I healed, I noticed that I couldn't move my big toe very much and I had a lump of bone kind of sticking out of my foot. It didn't hurt or anything, but the bump would rub on shoes and generally be annoying. So, this most recent Thanksgiving break, I had an appointment with my podiatrist (whom I've been seeing since I was in 7th grade) and I asked him to x-ray my foot. He did and it turns out the chunk of bone that came off when I broke it was lodged in my big toe joint, and was possibly causing cartilage damage. Needless to say, I needed surgery. So we scheduled it for New Year's Eve, almost exactly 6 weeks before I leave for China. On New Year's Eve, the doc knocked me out, numbed my foot, and went to work. He shaved down the bump and took out the chunk of bone in my joint, which turned out to be about the size of a pea (seems pretty big to have floating around in a foot). I went home that same day with my foot all wrapped up in gauze and looking something like this:

I've been spending the past week on our couch with my foot elevated in the hopes that the healing process will go well and I can still go to China. On Friday, I went back to the podiatrist for a dressing change and snapped this picture of what was under that bandage (warning, it's pretty nasty):

Thankfully, my doctor said that it looks like it's healing really well and I should be good to go for studying abroad! I guess sometime gambling really does pay off.