Shortly before the new students came to Beijing to start the Spring Seminar, my host mother and host sister from Suzhou came to visit me at Tsinghua University. I remember the weather around that time was beginning to get frigid cold, and I wound up biking throughout campus to meet them but we kept accidentally passing each other. We finally met at Tsinghua University’s famous arch tower at its centrally located park and took some photos together. Unfortunately my host father could not make it, but he sent them with his gifts for me. It was a whole set of HSK preparation books. HSK stands for Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi 汉语水平考试, translating directly as "Chinese Standard Exam". It is a nationally recognized language proficiency exam that foreigners take for jobs in China. I was really touched. I was not taking the HSK exam myself but he knew I was very adamant about studying the language, so it was a really thoughtful gift to me. My host sister was in Beijing for a competition while they were visiting me, so they had to be on their way, but before they left, I gave them a large bag of Beijing style treats that I bought in Wangfujing.
Later that evening, I met with my host mother again and a friend she knew from Beijing at a small restaurant that served donkey meat and we ate dinner together. Right after, we watched a play called 朦胧中所见的生活 (Menglong Zhong Suojian De Shenghuo), which Baidu translates as “Life in the Twilight”. It turned out to be kind of strange, as there was not much acting and it was mostly dialogue, but it was still amusing to watch. The mood of the room was mostly solemn, but occasionally people would laugh at a subtle joke the actor made. If you watch any funny shows in China, you can kind of get a sense that Chinese comedy is a little different from American comedy. It's a little difficult to speculate on though. I remember watching a foreigner in an audience of a Chinese comedy show, wondering if he could understand at all what was going on, and I tried to reimagine myself in that same position as I watched the play. Unfortunately, I could only get half of what was going on because it was hard to get a clear sense of the context and due to my limited language skills, but there was one moment I understood something that I thought was kind of funny, and laughed out loud when no one else in the audience did. At another point in the play, I didn’t think something was as funny and yet everyone else thought it was hysterical. I couldn't really wrap my thumb around it. Before my host mother parted that night, I gave her my gift to the family: some souvenirs from Tsinghua University, a stuffed bunny for my host sister, and a red envelope (hongbao 红包 ) filled with 100 kuai to celebrate the upcoming Chinese New Years (a traditional gift given around this time period).
When all of the new SU Beijing students came in, we had a busy weekend to prepare for the upcoming Spring seminar trip. We had to get everyone situated with a new cell phone plan and get everything else we needed for the trip, which turned out to be more of a hassle than what you’d expect. It can be such a pain to work out a phone plan here, not because of the Mandarin language, but because it seems like almost every salesman out there is willing to lie his way around to get you to buy something you don’t want. We first met up with some of the Tsinghua University students here who volunteered to help us out this semester, and after heading out to Wudaokou and getting some of the stuff we’d need for our trip, we spent the last part of the evening eating a Chinese style dinner with Peking Duck and, one of my new favorites, pumpkin juice. I was pretty much familiar with all of the places we went to this day, but I had never gone to the restaurant where we had this meal, so it was a pleasant surprise.
Finally, the day of the trip came. We had three cities to travel to; Xi’An, Nanjing, and Shanghai. In the end, this trip turned out to be a lot less hectic than the Fall Seminar because it did not involve as much traveling, which in turn also left us with a little more free time to explore the cities on our own. I took advantage of this in Shanghai in particular, going out to watch the famous Cirque du Soleil show with a new friend. We pretty much had lectures everyday and then site visits to go to, and then most of us would go out to eat dinner together at night. The rooming arrangements were different this time, as there was an odd number of girls, so it worked out that in each city, one girl would get a single room to herself while everyone else paired off into doubles. I was lucky enough in Nanjing to get the single, though at the time I felt it would’ve been nice to pair off with someone for those few days to get to know better some of the people from my group. For more information on what the trip itself was like, please go to the section that describes more fully the activities we had. Once we returned from the seminar, we were worn out but still excited to explore Beijing together, maybe them more so than myself since I had already seen a lot of the city, but we had a nice two weeks off to chill out and get to know more about each other before classes started.
When all of the new SU Beijing students came in, we had a busy weekend to prepare for the upcoming Spring seminar trip. We had to get everyone situated with a new cell phone plan and get everything else we needed for the trip, which turned out to be more of a hassle than what you’d expect. It can be such a pain to work out a phone plan here, not because of the Mandarin language, but because it seems like almost every salesman out there is willing to lie his way around to get you to buy something you don’t want. We first met up with some of the Tsinghua University students here who volunteered to help us out this semester, and after heading out to Wudaokou and getting some of the stuff we’d need for our trip, we spent the last part of the evening eating a Chinese style dinner with Peking Duck and, one of my new favorites, pumpkin juice. I was pretty much familiar with all of the places we went to this day, but I had never gone to the restaurant where we had this meal, so it was a pleasant surprise.
Finally, the day of the trip came. We had three cities to travel to; Xi’An, Nanjing, and Shanghai. In the end, this trip turned out to be a lot less hectic than the Fall Seminar because it did not involve as much traveling, which in turn also left us with a little more free time to explore the cities on our own. I took advantage of this in Shanghai in particular, going out to watch the famous Cirque du Soleil show with a new friend. We pretty much had lectures everyday and then site visits to go to, and then most of us would go out to eat dinner together at night. The rooming arrangements were different this time, as there was an odd number of girls, so it worked out that in each city, one girl would get a single room to herself while everyone else paired off into doubles. I was lucky enough in Nanjing to get the single, though at the time I felt it would’ve been nice to pair off with someone for those few days to get to know better some of the people from my group. For more information on what the trip itself was like, please go to the section that describes more fully the activities we had. Once we returned from the seminar, we were worn out but still excited to explore Beijing together, maybe them more so than myself since I had already seen a lot of the city, but we had a nice two weeks off to chill out and get to know more about each other before classes started.
