An American in Beijing

When in Rome...

It is with some sadness, but with relief too, that I report that I am making the switch from traditional characters to simplified ones (sorry, Dorothy!). For those of you who don't know (and I assume it's most of you), different Chinese characters have, for the past 50 or so years, been used in China and Singapore than in Hong Kong and Taiwan. These new characters were introduced in 1956 and 1964 in order to make characters simpler to write and remember by reducing the number of strokes in each character and altering them to have a more logical structure. People have very mixed opinions of this transition -- many laud it as a much-needed change which reflected the actual use of many simplified forms among the common people (this is, in fact, the official position of the Chinese government), while others bemoan it as a corruption of a richly complext ancient writing system whose structure and meaning have been clouded by inconsistent simplification and whose beauty has been cheapened by the new character forms.

I tend to think that the traditional characters are nicer and more interesting to learn (although obviously harder to remember and write!), since they often tend to preserve more meaning from the ancient pictographs. A small part of me is, I think, attracted to the challenge -- to be able to read not only simplified characters like everyone else in China, but also the writing system so difficult it was abolished by the government. To be sure, there is truth to the argument that the complexity of Chinese characters, not unlike the complexity and inconsistency of English spelling rules, was used throughout Chinese history as a way for the wealthy, educated classes to distinguish themselves from and exclude the uneducated masses too "simple" to write such complicated characters. This element of class warfare must certainly have hit a chord with the Communist government, and was perhaps one of the precipitating factors in the nation-wide transition from fantizi (traditional characters) to jiantizi (simplified characters).

At any rate, at Harvard (but not at Yale, UChicago, or Brown, from what I gather from other students here) the first year is done entirely using fantizi, jiantizi are only introduced in the second year of Chinese. But at HBA, the simplified characters are not so much "introduced" in a nice, comprehensible way, but are rather the only way everything everything is written now, both in class, in our textbook, and (of course) out on the street. It's pretty bewildering for a simple second-year well-versed in the beautiful, complex fantizi to suddenly need to learn 50 new characters every night in the strange new form as well as the simplified forms for nearly all of the characters we've learned (about 600) during the past year. Thankfully there is (usually) a good deal of similarity between the traditional and simplified characters, so a little guess-work goes a long way, but reading is difficult and slow, and every teacher I've worked with in individual session has told me the same things: (1) I have nice handwriting, (2) I'm not bad at having conversation, answering questions, or doing on-the-spot translations of paragraphs from English into Chinese, but (3) I really, really need to work on reading out loud.

I can tell this too: I know I sound horribly unnatural when I read, because I'm working so hard to (a) identify the character or try to figure out what it correlates to in the traditional system if I don't recognize it, (b) figure out what it means, (c) remember the syllable's sound, (d) remember what the tone is (there are 5 different tones), and finally (e) figure out how to stress or emphasize the syllable in the flow of the sentence's meaning. Obviously, I'm not at the stage where (e) is even a viable option, except for sentences (zhen de ma? zhe me hui shi ya! etc.) that are only a few characters long. I have a lot of work to do before I can read out loud with anything that could be called success. I resisted the simplified characters for a week, doing all my homework and essays in fantizi, reading from the traditional pages in the book, looking up all the new vocab online to find the tradtional forms, and learning each word twice: once in jiantizi, once in fantizi. And you know what I learned? It's just not possible. We simply do not have enough time to learn both sets of characters. The teachers certainly don't expect us to (all tests, homework questions, written announcements, etc. are in jiantizi), and most of them can't write the traditional characters either (I've asked them a few times, and no one has been able to do it yet). So I will, as we say in Chinese, "ru xiang sui su" -- when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

posted by Kelly @ 2:00 下午

More encounters with our six-legged friends

So, when the insect bite count hit the double-digits, I decided to take action. No more of this “but-bug-spray-smells-so-funky-I’ll-just-spray-it-lightly-I-don’t-want-to-ruin-my-clothes” nonsense. I came to China with three bottles of Off Deep Woods and 35 packets of Bug-X wipes, and if those little buggers (no pun intended) want war, then war is what they’re going to get. I have been, for the past couple of days, little more than a walking cloud of bug repellant. My presence is announced moments before I approach by the sweet yet pungent aroma of Off, and I keep leaving oily smudges on any surface unfortunate enough to come into contact with my slimy, oddly fragrant self. Any bug crazy enough to penetrate the haze of repellent surrounding me would probably drown in the stuff before it got the chance to bite me, but I’ll be darned if I let those impish little things make me any itchier than I already am. And let me tell you, I’m pretty much a walking “itch bite,” as a certain little friend of mine called it the other day.

I think I’ve determined the culprit: a tube of delicious-smelling hand lotion I purchased at the grocery store to try to offset the effects of lots of Purell and hand-washing, which manages to smell both like fruit and flowers and, with my luck, probably uses actual sugar to augment its sweet scent. I’ve been putting it on my hands and then rubbing a bit on my elbows, which are always dry. Right now, though, my elbows are not only dry but in a constant, miserable state of itch right now, since they each have not one, not two, but three super itchy bites on them, and four more in close proximity. I must be to Chinese mosquitoes as deliciously exotic as Chinese food is to the Americans back home – “all the buzz” around town (okay, this time the pun was intended), and everybody’s got to try it at least once. That’s me, the daily special, served up specially each morning for Beijing’s most pestilential citizens. Yum.

On a somewhat more serious note, the three bites on my right forearm are kind of funky-looking. There was a big speckly rash around them when I got them, and now they are sitting atop a sort of bruised-ish-looking raised mound of swollen skin. They itch (what else is new?) but hopefully it’s nothing serious. I won’t scratch them, obviously: I never scratch. I’m going to ask my teacher about them tomorrow.

--- edit ---

Mosquito bites much more normal-looking today (6.23.06). Right now studying for big big test -- v. nervous! more at some point when I don't have eight gazillion new characters to memorize. I'll leave you with the words of my indefatigable, prepossessing, often pertinacious but always 100% awesome little sister:

hello??? HELlo?!?!

*knocks on your head*

*hits your ear with gong, causing it to come off*

*you disintegrate*

posted by Kelly @ 12:08 上午

In which I am made fun of, and have an epiphany

Wow, I have been so absurdly, uncontrollably busy… I’ve hardly had time to sleep or call home, let alone take pictures or update this website. Things are still really, really wonderful here – even as I start to really adjust to life in China, every day brings a whole bevy of new, foreign, strange, fascinating new experiences and observations. As many of you probably already know, each day of classes at HBA involves two hours of lecture (da ban ke) and two hours of drill session (xiao ban ke) in the morning, followed by about 45 minutes of individual one-on-one drilling with an instructor (dan ban ke) and two hours of office hours in the afternoon. I have loved pretty much all of my instructors so far (they rotate from day to day so we get maximal exposure to various dialects and teaching styles). This is one of the benefits of Harvard, I really have to say – you never ever have to wonder if you’re getting anything less than the best, because you’re not. The instructors are all amazing. Graduates of Beijing Yuyan Daxue, the best university in China for those who want to teach Chinese as a foreign language, they all fit the mold of the perfect language instructor: friendly, energetic, good at joking with and relating to students, good at expressing themselves and enunciating clearly, with an incredible capacity for remembering students’ names and an even more incredible capacity to care deeply and genuinely about every single one of their students. There’s something about teaching language that lets teachers relate to students in a far more intimate and sincere way more than any other subject.

They’re hilarious, too. There was a slight mix-up the other day with times and schedules for drill session and I wound up missing my assigned class because I went to another one by accident. The funny thing is that before I even got back to my room after class (and hitting the grocery store), my drill instructor had informed the second-year teacher that I hadn’t been in class and was probably sick. Thinking I might not be okay, this teacher (Wang Laoshi) went to my room and knocked, and when no one answered, got a maid to unlock the door in case I was passed out on the floor dying of food poisoning or something (this actually happened to a student years ago – Feng Laoshi, the head of the program, was doing just this kind of check on a sick student and found him lying on the floor foaming at the mouth – ick! I think this incident might have been the inspiration for the “Perhaps the raw cucumber was not washed clean” chapter in our first-year textbook). She saw I wasn’t there (I was probably at the store buying mangos and an extension cord at the time), but while there she noticed that my AC was on “too high,” and chastised me (in a loving way, especially after we had cleared up the misunderstanding and she no longer believed that I was sick because my room was too cold) for making my room unhealthy to live in. “I turned it up,” she told me sternly. “You should have it at 25, 26 degrees. Never lower.”

The really funny thing is that I usually try to keep it between 23 and 24 degrees Celsius, which I think is reasonable, but the maids always turn it down to like 10 or something when they clean the room. This temperature is refreshing for like 2 seconds after coming in from Beijing’s omnipresent heat and humidity, but soon becomes uncomfortably cold. At any rate, I was really touched by the concern, even if it was misplaced (about 4 other teachers, most of whom I haven’t met, have also come up to me, saying “He Kaili [my Chinese name], I heard you were sick?” and I have to set them right each time – in fact, now all I say is “I’m much better now” because explaining the mix-up in Chinese makes my head hurt, but “Xian zai hao de duo le” is pretty easy). So don’t worry, Mom – they’re taking good care of me, I promise!

Anyway, I’ve had such a good time with the teachers – the one I had for drill session today was named Qian Laoshi, with a first name of Duo. In Chinese, this means something like “lots of money” or “make your money grow,” so it’s a pretty funny name. Qian Duo was a short, uber-perky teacher with a round, friendly face and a very particular way of speaking. She even sang for us! Today we discussed a grammatical construction which describes a person or object’s distinguishing characteristic – Qian Duo told my classmate Rei An his distinguishing characteristic was definitely his hair (which is spiky, highlighted, and comes to a kind of point in the front), and even though all white people look the same to her (!!) she would definitely remember him. Xiao Kan and Gong An Ju both decided that their distinguishing characteristic was that they were so tall (and it’s true, they are both tall), which left only me. It’s times like these when I realize how profoundly little I am able to say in Chinese… I wound up saying that in the States I’m sort of smallish and look young for my age, but that neither of these do me much good in China, as everyone is much smaller here and no one has any clue what age foreigners are anyway because they can’t judge non-Asian people’s ages!

Qian Laoshi told me that my distinguishing characteristic was that I was very pretty, but she tempered this nice compliment a few minutes later when we were discussing a different grammar pattern, which one uses when one wants to say “I had better…” or “It would be best if you…” or “She really ought to…” etc. She was talking about who she best ought to ask to help her move something heavy. “I ought to ask Gong An Ju, because he is so tall,” she said, bouncing around the front of the classroom. “I had better not ask He Kaili. She’s even less able to lift this heavy thing than I am. She is too weak; she has no strength.” She flexed one small arm in demonstration. “Yup, I sure had better not ask Kaili to help me.” And she went on for quite some time in this fashion, which I found rather unnecessary but altogether hysterical. When she heard me giggling at this, she paused, confused. “Why are you laughing so loud?” she asked innocently. Since I have no idea how to say “I’m not used to my teachers shamelessly making fun of me as part of the day’s lesson” in Mandarin, I just smiled and laughed some more. This is why Chinese people are awesome. They have zero shame. Language classes are the coolest.

Outside of class, though, things are more serious and, in a way, cooler still. Today it really hit me for the first time where I am and what I am doing, and how it is all on a certain level still incomprehensible to me. I think it really came home to me today because I was doing something completely alone: I ate a solitary dinner (sniff, sniff, I know, so sad) in a restaurant on campus, my first time ordering food without being part of a giant mass of foreign students all stumbling over words and pointing hopefully at menus without any real idea of what we’re ordering. I’ve certainly had plenty of all-Chinese, mostly successful interactions with staff and teachers and even other students, of course, but for some reason I suddenly was taken aback by the sheer wonder of it all. Here I am, seven thousand miles from the only place I’ve ever known, on the other side of the world in a strange land where everything from the coins in my pocket to the sounds in my ears to the food in my stomach to the very trees and air overhead is completely and utterly foreign. And yet – there I was, making contact with another person, exchanging ideas, understanding one another for a brief moment. Sure, the conversation was simple and mundane, our questions (“could you please bring me a paper napkin?” “would you like me to bring the bill?”) and our answers (“no, that one doesn’t have meat.” “thank you for your help!”) certainly unimpressive – but there, in that moment, I realized what it is that I’m doing here.

Mandarin for me is no longer a bunch of funny sounds to make in class or a line of pretty pictures to decipher or write – it is no longer an academic exercise for me, as it was in the States. Here, Chinese is the flow of meaning between people living their lives. Mandarin is what keeps the biggest nation in the world running, but more importantly, it is what allows the people of this country to establish contact with other humans – to share not just space and air but thoughts, ideas, plans, opinions, beliefs, hopes, and dreams. And now, here I am, a stranger from a strange land, taking part, moving through the endless sea of Chinese washing over me with a bit of comprehension, able to share ideas, even make jokes, using this thing called Mandarin which is in America a fun academic exercise but here is a living thing, which changes and grows each day, just as all languages in the world evolve, as it issues forth from the people speaking them. There’s something kind of beautiful about that.

Building out of this realization was an even stronger one – not just that I am here, but that I am here. There have been many things in my life that I just could hardly even believe I was lucky enough to have or do, but they have all been, in a way part of a pretty set life plan. Graduating high school, for example, was a really great experience, but I always knew I would graduate, from the second I learned what graduation was. Going to Harvard is a dream come true for me, a dream I never really believed would come to fruition, but it, too, makes a certain kind of sense – it matches who I am (a person who just really loves learning) as well as where I want to go (into the field of academia, and teach philosophy to university students) – it’s part of the general plan I’ve always had inside of me, even if I couldn’t see to the end of the path. But where does being in China fit in? It's not part of who I've ever been, thought I would be, or could have known to hope I'd become: but here I am. How am I so lucky to be here, learning this amazing language and experiencing at least a small part of the wonder and importance of language and communication and culture? How did I ever find my way here, having no idea what I would discover about this strange, strange place – and about myself? You know what I mean?

But I guess, in the end, that’s really the point. Life isn’t about following a set path from point A to point B to point C, knowing exactly what is expected of you at each stop along the way, building towards each predetermined destination as quickly and efficiently as possible. Maybe life should be more like deciding to try for point W, without knowing quite where it is or what exactly it involves, to see how the path changes as you walk it. See, now I’m getting all soppy and metaphorical and probably making everyone gag. But really, it’s all kind of unbelievable. And I love it.

posted by Kelly @ 10:31 下午

Censorship

Well, this is what I get for coming to a communist country, I suppose... I gather from a few e-mails I've gotten that other people can read my blog, and I can post to it, but the site itself is blocked (along with numerous, numerous other websites) from my computer, as well as any other blogs on this site which are written from China. It's interesting -- I guess I can write whatever I want here, but the government sure is making sure that no one in China can read what I say in the event that it is, as my customs form says, "detrimental to the political, economic, cultural and moral interests of China." Items of this nature are prohibited from imporation into the country, listed third on the Chinese forms, before "deadly poisons of all kinds," diseased animals, illegal drugs, and any items from epidemic-stricken areas that might be capable of spreading disease to humans and livestock. Oh, China. This is why I left my books of Kant and Rawls at home.

posted by Kelly @ 1:45 下午

Today I encountered a good smell

Today I encountered a good smell on the streets of Beijing. This is no common occurance -- the streets are filled with smells, of course, but most of them range from merely foreign to downright disgusting, with the exception of a few good food-related smells. There is, of course, the ubiquitous haze of pollution, a lung-burning, eye-tearing smell which gets stronger on the streets and even worse on the highways, supplemented by the smells arising from decaying piles of garbage, unwashed people, and strong gusts of odor from the sewers. The all-to-common piles of vomit one encounters daily on the streets indicate that it is not only foreigners who sometimes cannot tolerate the food here, although I don't know how these smell as I hold my breath and walk away from them wherever I see them. Sometimes it smells of urine, sometimes of raw meat or fish, sometimes of some strangely unpleasant food. Good smells, when they exist, are almost always the smell of things frying. But today, walking past a park near campus, I encountered an undeniably good, non-food-related smell. It smelled like flowers. Now, I didn't actually see any flowers -- what I did see was a bunch of leathery-skinned workmen in orange vests, digging near a big tarp just to the side of the sidewalk, a one-armed beggar playing the gao-hu, a traditional Cantonese instrument, a woman nursing her baby on the sidewalk, and a newspaper stand with about ten people clustered around it -- but I smelled them. And for the first time since coming to Beijing, I slowed down and took a deep lungful of air, to enjoy the beautiful smell. It smelled like the honeysuckle my sister and I saw when we walked to the beach to take in the Long Island Sound and beach on my last day in the States. The fragrant Chinese flowers, ironically enough, made me miss home.

posted by Kelly @ 12:14 下午

Fun with Chopsticks

One of these days, I’ve definitely got to get myself down to McDonald’s to pick up a spoon and fork, implements which I optimistically neglected to bring, convinced that just as immersion in a foreign country is the best way to learn a language, traveling to China armed only with a few pairs of chopsticks would be the best way to improve my technique, forgetting the American food I had brought with me. Eating tuna fish with chopsticks, though an interesting challenge, is definitely possible. However, eating oatmeal with chopsticks has proven far less successful, especially since the kind of oatmeal I brought is supposed to be made in the microwave (not merely with boiling water, which is all I have access to) and so remains stubbornly both soupy and crunchy. Chopsticks are not much of a match for this little teacup full of oatmeal disaster.

posted by Kelly @ 9:39 下午

Sleep Patterns

Sleep patterns

6.13

1:30 am – 9 am EST

7.5 hours

6.14

awake for the whole thing

0 hours

6.15

12 am – 6 am PRC

6 hours

6.16

11 pm – 4 am

5 hours

6.17

1:30 am – 4 am

3.5 hours

6.18

10 pm – 4 am

6 hours

6.19

11 pm – 5:15 am

6.25 hours

The moral of the story: Jet lag is fun.

Alternative moral: Hooray for caffeine.

posted by Kelly @ 8:26 下午

Flora and Fauna

Chinese insects are, I believe, made of stronger stuff than the wimpy American ones I am accustomed to. There’s none of this “small pink somewhat itchy bump” nonsense when you encounter one of these bugs and come off the worse for it. The welts are huge, red, and massively itchy. The insect bite count is currently holding steady at about five right now (I just talked to Kevin, and he’s got more than ten!), but man are they intense. The two most awful are the red welt on my left hand, which sticks out about ¼ cm from the surface of my skin, itches like crazy and rubs up against simply everything, and a ginormous spider bite which I acquired during my first night in Beijing and which, though no longer very itchy, continues to look like some kind of repulsive cancerous growth. The picture really doesn’t do it justice – there are two raised yellowish welts where the pincers must have sunk it, surrounded by a red, pink, and purple constellation of speckles and burst capillaries which look something like the illustrations of the Andromeda galaxy nebulae in books of astronomy. I can only give thanks again and again for the fact that I live in Beijing and not some rural backwater where I would probably be invisible beneath a layer of swarming malarial bugs and itchy welts – I could have it so, so much worse. Still – even in the capital city, these Chinese bugs are fierce!

posted by Kelly @ 2:17 下午

The Big Day

Today is the first official day of HBA! I woke up around 4 am and gave up on sleeping by 4:45. I got up, made some breakfast, and tried to study a little for the placement test at 8 am. The test was absurdly hard, but since I’m only trying to place into the lowest level of Chinese offered here this summer, it was more of a formality than anything else. By the time the test was over at 10:30, I was hungry again, so a bunch of us went out for a second breakfast at this little restaurant out of the South Gate, on Xueyuan Rd. The food was okay, if a little over-priced. I met a bunch of new people, though, which was nice, especially since our time of speaking English was rapidly dwindling.

We returned to the dorm, then a few people and I went down to the grocery store, where I picked up some iced tea and some bottled water and juice. Then we all hung around on the 8^th floor (where all the second-year students live) talking to each other before our vocabulary was reduced to “Do you have any children?” “Probably the cucumber was not washed clean,” “Only if you write characters stroke by stroke can you remember them well,” and other useful phrases from our limited bank of Chinese knowledge, entirely contained within two small red textbooks. Soon it was time for what was quaintly termed “Convocation” on our itinerary – speeches from the head of the program, the president of BLCU, and a lady whose position I am unclear on, followed by a long orientation, the signing of the famous language pledge, and a meeting with our Zhong guo ge ge and jie jie – Chinese BLCU students who will show us around campus and the city, help us practice our Chinese, and give us some insight into Beijing’s youth culture. My jie jie’s name is Zhao4 Bo2 (Zhao rhymes with wow, Bo rhymes with awe), and she’s going to take me cell phone shopping. Whee!

After that, we had meetings with our teachers to tell us more about our specific classes (depending on our level), which took a whole bunch more time. After heading back to the dorm, we all hung around speaking awkward Chinese to one another (with lots of miming, giggling, and confusion) before splitting up to study for a while before dinner at the campus dining hall. Then it was back to the dorm for some more studying, which I took a break from to type this. I am wiped as anything but I already have an entire chapter to study and 45 characters to memorize for class tomorrow, so I’d better get down to business now!

posted by Kelly @ 9:16 下午

I am a master communicator

Today was so incredibly much fun (for most of the time, anyway) I hardly even know where to begin! It’s the first day when most kids have arrived on campus, but testing/orientation hasn’t started yet (that’s tomorrow) and we are all still allowed to speak English to one another. I met up with a couple of my favorite Chinese Ba/Bb kids, and met a ton of cool new Yalies. (The kids here are predominantly from Harvard and Yale, although I have met one person from Brown, one from UPenn, and two from UChicago, and got really excited as they made an exotic change from all us Harvard kids and Yalies alternatively joking about The Game last year [and Harvard’s great triumph!] and comparing first-year curricula.) I woke up super early (what else is new?) and had a very successful negotiation with the staff here, and wound up with my electricity fixed! Yay!

This is how it all went down: I fell asleep last night to the comfortingly familiar sounds of Harry Potter emanating from my laptop, but was awoken around 2 am to a series of panicky beeps which told me that my laptop had run out of battery power and was shutting down. This struck me as somewhat odd, given that my computer was plugged into the wall and so should not have been using its battery at all, but I shrugged it off, figuring that there had been another blackout in my part of the city and that the battery could charge itself up when the power came back on.

However, when I woke up for good a couple of hours later, my computer was still without power. Saddened, I put some water in the kettle for a cup of tea while I tried to figure things out. The kettle didn’t work, either. I tried the TV. No luck. I was momentarily baffled by the dial tone on the phone until I discovered the battery panel on the bottom of the unit – no electricity needed. The weird thing was that my overhead lights still worked, both in my room and in the bathroom. What on earth was going on? I did a little bit of studying by the light from the window while I hoped against hope that the electricity would come back on in my room. It didn’t.

Eventually, around 6 or 7, I headed down to the front desk to try to get to the bottom of this no electricity business, armed with a scrap of paper which I hoped would help me communicate my somewhat complicated power situation with the person behind the desk. This is what it says:

Kelly Heuer: Room 810

[picture of outlet] <-- these do not have electricity
but
the main light in the bathroom
and
the main lights in my room
and
the bathroom fan all have electricity

“Hello,” I said in Chinese to the girl behind the desk, “I have a problem with the electricity in my room.” And I handed her the sheet. She read it in about two seconds flat (it would have taken me at least a minute or two to read all those characters – I was jealous!) and asked me in Mandarin, “Only these [pointing at picture of outlet] don’t have electricity?” “Yes!” I replied, thrilled that she had cottoned on so quickly. “I’ll have the electrician come to look.” she told me. Would I be in my room at 8? I assured her that I would. I thanked her, all smiles, excited to have had a conversation in which I actually understood everything that was going on.

Of course, when the first and second electricians arrived at 8:10 and 8:20 respectively, I really had very little idea what they were saying to me, and skated by (as I usually try to) on smiles, nods, nervous giggling, and a bunch of “thank yous.” Still, now I know how to get my point across when I really need to: provided I have pen and paper and knowledge of the simplified characters needed, and until my on-the-spot Chinese skills improve from their current incredibly minimal level, putting the characters down on paper should be a decent way to let other people know what I need from them.

posted by Kelly @ 8:55 上午

My Room

My room is really, really nice. It’s sort of like living in a hotel – we are provided with a host of toiletries in the bathroom (even a toothbrush!), a kettle to boil water, a refrigerator, a teacup and tea, a trashcan that gets emptied every day, our own shower that gets cleaned every day, towels that get replaced every day, and bed linens that will presumably be replaced every week or so. This is really amazing – I haven’t had a long-term living situation where this much was done for me since I left home for college (well, I guess the summer I spent at home when I worked at Eduware, the software company of Edu-torture, might count – and then, of course, I not only had free food and clean towels, but got to see my family every day, a pretty big plus in my book). I don’t actually know if they make the beds for you here, since I’ve woken up early enough every day so far to just make my own bed, but I bet they do. [EDIT: they do, just messily.] It’s true that the walls are a little dirty, my kettle is a little rusty, my bathroom needs to be evacuated of all contents except me and my shampoo/ conditioner/ body wash whenever I take a shower, because the tiny bathroom literally is my shower stall, with a head mounted in a corner on the wall and a drain in the middle of the floor which never fully dries, and everything smells faintly of cigarette smoke [EDIT:or sewage, a smell which arises powerfully from the toilet and shower drain every other day or so for a few hours], but I am really just incredibly impressed with how nice the accommodations are for us by Chinese standards. A couple of students have been complaining about, among other things, the scratchiness of the towels, and are looking for places to buy nicer ones, which strikes me as entirely unnecessary. If scratchy towels that get replaced with clean ones for you every day are all you have to complain about, you’re doing pretty well. Please, people. I think we’ll survive.

posted by Kelly @ 6:22 下午

Beijing by the Numbers

Me

American mosquito bites: 1

Chinese mosquito bites: 3

Chinese spider bites: 1

Times I’ve eaten something without having a clue what it was: 7

Times I’ve eaten meat: 6 (I think… see above)

Times I’ve been mistaken for a German tourist: 3

Times I’ve had to ask a Chinese person how to say something: 5

Times I’ve dropped the H-bomb: 1 (probably won’t do that again…)

Travel

Taxi rides taken: 4

Honest taxi drivers encountered: 2

Hours spent on plane: 14 ½

Hours spent in the air: 13 ½

Hours spent in American airports: 7

Hours spent in Chinese airports: 1 ½

Hours slept so far: 15

Hours awake so far: 68 and counting…

Sara’s apartment

Toilets: 2

Working toilets: 1 (the other one is in a perpetual state of flush. What a waste of water!)

Sinks: 3

Working sinks: 2

Washing machines: 1

Dryers: 0 (there are no dryers in China. Weird, right?)

Beds: 10 (5 bunk beds)

Mattresses: 6

Computers: 1

Rolling blackouts: 3

My dorm room

Cans of tuna: 14

Granola bars: 31

Bananas: 3

Bottles of water: 7

Rolling blackouts: 2

Chinese books: 6

Pirated DVDs: 3

posted by Kelly @ 3:21 下午

It is 4 am and I am awake!

The Gold Street Market was a ton of fun. After a brief altercation with a less-than-honest cab driver, we hopped out at the Yixiang Hotel, where Brentan and I cashed some traveler’s checks. Oddly enough, the exchange rate had gone up from when I’d exchanged my American cash earlier in the morning – something I hadn’t really thought was possible, especially since the yuan is pegged to the US dollar – but on reflection I guess it made sense. In any case, the service charge for cashing traveler’s checks more than made up for the slight difference in exchange rate. Then it was off to the market! We walked through the Lido Hotel (gorgeous!) on our way to a few DVD stores (sketchy!), then walked down the street to the big Gold Street Market. I picked up a pretty amusing pamphlet outside – “Sunny Gold Street Happy Life The place make your Chinese dream come to true!” proclaimed the front – then went inside for my first taste of the overwhelming pushiness of Chinese market vendors.

Here, you have to be careful not to show too much interest in an item unless you really want it, because the vendors want your business very, very badly and will not let up on you if they think they can sell you something. Asking the price of something is not, as in the States, a simple inquiry, but rather an invitation to the vendor to begin bidding with you, and once you begin bidding, you continue until you agree on a price, which pretty much means you need to pay the agreed-upon price. All the vendors will try to convince you that they are giving you a great deal – “for you, I give special price!” and various reasons for this are given “…because you are a student, because you have such a pretty face, because your Chinese is so good, etc., etc., etc.” They will try to persuade you that you cannot find a lower price “other vendors charge you $A, I only charge you $B” or the perhaps slightly more honest “other foreigners I charge $X, for you I only charge $Y because you speak Chinese to me” and so on. You just need to be strong and tell them wo bu yao (I don’t want it) and walk away if they are getting too pushy. There is no sense in buying something you don’t want to appease a pushy vendor out of politeness’ sake. Or so I told myself.

Something that the lady at the DVD store said to us as we were bargaining with her really got me, though. At increased pressure from the United States and other countries whose intellectual property rights are violated when the Chinese pirate their DVDs, Chinese police have begun to crack down on the trade in uncopyrighted media materials. Business is not as good as it used to be for DVD vendors, and prices are on the rise. As we tried to bargain the sellers down an extra 10 kuai, the woman we were primarily speaking with said pleadingly, “You have to understand, to you it (the extra 10 kuai) is nothing, but to us it is everything.” And, of course, she is completely right. Our money goes so far here it’s hard to reconcile the desire to save money (or not get ripped off) with the realization that our savings of 10 or 15 kuai is almost nothing in American terms (about a dollar or two) yet mean so much to the Chinese people living here whose standard of living is so much lower and whose purchasing power in Beijing is so small. Of course I know this is not an open invitation to get ripped off, to settle for higher prices because someone appears poor or spins a sob story – the same goes in the United States – but it’s a difficult balance to strike, in moral terms.

Anyway, right now it’s almost 5 am here (and yes, I’m awake… thank you, jet lag) and I’m super-excited because today is the day we move into our HBA dorms! The building opens at 12 for students to get in, and I’ll probably arrive about an hour or so after that. After lunch, Sara, Brentan and I are all heading into Beijing together because Sara wants to show Brentan the Wudaokou market near my university and I, obviously, will be moving in. This isn’t goodbye, though – Sara and I have lots of plans to hang out on the weekends (either in Beijing or at her peaceful apartment, which sounds good to me because the food here is amazing). I am so excited – I can tell already that this is going to be an incredible summer.

posted by Kelly @ 4:35 上午

The Long Road to China

The long trip to China deserves a long post to describe it, especially since classes haven't started yet and I have lots of time to post! My father said to me before I left: “What a long, strange journey it’s going to be.” He was absolutely right! The travel was strange at many points, and most definitely long, but on the whole was safe, fun, and could hardly have gone more smoothly.

Pre-departure

My mom, dad, sister, and I arrived at JFK Airport a little after 12:30, about four hours before my plane was due to depart. After checking my luggage, I was informed that the plane was delayed by three hours. Ouch. With seven hours to kill before take-off, my family and I got some lunch, roamed about the airport, went on a quest for raisins (special request for Sara, my amazing hostess), played dots, and generally enjoyed our remaining time together. All good things must come to an end, however, and this did too: before I knew it, I was heading through the security area and luggage check. With one last wave at my family, I set off down the corridor to find Gate 7.

I found it pretty easily, and settled down to wait with a bag of soy crisps and my book of survival travel phrases. I had my first experience with what Kevin and others have described as the pushy desperation that often characterizes large masses of Chinese people in official situations. As soon as the flight attendants began boarding the plane, the waiting passengers mobbed the entry area, lined up even as the staff tried to cordon off the area to hold them back. There were a number of announcements made asking people to please resume their seats – in Chinese, of course, so it took me a while to figure out what was going on – but my confusion was not helped by the fact that most of the people clearly ignored the requests and continued to crowd the entrance area. Even when it was clearly announced that we would be boarding by row number – not by who managed to shove their way to the front first – people continued to crowd, and I had to shove and “laojia” (excuse me) my way up to finally stumble on to the airplane.

The flight

I found my seat (35K) towards the back of the plane: a window seat, which I’d requested. I had a lot of time to ruminate upon the pros and cons of window seats during the 13 ½ hour flight, so here is what I came up with:

Pros:

• You get to look out the window (duh). This is fun for take-off and landing, and, in my opinion, even for those parts of the flight during which you are above the clouds. Let’s face it, clouds are pretty sweet-looking, especially from a new perspective (above).

• You get to control when the window is opened or closed. This is awesome for those times during the flight that you want to adjust the amount of light by you in a more gradual way. Now, circumstances might be different for different airlines, but on my Air China flight, we all had to put the windows down for “nighttime” (even though it was totally bright outside the plane), which made things nice and dark for the people who were trying to sleep. People like me who don’t sleep well in strange and uncomfortable situations (like being wedged between a plane window with sticky stuff on it and a middle-aged Chinese man with bad breath and a cough) benefit by being able to adjust the light in their little cubbyhole of space, because, at least on Air China planes, the overhead lights are really bright and shine on everybody in the row, and it would have been pretty rude to drench everyone in such bright light.

• This one is important: you have a place to lean up against that isn’t the person next to you. As you may have guessed from the above bullet point, I pretty much spent minimal time sleeping, but I was far more comfortable being able to lean on the wall of the plane and curl up to sleep (or sit there with my eyes closed until an appendage fell asleep) than to lean on the Chinese guy next to me, which would have been my only option had I been sitting anywhere else.

Cons:

• Okay, this one is huge: you can’t get up without stepping over everyone else in your row. My flight was non-stop, 13 ½ hours, and I was only able to get up to walk around and whatnot twice. The other times I just had to stand up where I was (which is difficult, because on my plane the seats were so close together that standing up was more of a diagonal than strictly vertical task) and sort of stretch unobtrusively. At various points during the journey I really had to go to the bathroom and was so desperately thirsty that my throat was all dry, but could do nothing about it without literally climbing over the two slumbering Chinese men next to me, which, far from being awkward and rude, was just impossible given the way the seats were. During the “night,” when all the windows were closed (except mine, heh heh) and the movies were turned off, the flight attendants also stopped coming around to give people water, so I just had to sit next to my sleeping, coughing neighbor alternately looking out the window wondering if we were over the North Pole, trying to read my list of traditional to simplified character radicals, and peering over the sea of sleeping people, hoping against hope that some nice stewardess would come by and rescue me from my dehydrated misery. (One did, eventually.Yay!)

• It’s also a little bit harder to talk to the stewardesses or tell when one is coming by when you are so far from the aisle. Especially if some clarification would be nice (i.e., could I have a glass of water and a Sprite? [no idea; I just had one at a time], does the fried rice have meat in it? [yes, and shrimp too; but I ate it anyway]), and no one speaks English to you, being in closer proximity is a huge, huge plus. Not only can you ask more questions, but you can point to things to help get your point across (i.e., I’d like some of that [that being, for instance, a bottle of something looked like V8 that the guy next to me was drinking. It smelled pretty good, but I have no idea how to say V8 in Mandarin (hong xi shi …?) so settled for Sprite, which I at least knew how to say, although it’s probably not the healthiest choice of breakfast beverage]).

The in-flight movies were interestingly mixed. There was a good deal of news coverage in Mandarin, some information about the World Cup, then The Chronicles of Narnia (in English with Chinese subtitles). Then they turned all the movies off, which was sad, and the screen was blank for many hours in the darkened cabin where I sat, hemmed in by my sleeping neighbors, and thought longingly of water. With about 2 ½ hours left in the flight, the lights came back on and we were treated to a video of an Air China stewardess showing in-seat stretches and exercises we could do to stay limber, followed inexplicably by a Discovery Channel documentary about the wildlife of the Victoria Nile (again, in English with Chinese subtitles).

Arrival

Finally getting to Beijing was exciting. Naturally, it was only during the last hour of the flight that I really became tired enough to sleep, but I definitely didn’t want to miss a second of my first landing in a foreign country! There was a bit of turbulence before touchdown, and I think I saw some lightning, which was really cool. Aside from a large number of crying babies, a lady in the cabin being noisily and almost continuously sick into her airsickness bag, and the increasingly pungent bad breath of my neighbor, the last twenty minutes of the flight were pure magic. The lights of Beijing sprawled out beneath us, moving and flickering like a circuit board, with channels and lines of lights reminiscent of some giant silicon chip. White, yellow, green, red; circles and bends; grids of little pinpricks; the slow sweep of headlights along tiny highways below us – it was breathtaking. I popped a piece of gum for the descent (my neighbor requested one as well – why hadn’t I thought of this, like, 13 hours earlier?) and stared out the window. The landing was smooth as silk, and I joked along with a Chinese couple eager to try out their accented English on a foreigner as we disembarked.

Beijing Airport

The airport was fairly simple – as Kevin had told me, it was neither so large nor so confusing as JFK, despite being the international airport in China’s capital city. All tiredness forgotten, I charged up the stairs and down the hallways that led to the Health and Quarantine area, Customs, and finally, Baggage Claim. The line for customs was long, and although I exchanged a few words with the girl in a pink Yankees sweatshirt on line with me in the “Foreigners” queue, I found her, as I sadly find many New Yorkers I meet outside of New York, somewhat rude and pushy. She complained about the length slowness of the queue, the inefficiency of Chinese bureaucracy and China in general, and then tried to cut me in line. (I didn't let her. Ha!) The couple from Oberlin a few people ahead of me seemed much nicer, although too far away to engage in conversation. None of this really mattered, though, because about 40 minutes later I had claimed my luggage and was heading out into the great exit area where I found Sara at last!! I felt terrible because my flight had been so delayed – after working all day, she had come to the airport and had to spend three extra hours waiting – what a good friend! We quickly hailed a taxi with Sara’s expert Chinese skills, and soon found ourselves at her apartment.

Sara’s Apartment

Sara’s apartment complex is really, really nice – not much furniture, but a kitchen, two bathrooms, and three bedrooms, where she hosts China Care volunteers (including a friendly 16-year-old Virginian named Brentan) and has both lunch and dinner cooked for her by a friendly Chinese lady! (Bean: her name is Ping! No joke!!) Sara and I hung out for a while before I took a shower in the beautiful red-tiled bathroom and finally, mercifully, fell asleep. I’m still pretty jet-lagged (and woke up at 6 this morning to bright, beautiful sunlight) but was really lucky to be able to sleep at relatively normal hours according to this time zone, which is, as I think I’ve mentioned somewhere else on this page, exactly opposite from EST – 12 pm here is 12 am back home. Sara got up around seven, and after a leisurely breakfast we went to a grocery store near her apartment, and to the bank, where I exchanged cash for some brightly colored Chinese yuan.

The walk to and from the store and bank is along a beautiful, tree-lined highway. The traffic is relatively light out here on the Sixth Ring Road, which is basically “the suburbs” of Beijing. The street also has separate lanes on either side for bicycle traffic, and sidewalks for foot traffic (like us). Sara was telling me about how she has really gotten to see a lot of different types of Chinese life in her three trips to this country: in 2004 she got a taste of rural life working in an orphanage, while the summer of 2005 gave her some idea of student life in Beijing (albeit foreign student life). This summer in the suburbs gives still another picture of the daily life of Chinese people of all ages – walks in the park, trips to the grocery store and fruit market (which we visited this afternoon and acquired one cucumber, one mango, two bananas, and some kind of small green melon), visits to the post office, and so on.

Tonight

Tonight, Sara, Brentan, and I are heading to the Gold Street Market, a 30 kuai taxi ride away, to pick up some DVDs and to see what a real market (not just a produce one) is all about in China. It should be really fun – Brentan doesn’t speak a word of Chinese (well, except for ni hao and xie xie), and while I can usually think of a way to get my point across I have a lot of trouble understanding what people are saying to me. Sara can obviously both understand a ton and speak perfect Mandarin (as well as bargain like nobody’s business), so Brentan and I are in good hands. Actually, Sara and I are in good hands with Brentan as well, since he is 6’2 and muscular-looking. (Sara and I are both decidedly on the diminutive side.) Come to think of it, I don’t really bring anything to the group except additional people power, making us a group of three rather than two, which, let’s face it, doesn’t take a whole lot of skill. Oh well.

posted by Kelly @ 8:13 下午

Final days...

Hiking through Long Island, watching Disney movies, spending time with adopted aunts -- what better way to spend my last days in the United States? I am having an amazing time; I can only hope that China will be as magical as spending time with the people I love here, back home.

posted by Kelly @ 7:29 上午

Good times with the fam

Today was awesome. Lots of fun and wonderful stuff happened...

The day started off on a good note as I woke up to discover my mother in the process of baking apple crisp (thanks mom!! :). We all hung out with my sister, planning trips to visit colleges over the summer, before splitting up to go our separate ways: my mom gardening, dad fixing something outside, and Amy and I doing some more college-brainstorming and getting dressed for a trip down to Port Jefferson for some shopping.

Before we reached our destination, however, we picked up a fruit platter from Stop & Shop to bring to the nurses at the hospital where my mother works (and I used to volunteer). It was very very nice to see the ladies on my mother's floor, many of whom I've known (by sight, at least) for years. My mom's friend Dorothy, who is just about the nicest person alive, gave me a going-away card and a present of chopsticks and a little bowl to take with me to China. Dorothy is from Taiwan, and shares my mother's fear of the unsanitary conditions of the Mainland. It was so unbelievably nice of her to give me the present -- I'm definitely making her a thank you right away!!


After that, Amy and I headed down to Port Jefferson, where we picked up a bunch of awesome books at the "Good Times Bookstore," which is very sadly closing after many years in business. One upside of this is that all the books were 70% off, so we got seven books for $17.82. After all that book-shopping, we were a little hungry, so we picked up some wraps from Tigerlily (this awesome vegetarian/vegan/alternative food place) and some frappuccinos at Starbucks and read for a little while. After a stop at the Gap (where Amy acquired a cute skirt and two awesome tops, and I tried on some adorable Bermuda shorts which were sadly not available in my size in the color I wanted), we walked around down by the docks for a while: picturesque, if absurdly windy, as I am sure the pictures can attest.


Yeah, it was pretty windy.

Anyway, after that, we went to Staples to get some school stuff for Amy (for her classes next year... I think my deep and abiding love of office supplies must be a familial trait). I exercised extreme self-restraint and purchased nothing, although this is probably only because we didn't hit the highligher aisle. We drove home singing along to Sean Paul, and then played Trivial Pursuit with my mom and dad. If you ask me, Amy and I are at a bit of a disadvantage in playing this game since we have the "Baby Boomer" edition set of cards, and nearly all the questions aside from the Science category are somewhat dated (most notably Arts & Entertainment, although most of the categories, since they are by definition relevant to a particular generation -- not our own -- refer to things particular to our parents' time frame).

The funny thing about these games is that we almost invariably devolve into flipping through the cards to help each other out, searching for questions we know the person being quizzed will know the answer to, or providing copious hints about the answer (my mom is particularly guilty of this). My dad, on the other hand, gets really excited flipping through the cards and will ask questions at random just because he thinks the answer is interesting. After my dad won the game, we all sat around asking each other the questions, because Trivial Pursuit is just awesome and the fun wasn't over yet. A question about Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sparked a discussion about the author, the novel, the movie, the historical context, and the anti-psychiatric movement of the 1960s and 70s (roughly in that order).

Anyway, then my mom, dad, and sister all went to bed, and I sat down with a bowl of apple crisp to write this. I am way way excited to be leaving in basically two days, but sad, too: days like this remind me of how much I love my family and how lucky I am to have them around. I will miss them all a ton when I'm in China, probably more than I already miss them when I am up at school. I'm already looking forward to returning in August to spend another month with them.

posted by Kelly @ 10:38 上午

FOUR DAYS!!

Four days four days four days four days!!!!!!!! I am so beyond excited. Packing and so on today... hooray!

posted by Kelly @ 1:07 上午

grrrr

So, I had an entire post written here, and it momentarily appeared on the blog -- then my computer froze, and now apparently it has been lost forever.

Rawr. I'm too tired to retype the whole thing again... it wasn't too important anyway I guess. Here is the gist: Today it rained, I went shopping, talked to Kevin, and went out to dinner with friends. Kevin is good, friends are fun, shopping was expensive, the rain is pervasive and made me very damp.

El fin.

posted by Kelly @ 1:27 下午

Lists!

Okay, everybody loves lists. By everybody, I probably mostly only mean me, but since this is my blog, I think that's fair. This post contains a bunch of boring lists, because people like me get a thrill out of making these lists so we can cross each neat little line off and feel good about our day. So, without further ado: lists!

Things to buy (here):

• luggage (at Macy's, on sale. going tomorrow.)
• Immodium AD (at CVS. ewwww I dread the future.)
• acidopholous (probably also at CVS. ditto on the above comment.)
• Traveler's Checks (at the bank. probably also tomorrow.)
• memory card for my camera (best buy?)
  

Things to buy (in China):

• alarm clock
• notebooks
• cell phone
• ice cube tray
• calling card

Words that I definitely, totally, emphatically and most decidedly need to know before boarding the plane on Tuesday:

• hu4 zhao4 (passport)
• qian1 zheng4 (visa)
• bei1 (north)
• nan2 (south)
• dong1 (east)
• xi1 (west)
  
• da3 di1 (to take a cab)
• da3 biao3 (turn on the meter, in a cab -- something I need to make sure the cab driver does so he doesn't rip me off)
  
• chi1 su4 (vegetarian)
• kai1 shui3 (boiled water -- the only kind of water I'm supposed to drink)
  
• luu3 xing2 zhi1 piao4 (Traveler's Checks)
• zi4 dong4 qu3 kuan3 ji1 (ATM)
  
• shou3 ji1 (cell phone)
• guo2 ji4 chang2 tu2 (international long distance)
• dian4 hua4 ka3 (calling card)

Also:

• The address to tell the cab driver (when I leave Sara's and go to HBA!):

• It's kind of a lot to remember, but I'll have it memorized before I get there... I hope.

That might be enough listing for now. Haha, this has got to be the most boring post in the history of Blogspot.

P.S. Kevin, I miss you!!
This is sort of like a picture of us, if we had been born a couple of millenia earlier than the stellar year of 1985:
I love you! Stay safe!!!

posted by Kelly @ 6:29 上午

T minus 9 days and counting

Well, I'm back on Long Island for the time being, and enjoying the vegetative atmosphere (both literally and figuratively: in addition to vegging out on the couch watching Law and Order, I also communed with nature today when my family took a trip out east to the Peconic River Herb Farm, which was gorgeous as usual). Right now in New York it is 4:35 pm on Sunday the 4th, while in Beijing it is already 4:35 am on Monday the 5th. According to my expert calculations, this means that Beijing is exactly 12 hours ahead of us here in the Eastern Standard Time Zone. This spells some serious jet lag, but at least I'll have a little bit of time to recuperate and sleep and whatnot before I have to move into the dorms and start my all-Chinese-all-the-time immersion. Eep!

My schedule for the summer is as follows:

Present-June 12th. Loaf around Miller Place, study a little Chinese and GRE stuff, engage in desultory packing, but mostly just space out and have fun.

Monday, June 12th. Frantic, frantic packing. (Also: Happy birthday Valeria!)

Tuesday, June 13th, 4:30 pm (EST). Depart JFK Airport. (Flight: 16.5 hours nonstop)

Wednesday, June 14th, 6:00 pm (PRC). Arrive Beijing Airport, meet Sara!

June 14th-June16th. Stay in Sara's apartment, sleep, see the city. Whee!

Friday, June 16th. Dorms at Beijing Yuyuan Wenhua Daxue (Beijing Language and Culture University) open. I will move in on this day.

Saturday, June 17th. Orientation. At this point, I am still allowed to speak English.

Sunday, June 18th. Placement test, Language Pledge, all that fun stuff. The program begins!

June 19th-July 14th. Business as usual.

Saturday, July 15th. KEVIN COMES TO BEJING!! Happiness ensues.

July 17th-21st. This is the week of "Field Work" or "Social Study," which I will ostensibly spend studying Beijing's art and architecture, but actually will be devoted to seeing the sights of Beijing with Kevin and ditching everyone else as much as possible.

Wednesday, July 19th. Kevin leaves. Great sadness.

July 21st-August 17th. Business as usual again.

Friday, August 18th. Last day of classes!! This is sad also, although it will be nice to go home.

Saturday, August 19th. Frantic packing commences; I will wonder how on earth I've managed to accumulate so much stuff in just nine weeks.

Sunday, August 20th, 1:00 pm (PRC). Depart Beijing Airport. (Flight: 16.5 hours nonstop).

Sunday, August 20th, 2:30 pm (EST). Arrive JFK Airport, meet family!!! I am home at last.

August 20th-September 15th. Soak up the family presence and American ambiance; hope that I can still speak English. Begin studying for the GRE (oh, no!) and applying to graduate school.

Friday, September 15th. Back to school in Cambridge. Summer ends at last.

That is the general plan for the summer months: probably a bit more fun than last summer (working INSANE [but somewhat fun, in a vaguely maochistic way] hours in Cambridge at Let's Go) and wayyyy more fun than the summer before that (working two hours away from home in Long Island at Eduware, educational software company of doom). The culture immersion will doubtless be amazing, although the workload is pretty intense too, from what I've heard. Each day of class at HBA begins at 8:00 am with two hours of lecture, two hours of drill session, 45-minute individual sessions in the afternoon, and office hours in the evening. When I'm going to get to the Beijing Library to do research for the paper I'm being funded to write is very unclear. Please please please let them have the books I need in English!!

I'm a little worried about the food in China, as I border on emetophobia in my attitude toward puking (whether in self or others) and apparently this is pretty inevitable. Also, I have heard very very mixed things about the availability of vegetarian food there, so this is an added concern. I think I'm just going to have to accept the inevitability of some unpleasant food experiences and just grin and bear it. I was really put off, though, by the attitude of this one lady who was running the mandatory "East Asia Study Abroad" meeting I had to go to at school -- when asked about traveler's diarrhea (ew, I feel gross even writing it) and other concerns she blew it off, saying first that it didn't happen too much, and then that "it's great, you'll just lose weight and be healthy!" Um, last time I checked, losing weight because you are puking and starving wasn't exactly healthy. Seriously, who hired this woman?

Anyway, I'm sure I'll be fine. I'm more excited about things I need to learn, do, and get while I'm in China. I'll be visiting a host family on a few weekends (I think) so I'm bringing some Harvard and New York memorabilia as a thank-you gift, which I'm told is usually a big hit. I also really want to study Tai Chi and calligraphy while I'm there. I also have been commissioned (along with Sara) to purchase furnishings for our amazing room in Adams next year, and I plan to pick up (1) rainboots, (2) a North Face jacket, (3) some pretty scarves, and (5) a jade bracelet to match my necklace, at some of the markets they have. SO EXCITED!!

Right now, I'm trying to juggle a bit of GRE prep with cramming on "Survival Vocabulary" from the HBA handbook, and my brain is going a little crazy from the sudden innundation of new words in both languages. I've made flashcards of all the Chinese vocab and I have a sheet of 65 fun new vocab words (inveigle? chary? obfuscate? quotidian? penury? okay, I do know what the last three mean at least) for the GRE, but it's not the most gripping stuff. Frankly, I'd rather watch Much Ado About Nothing, which is what I plan to do tonight.

Whoops, dinner's ready. I'm off!

posted by Kelly @ 4:36 上午