A new perspective

It's amazing how much can change in a day.
My thoughts this morning: why am I here? Why did I think I could study abroad in China? When can I go home?
Now: can't keep a smile off my face.


Ok end of blog post, just kidding let me flesh this out a bit. The last few days have been both overwhelming and rewarding. The chinese course is really intense. Our schedule Monday through Thursday is:


8-9:10 - Lecture, which has 10 people. There is a quiz at the beginning
9:20-10:10 - Drill 1, which has 4 people
10:20-11 - Drill 2, same 4 people
11:10-12:30 - 1 on 1 session, during which each of us gets 20 minutes with a professor


The student to teacher ratio here is really impressive. For the 30 2nd year students (that's me), there are 9 professors! On every Friday, we have a 2 hour written test, followed by an oral test. Talk about stressful. Since this course is designed to fit a year of chinese into 8 weeks, each day of class/homework is equivalent to what we did in a week at Duke. So in the afternoons/evenings, I have at least 3 hours of work to finish. I never thought I would have to memorize 50 characters a night, but here I am after two days of class, already with 150 flashcards made up. To give you an idea of the workload, here's my to do list from Monday: learn 50 characters, written homework assignment, record myself reading a passage and email it to the teacher by 9 pm, listen to the vocab and text audio files, read the text multiple times, prepare for meeting with language partner, meeting with language partner (1 hour), write up for time spent with language partner (100 characters), read the grammar notes for class tomorrow. Today I went to a nearby bakery that has a lot of tables in it, and worked there from 2-5. It was actually really nice, because my desk chair here is not too comfortable. I picked the studying back up at 10:30 and studied until now, 11:30ish. And I'll wake up tomorrow morning at 6:30 to review characters before the quiz.


Each of us was assigned a language partner. The language partners are Chinese students at the university, who are paid to spend one hour Monday-Thursday with us. My language partner is really nice, but I have a significant amount of trouble understanding her. She speaks fast, and uses a lot of vocab that I don't know. That being said, I'm already finding it easier to understand her after two days of meeting, which is a great sign. Tonight, she took me to her dorm room and showed me around. I met two of her 5 roommates. They were really nice! I introduced myself (in chinese of course), and they were really genuinely excited to meet me. Each of them wrote down their names, email addresses, and phone numbers on a sticky note to give me, and one wrote that I should call her if I ever need any help! As an example of how I don't understand my language partner, tonight at the end of our meeting she asked me when I usually eat dinner, for the purposes of planning our meeting tomorrow. After asking her to repeat the question twice, I said seven. We continued to talk about where we'd meet, etc., and at the end of the conversation I asked her what time we were meeting, because I hadn't heard/understood. And she said seven. So basically she scheduled the meeting for the one time I said I was busy. But it's ok, I'm learning here that you have to be really flexible and just roll with things.


For this summer program, we all took a language pledge, which means that we are not allowed to speak any english to each other inside or outside of the classroom. I was really worried about that, because since I have only taken Chinese for a year, my vocabulary is pretty limited. I understand the purpose of only speaking in Chinese, but some of us have been speaking English to each other...I mean we have three plus hours of class a day, and then at least three more hours of studying, and then a one hour meeting with a language partner that is completely in Chinese. I think we're getting sufficient practice.


Yesterday, two of my friends and I decided to try out one of the three student dining halls on campus. It is quite complicated, and I am still very excited that we managed to figure it out, and eat lunch there among all the other Chinese students. In retrospect, the system really isn't too complicated, but we were only speaking in Chinese, and when we would ask the workers questions they obviously were only speaking Chinese too. Some things definitely got lost in translation. I'm perfecting my "blank stare" face that I make when I don't understand I word of what someone just said to me. I've gotten pretty good at it to say the least. Anyways, I got a rather large bowl of noodles, which were really good, for less than a dollar. Well worth the confusion.


While we're on the topic of food, tonight my friends Anna, Allison, and I walked down the street to find a restaurant for dinner. We decided to go to a place that looked pretty homey, not too nice but filled with people eating. To our dismay, the menu only had pictures and characters, no english. Allison is a third year Chinese student, and Anna is fourth year, so they are considerably more advanced than me. May I also add they are white (Allison is blond, Anna has red hair). So first of all, I'm pretty sure our waitress was confused when I didn't speak a word of Chinese, and they took over order and speaking to her. She was clearly amused at our attempts to order what we wanted, and specify what kinds of meat we wanted in our dumplings. Dinner was good, but everything became hilarious for some reason once we asked for the check. Basically we called her over, but then none of us said anything because we couldn't remember the word for check. So she laughed at us (in a nice, friendly way), and eventually one of us said we wanted to "pay money." She brought the check over, and then we were confused about which bills to use, and how to divvy it up. She continued laughing at us. By this time, the guys at the table next to us were staring too. Then, we asked for her to box up the rest of the dumplings, and she brought a clear plastic bag. So then Anna specified that we wanted an actual box, and she laughed at us again and brought one over. At this point, whenever she would walk by our table, she would look at us and have to cover her mouth because she was laughing so hard; trust me, we were laughing just as much. We eventually got up and left. On the way out, one of the guys at the table next to us said "bye bye!" in a really silly voice. It was hilarious. And then to the waitress I said "mingtian jian" which means "see you tomorrow!" She laughed again, probably because those were the first two words I'd spoken to her all night. We will definitely be going back.


A random tidbit: the other day we were wondering if Chinese people eat dinner late, so I googled "when do Chinese people eat dinner?" and yahoo answers said "racist bastard." Haha so helpful.


To connect this rambling blog post to the first paragraph, today has been really good, between studying in the bakery, the hilarious dinner, and getting to meet my conversation partner's roommates. I realized, while walking back from my language partner's dorm (with a smile on my face), that I really like it here, despite the incredibly tough schedule and workload. Beijing is an amazing place, and I am so lucky to have the opportunity to study here for two months. Hopefully I'll be able to make the most of it. Now, it's bedtime so I can get my 6 hours!