there are some pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/i.like.parentheses
After we all arrived at the Beijing airport (all of us on time! A perhaps unprecedented event), we drove over to the Tsinghua University (pronounced “Ching Hwa”) campus where we would be staying for a few days. It was pretty nice - I had thought we were going to be in something like student dorms, but instead we were in a hotel (private bathrooms! Swoon...).
The first morning in Beijing I woke early and was restless and jetlagged, so I went for a walk. There was this group of mostly older people across the street in this beautiful pondish-parky area having a little ballroom and traditional Chinese dance club. It was awesome (they were awesome; they were smiling and friendly and dancing! (I like seeing people dance)). There was also a guy standing on top of a hill singing in one of those neat traditional styles that I should know the name of by now but don't, and statues of Confucius and other people whose names I couldn't read because I can't read. That was neat. And ducks! Little ducks. And their butts, while they submerged their heads looking for tasty treats. And a single duckling! So cute. I totally fell in love with the ladies dancing in the park, though. I ended up going over one morning and sitting on a bench and talking to a couple of them. In Chinese! It was amazing. They were so nice; I think I awoke their motherly instinct. They said I should dance, even if I didn't think I was very good at it; that that didn't matter. I love them. *laughs* No, really, they were the first real Chinese people that I talked to on my own, and they were so friendly (and I was so terrified).
In Beijing we mostly went around on tours of culturally significant places - we visited Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, Beijing University... lots of places in a very short amount of time and they all sort of run together in my memory (this is not a satisfactory description of these places, but it has been too long now for me to remember everything well).
After Beijing, we took a giant fancy bus to the city of Chengde in Hebei province. On the way we visited the Great Wall, and I was blown away. I wasn't expecting to be very deeply impressed - it is such an obvious thing to go visit, and I thought that, after all, it was just a wall - but whoa. Holy whoa. I am deeply impressed; I was awe-struck. It is enormous - not so much particularly tall most of the time, but it stretches so far and winds through the mountains with such twists and turns that seeing it meandering along the hills beyond the horizon filled me with wonder. It is steep in places, and crumbles in places, and the landscape around it is breathtaking and beautiful. It looks like mountains forever, and on the far side of the wall, it is like there may never have been people. I can't understand how hordes of Mongolians could make it through those mountains in a state fit to attack cities.
On the bus, Zhao Laoshi told us the story of Meng Jiang Nu and how her tears tore down the Great Wall. The story made me feel the sadness of the place and brought home the reality of the building of the wall and the human work and tragedies that went into it. It is an amazing creation and a beautiful thing. The wall itself is beautiful in its winding and its majesty, in its status as a symbol of strength and of China. The wall is amazing, but it is also such a terrible thing. It inspires awe with its greatness, but it brings to mind the connection between “awe” and “awful,” the fear and sadness that go hand in hand with the reverence and respect.
There were these amazing women at the Wall - they are the street vendors who follow tourists trying to sell t-shirts and photo books. They're like... I dunno; they followed us the whole way when we were going up the hill to get to the wall and all along the wall (which required a fair amount of energy, really), and they'd, like, offer to hold our water bottles while we took pictures or point out cool things. There was one lady who stayed around the group of people I was with, and she was so helpful and friendly that I don't know or really even care if she just wanted to sell a few more photo books; she seemed like a perfectly good-natured, kind person. She asked if I wanted a book, and she asked if I wanted a t-shirt, and when I said no to both, she didn't ask about it any more. She kept following us and offering help or conversation or advice about what areas of the wall offered the most spectacular views, and when some of my classmates accidentally threw a frisbee off the edge of the platform where we were waiting, she went out to get it for us. And like, I dunno. People tended not to be very courteous to or respectful of the random street vendors we encountered, and it made me frustrated and want to be extra-nice to them.
Money and having it and knowing when and how to use it have sort of been issues for me lately - the food allowance that Zhao-laoshi gives us every week is more than sufficient to cover our needs (we are most of the way through our midterm break of traveling and I haven't yet needed to spend any of my own money). And our instinct - all of us, I think - is to feel like people are trying to cheat us, trying to overcharge us, whatever. Maybe they are (certainly at least some people are trying to charge us more than they would people who weren't obviously foreign tourists). But like... it's generally still not enough to make significant differences to us, I think. If I pay an extra five kuai for a t-shirt, that's still less than a dollar and it doesn't really matter to me? And I don't mean that bargaining is bad or that we should all accept whatever price they quote us, just that maybe people get a little more riled up than they need to sometimes? I don't know. Or, like... people on the streets who are asking for money. I am traveling and am in an unfamiliar place where I am foreign and strange and everything around me is foreign and strange, and it makes me want to shrink into myself and be closed and suspicious, and that makes me ashamed, I think. Well, no, that makes me behave in ways that make me feel shame. At home, if I have a little money in my pocket when someone asks, I will give it to them (not always, but often enough), but here, where it costs me much less to do the same, it took me a month before I did anything but shake my head and look uncomfortable. Like... agh. It doesn't cost me anything, basically, and for a while I was barely even having the courtesy to make eye contact. So that's been a problem.
Anyway. In Inner Mongolia, we rode horses through the grasslands and climbed the hills to see the openness of the sky and the hills and to feel the wind and the clearer air. We spent the night in a yurt and ate mutton around a fire that burned like crazy and made me feel like believing in dragons. Every person we met was welcoming and kind; they set up a karaoke party for us, which was good-natured but a little awkward - we are Carleton students, so too self-conscious to dance, and there was so much space to fill with only our thirty people. But the people organizing it were totally doing it for our benefit, because they thought it was something that young people like us would enjoy, so we laughed and did the limbo-stick-dance-thingy.
I loved Inner Mongolia. Our bus was stopped on the road because there were too many cows in the way for us to pass. There were no city lights at night; there was just the sky and the sparks rising from the flames making me think of songs sung softly around a campfire; they were like fireworks and like liquid gold and like one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Looking at the stars and the Silver River that is our Milky Way, Zhao Laoshi told us the of the Qixi festival and the lovers who are forever separated as two stars on opposite ends of the sky, able to meet only once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month. There was no heat in the yurt, and it was hard, that night, to leave the embers of the fire to walk back to bed; even the embers were warm and the night was very cold. I slept bundled in all my clothes and blankets, warm inside while it was cold outside, and in the darkness and the peace it was the best night of sleep I had had in since arriving in China. The blankets were delicious and cozy and I was absolutely content.
We arrived in Tianjin after about twelve hours in a bus (longer than it took to fly across the Pacific) and started classes. We take four hours of Chinese class a day, and in the afternoons we have a class in history, Peking opera, tai chi, calligraphy, or wushu. The classes are mostly pretty good. They are basically taught in Chinese (except for the history class, which is in English). There is theoretically a translator for calligraphy and Peking opera class, but she's sort of stopped translating since the first couple days, so now we spend much of the class looking a little bewildered. The martial arts classes are my favorite, I think. It's like... the instructor is very good (some sort of national champion, says Zhao), and it's familiar (I think most of my classmates don't enjoy it so much; they've never done martial arts so everything is unfamiliar and new and she doesn't speak English so she can't explain to them exactly what she wants) and peaceful and probably the most calming, centering thing in China for me.
It's been really nice to be in Tianjin for a while and to settle down. The traveling at the beginning of the program was exciting and wonderful, but relaxing and having time to explore a place have been really good. The food is amazing. Like whoa. For breakfast for about the last week, I've been going to this lady with a cart in the street near our classroom and getting this tasty egg-wrap thing. I don't even know how to describe it, but it's so addictively tasty and it only costs two kuai (about twenty-five cents). Everything is really really delicious (this is an exaggeration; I think there are things that are not tasty) and really inexpensive - our food allowance is about sixty-five dollars a week and I probably spend less than three dollars a day on food most of the time.
Tomorrow we are leaving Tianjin to spend a week traveling for mid-term break before reconvening in Shanghai. I'm heading with some friends to Tai Shan (a mountain! Our only real criterion for places to go for break was that they not be big cities) and the town where Confucius lived before sort of meandering down to Shanghai. It should be a good time.
(at this point, I go traveling and forget to put this anywhere for anyone to read it, so there's sort of an abrupt time break)
The first day was spent in travel; we took the train from Tianjin, and it was long and crowded and warm, but full of friendly, crazy Chinese people. There was this lady who is a teacher of, like, traditional Chinese braiding/weaving (not like weaving blankets, weaving bracelets) and she showed us how to do a couple? Well, three, I guess - one for each of us who were sitting together. And she was crazy! She was showing Michelle this really pretty pattern that was sort of complicated and she kept being like, "no, put your hands here... not like that; do this.... no, here" and moving Michelle's fingers and stuff (I think I would've gotten irritated). And now I sort of vaguely understand how to do something with two threads? I don't know how long I'll remember it for, though. And then there were all the people who were just smiling and asking us about how we liked China and helping us put our stuff up on the luggage racks and making sure that we got off at the right stop. And it was nice of them.
Oh! And then we went out to find dinner and went to this little restaurant and had jiaozi (which are gyoza, by the way (the same character and everything, says Ryan, a classmate who lived in Japan for a few years)) and then we were walking around looking for ice cream and we came across this little store that was selling snacks and water and walking sticks (for people climbing the mountain; apparently there are like seven thousand steps or something) and the people were so freaking nice! They were like... I don't know, they talked to us and said nice things and recommended us places to see in Tai Shan and invited us to dinner tomorrow night (probably not seriously) and explained that they rent out rooms above their shop and it would only be forty kuai a night per person (less than half what we're paying at this hotel (which is still only around eleven dollars a night each)), which I think sounds sort of tempting and adventurous, but I guess is sketchier than Bill (and probably all the other people with developed senses of self-preservation and sanitation) feels comfortable with. And they made me really happy, so I want to share.
So the next day, we commenced the trek up. The amazing nice people at the little shop across from the train station had told us that there were seven thousand steps and that it would take ten hours, but we had heard from others that it might only take like four hours? Which I guess was sort of true; there was an option to take a bus to halfway up and an option to take a cablecar (tramway? Ropeway!) up to the top top (or nearly, close enough, anyway), but we are lihai (hardcore!), so we walked the whole way and it took... six hours? Seven? Something crazy and long and sweaty and gross but also splendid. It was really warm on the way up, but as we got higher, the air got colder (we went from maybe 400 meters elevation to 1545) and it was really really nice to be exploring in t-shirts when we were all sweaty and gross (we'd been able to store most of our luggage at the train station, so we were carrying not too much stuff). And the mountain! It has all these stone steps and it is wonderful, and there are poems carved into the sides of the mountain (why don't we have that in English?). It was beautiful - partly I think just because the characters themselves are beautiful, but the idea of it is enchanting - everywhere you looked, there was poetry on the mountain (I think I am exaggerating). (I am doing a little excited dance remembering it)
And then the morning! Okay, so the whole point of this expedition was that we hear that the sunrise on Tai Shan is beautiful (this is not really true; the point was that we were all sick of being in the city all the time and we wanted to go to someplace beautiful), so we got up at like five or so in the morning to walk the rest of the way up the mountain by sunrise and it was just.... foggy and gorgeous. We had to stay together while we were walking because it was too dark and foggy to see anybody distinctly more than about ten or twelve feet away, and we went up to the top of the mountain (climbing over rocks and boulders; it was gorgeous, it was amazing, it was what I love in life) and sat surrounded by Chinese people who were all astonished that we could understand that they were talking about us. We watched while the fog got lighter and lighter (we were up in the clouds, there was no sunrise, there was just the light of the risen sun) and then explored some more and ran up and down the rocks in the wind, in the wet, with the fog blinding us and the coldness and the beauty, and it was wonderful. It is my favorite thing after the Wall (maybe along with the wall and Inner Mongolia).
And now we are in Suzhou, heading for Shanghai the day after tomorrow and starting classes again on Monday. We are meeting tomorrow morning at an ungodly hour for breakfast before seeing sites, though, so I am going to bed now.