Oh, I've never explained anything about our classes or what's on the agenda. So far we've just been doing orientation stuff. Starting thursday we will have class. 8-12 we have language class and then some afternoons we have elective-y classes. I'm taking sociology and marketing. Our language pledge starts monday. In the IES building, which contains the dorms and class rooms, we have to always speak chinese....that could be hard. In a few weeks we're going to Yunnan province. It's kinda like Tibet...but not political Tibet.
We had a cultural simulation course, where we were split into two groups ...mehhh it's complicated and boring to explain so nevermind.
After that we were paired off and given a piece of paper with characters on it. We were told to go to that place and get proof we had gone there. We were given 香山公园。I immediately recognized it from class at UT. Fragrance Hill Park. Turns out it's beyond the 5th ring road. Me and my partners walked out of campus, hopped on a bus which took us to the Summer Palace. We asked a few people, including a grizzly rickshaw driver where the 331 bus stopped. Do not under estimate the power of a pointing finger. It's basically how I navigate around Beijing. Eventually we made it to our next bus after buying some egg sandwiches at a stall near the bus station. One stall next to it was serving what I assume were unhatched chicken fetuses on a stick...heads still attached. It was pretty stomach turning. We made it to Xiangshan and took some pictures proving we had accomplished our mission. After a short climb up the hill we arrived at a little scenic overlook. I should mention that scenic in Beijing is a loosely defined word. It would have been scenic if we could have seen the city through the pollution..
...speaking of the pollution.. It's not THAT bad. No, it's terrible. But I don't notice it when I'm inside. My breathing has been fine and my eyes aren't irritated. Nobody else has complained of pollution related allergies yet. The odd thing is the sky. It's never sunny. But it's never cloudy. Shadows don't really exist outside. There's just...haze. You can see the sun because you can probably look directly at it. It's also very dry. Beijing is basically in a sub-arctic desert. There's very little grass and the trees don't have leaves. But that might be a winter thing. Ai laoshi said it hasn't rained in 5 months.
We had been passing rows and rows of street vendors selling roasted chestnuts and sweet potatoes all day. We were hungry so on the way back we finally gave in. I bought a sweet potato to munch on and my cohort, Nash, bought a bag of chestnuts. Mine was 1 kuai (20 cents) and his was 5 kuai (90ish cents). Mine was delicious and his was terrible. We then understood why there we so many chestnuts for sale. Nobody likes them.
word of the day
public bus - 公共汽车 gonggong qiche
man the food seems 这么便宜！香山公园 and all the bus riding stuff seems to be very useful!!
ReplyDelete