One Week Down, Fourteen to Go!

The title of this post really doesn’t fit my true feelings. I’m loving my time here this semester so far. Everything really seems to be falling in place and I already feel my Chinese is improving quickly. I’ve met some really great friends here already and continue to meet some really great people. There’s about 5 people on my floor alone who I get along with quite well and it’s pretty exciting to be surrounded by good people who I can honestly trust. I’m going to try and hit each important subject one by one in the following paragraphs. By important, I mean topics that someone like my mother and father would really care about, maybe not the most interesting facets of my life here in China, but definitely important.

Dorms:

The dorms are conveniently located on the West side of campus near a gate that pretty much sells street food 24/7. We don’t have a dryer in our dorms but we have washers which led me to quickly seek out the closest dry cleaning service on campus which costs a whopping 20 kuai per load. Within 5 minutes walking we pretty much can reach 15 different restaurants on campus that range from 2 to 10 kuai per meal. Our dorms are pretty clean, I can’t complain. The bed, well, it’s hard as a rock but I seem to be sleeping fine. Maybe I’m used to it now!

School:

The third day we were here we took a placement test and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I didn’t excel, but I did better than I thought I would considering I haven’t studied or practiced my Chinese in 3 months. I was placed in intermediate high level but decided to jump up to the highest level in intermediate for spoken language and written. My tutor insists I should be in advanced low for spoken but I feel comfortable with this class, the teacher is awesome. Her name is Professor Wang and she was my USC teacher’s roommate at Beijing University for their undergrad—I guess it’s even a small world in China!

Every week I have about 23 hours of class, it’s a little overwhelming but definitely good for my Chinese. I don’t have class on Friday, which is pretty nice and convenient for traveling if I choose to. All my teachers are great, they seem to be really friendly and very atypical for China in the sense that they are open to talk about anything that is brought up with little reservation. Everyone in my program is assigned a graduate student in language studies as a tutor. From what I’ve heard from other people, I feel pretty lucky that mine doesn’t speak English and expresses little desire to learn it. She’s very good at teaching and helped me a lot with my homework last week. We are supposed to meet about 3 hours a week with our tutors and I’m hoping I can sneak in a few more hours since she’s so helpful. I was discussing the Communist Party with her and different aspects of it and she kind of blindsided me when she told me that she was a member! She said that many college students at Beijing University and Qinghua get recruited because they’re all the top of their age group in their respective subject matters. I kind of decided I should probably avoid all topics concerning Chinese politics or politics in general.

Church:

The first week we were here we had a group of about 8 people go to mass which was pretty nice. It’s on the other side of town but the subway stops right in front of it and it’s an English mass. I was able to go to confession John! And I didn’t need to use my phone app to help me with that haha. The priest is great, I’m pretty sure he studied in the United States because I spoke to him a bit after and his English is phenomenal. We are getting ready to head back to mass today with another big group of people so it seems like it will become a habit!

Miscellaneous:

Gabe, my good friend Steve, and I went to the Great Wall yesterday by public bus. It is over 70 km away from our school and it cost us 8 kuai round trip. It took about an hour and a half to get there and it was a perfect day to go because it snowed the previous night and very few people were there, not to mention it was beautiful. I still haven’t figured out how to upload my pictures since my iPhoto app is messed up on my computer, but I’m sure my brother will help me quickly resolve this… mhmmm.

We went to dinner with a diplomat I met one of the first nights we were here and he invited us to a beautiful restaurant in the center of a park. It’s in the Russian district of Beijing so it was very Western but the food was authentic Chinese and arguably the best I have had since I’ve been here. He was the diplomat for Singapore for 4 years before becoming a diplomat in Japan for the Chinese government for 7 years. His English is extremely fluent and he is a very nice guy. He paid for the dinner against my will and invited us to dinner at his favorite sushi place next weekend. I also was able to see Dr. Lu again this past weekend and he brought a few of us to dinner and introduced us to some really nice people as always. He should be coming back here when Dad and Janie come visit but I’m not sure about the dates.

I can’t think of much else to write about yet. The food is excellent as always and we’ve been having a lot of responsible fun just hanging out and meeting up with old friends from years past.

If you have any questions, post them on the comments section and I’ll be sure to answer them. I’ll try and get pictures as soon as possible. Hope everyone’s doing great, life in China isn’t bad but I miss you all!

再见！

小龙