Settling into Nanjing, by Kevin Worthy

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Kevin, Nanjing

Nanjing, China, a city with over 6.1 million people living in it, is my new home for at least the next six months. As I was walking through a fresh vegetable market today, avoiding the fresh meat market right beside it, I was reminded of why I fell in love with China. I realized I truly enjoy the hustle and bustle, the cars honking for seemingly no reason other than to be obnoxious, people weaving and dodging to get there where they need to go, people spitting anywhere, the hundreds of tiny shops with trinkets being bought and sold, the occasional stank smell of China (really no way to explain it), and the persistent staring at me as a foreigner, which makes me feel like I left the house without putting pants on. It all sounds awful, but it adds up to be this beautiful country whose people and culture I have come to love. It definitely is not a place for everyone, but I am realizing once again that it’s a place I want to be, at least for a while.

Settling into Nanjing has been quite a fun, yet exhausting experience. Getting here was even more difficult. In order to save a couple hundred bucks I decided I would take a train from the airport in Shanghai to Nanjing. In hindsight maybe that wasn’t the best decision when trying to lug around two suitcases full of a year’s worth of clothing. Nonetheless, after getting to the train station and missing my first train due to two cute little kids who wanted to practice their English with me, I finally arrived in Nanjing. After taking a taxi to my hotel I’m pretty sure I fell asleep on the bed without even taking me shoes off. It had been over 30 hours of travelling and my body was ready for sleep.

The next day I decided to get right on apartment hunting so I called the realtor that many of the students before me have used and she told me she would be picking me up in five minutes. I hadn’t even showered or gotten dressed by that time, I figured it would be a while before she could meet. I was excited to ride in someone’s personal car in China. Up to this point I had only ridden in a taxi and bus in China. As I waited outside the hotel for her, I was surprised to say a lady on an electric bike (not a moped) coming towards me waving her arm. To say the least it wasn’t the car experience I was expecting, but I think it was much more. I rode around on the back of that bike all day looking at multiple apartments until she finally decided she was too tired to drive anymore and made me drive. If you think biking in traffic in the states is tough, try it in China where street signs and lines in the road don’t matter all while having an extremely energetic lady on the back of the bike moving around to point things out.

After a long day of apartment hunting, I had decided on one, but wanted to sleep on it for a night before I made a decision. The next day I went to the apartment to sign the contract, which consisted of me sitting there while the landlord and realtor squabbled over minor details that somehow didn’t concern me even though I was the one renting the apartment. Not sure how that works, but it’s China. I was finally able to get my contract signed and moved in that day. Although it was really clean thanks to the previous Flagship student who lived here before me, it was nice to tidy it up and make it seem more like home. It is now probably my favorite place that I have lived including where I’ve lived in the States. It still needs some posters on the walls to break up the massive amounts of light, but it’s slowly coming together.

We started orientation today, which was consisted of a lecture on safety, a welcome, and then two surprise placement tests that none of us realized we had until yesterday. Thankfully it’s just a placement test and holds no weight when it comes to our grades. The group of students is a small group of 9, compared the group of 30+ the previous semester had. Tonight we all went out and had 北京烤鸭 Beijing Roast Duck which was delicious as is to be expected when it comes to this dish. Tomorrow is another round of orientation and then Monday we begin classes. After this first week of classes I’ll give an update on how those are going. For now though, it’s time to turn on my electric blanket and sleep on my bamboo mat bed.

November (by Dare Norman)

Happy last day of November, everyone! Christmas is upon us and the thought of soon returning home is hovering overhead in a cloud of mixed feelings. There are real clouds in the sky, too: the greyish snow-filled kind.

See? Here is the weekend weather forecast:

Yes. It’s cold.

And this isn’t even the “Feels Like…” temperature!

This is post-snowball battle, maybe the most intense of my life. My hometown doesn’t have terribly cold weather; my with-snow experiences are few and muddy.

Left to right: Austin, Yale-student choir friend and the greatest whistler on the face of the Earth; Zhongzheng, Mongolian-Chinese but honorary 美籍华人; two snow-bunnies and a snow-soccer ball that we found someone had made; myself; and Ethan who goes to church with me on Sundays, really loves Sigur Ros, and has a magnificent fur hat.

(Photo by Colleen O’Connor)

Besides bundling up against the frigid weather and making sure to leave our socks on the radiator overnight, we have been very busy with extracurricular activities! There is always lots of studying Chinese, but here are some of the more interesting events of the last two weeks:

Thanksgiving dinner at a fancy Chinese seafood buffet! Crab meat, pumpkin soup, and all the angel food cake, pudding, and tea that I could possibly hope for. It was so great to share dinner with my friends!

Five friends and I also participated in Harbin Institute of Technology’s International Student Performance Night! My friends and I represented America through swing dancing to classic rock-and-roll (Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”).

Two nights ago Zilu, Emily, Colleen and I went to a get a massage – about 10USD for an hour and a half. This was my first experience with Chinese medicine.

After changing clothes and shoes we did 泡脚 pàojiăo, a hot tea foot-soak. This was my favorite part because most of the massage was sort of painful. I don’t know about in the US, but here the massage was a lot of pushing pressure points and noisily slapping and rubbing muscles. It made me laugh. The man kept having to tell me, “放松! fàngsōng! Relax!”

At one point, the massuese took a small round object from his medicine kit. He lit the ball on fire, placed it in a glass jar, and proceeded to approach my exposed foot.

“哦？在干吗?! ó? zài gàn ma?! Ah! What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed.

“别动。 bíe dòng. Don’t move.”

That was the brusque reply as he popped the jar on my sole. The flame suffocated, taking all the oxygen with it and vaccuum-sealing the jar to the sensitive skin of my foot.

拔罐 báguàn Cupping, he explained, was a traditional Chinese medicinal practice to relieve tension. “Wind” gets into your skin, and the suction of cupping removes the “wind” and stops any aching – that’s according to my drills professor, who I asked later. I still don’t fully understand what that means, but it was certainly an experience!

Inner Mongolia Adventure, October 22-26 (Fall Break!) by Dare Norman

“July is the best time to travel Inner Mongolia, not October,” he wheezed out a laugh, scratching the stubble on his chin. On his head was a beanie like a black knit gourd, and his brown eyes were framed with heavy lids and smile lines. Our driver, Mr. Zhang.

It was not the first nor the last time we were criticized about our timing. Inner Mongolia is known for its grasslands and rolling hills: riding horses across green pastures, sleeping outside by a bonfire and eating hand-roasted meat…you know, Genghis Khan. In the autumn, they said, the plains are only brown and cold. How could that be exciting?

Our train had arrived in Hailaer early Saturday,  and my first, waking awareness was of glittering white on the window: snow. I bolted awake. The sun had just risen and was tickling pink across the soft mountains in the distance, reducing me to awe until a friend dragged me to disembark.

Outside, the hiss of steam from the engine was a thick white cloud, and breathing equaled brain-freeze. I slid my pack over my arm and happily snuggled into the crowd of travelers, customers, and merchants haggling in the street.

“Car rental!” One shouted in that thick northern-Chinese garble, “600 kuai!” After some fierce negotiation and multi-lingual discussion (having a foreign language at your disposal – in this case, English – can be rather convenient when bargaining), we reached an agreement. Seven people, six bags, a few water bottles and a dozen beef baozi  packed together in a tiny gray van, Chinese club music in an endless cycle, a Mao Zedong pendant dangling from the rear-view mirror. So our adventure began.

I had no last look at Hailaer; with all our belongings, there was little space to turn for a backward glance. It was simply forward, pushing thirty miles an hour over hill after hill of frozen grassland.

It was the most breath-taking road trip: hiking snowy mountains, trekking along the Chinese-Russian border, and, of course, experiencing interesting meals. China has all sorts of interesting cuisine, but when it comes to eating sheep Inner Mongolia wins.

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After three days of bitter cold wind, pink sunsets over icy ravines, shooting stars from the Milky Way, greasy game lunches, and the smell of cigarette smoke, we arrived in Enhe, a small tourism town near the Russian border.

I had been sleeping, snuggled between the packs on my left and the puffy coat of my friend on the right. Outside were bare trees, empty hostels, a few stray dogs, brown grass and patches of thick snow. A man sidling down the hard dirt path.

“Eiy!” Braking, our driver rolled down the window. The burst of frosty air shocked me awake.

“I have six foreigners here,” he called. “There a place to stay the night?”

The man responded rapidly and slurred his words – I didn’t understand. But when he gestured to a small house nearby, our driver followed.

Our crew clambered clumsily out of the van and was quickly herded into the house by a kind-faced woman.

“Poor things,” I heard her mutter as we shuffled by. “How pitiful!”

I suppose we did look a bit pitiful:  hungry and chilled, tired from uncomfortable car-naps and less-than-recommended hours of sleep each night, sore from hiking, oily and rank with no opportunity to shower. But from our faces beamed smiles, and my heart was happy.

That morning, I remember waking up warm inside and out. Our room was stove-heated and stuffy, the memory of a blazing fire in the grate beside the bed. Fog on the outer window, layers of thick quilts, and one of the softer mattresses I’ve encountered in China.  I had probably dreamt of dinner from the night before:

火锅 Huŏ guō Hot pot is a typical North-Eastern Chinese method of feeding lots of hungry college students on a chilly autumn evening. There are lots of fresh meats and vegetables involved, and a large bubbling pot of spicy soup and bean oil.

Whatever you want to eat – pumpkin slices, parsley, sweet potatoes, duck, baicai (a type of Chinese cabbage), mushrooms – you simply boil on your own right there at the table. There are dipping sauces, too – a sour, red, fermented-tofu sauce or thick sesame paste.

This was all served to us with love and care by the hostel-owner’s wife Anna. They were a perfectly interesting Russian-Chinese couple. He loved to talk, to tell stories and explain Chinese colloquialisms in a brusque, difficult-to-understand accent. She would fuss at him quietly in Russian as she, smiling, served us hot milk tea.

When I told them that I was studying music at my American university, they asked me to sing a bit.

I remember singing a verse from Les Misérables through the stuffy, fragrant warmth of the dining room, laughing through a group rendition of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, and then dinner was over. Anna hugged us goodnight, and I fell asleep brimming with happy.

The best was yet to come: breakfast.

Yes, sir. Behind Mr. Zhang’s tea cup: those are pancakes.

Scrambled, peppered eggs with sautéed onions; sweet, soft bread; three or four different fruit jams; Chinese breakfast cabbage. Two buckets – buckets – of fresh, warmed milk and milk tea.

That was the perfect highlight of our trip to Inner Mongolia.

The days later were filled with riddles and road-trip games, walking on ice-covered creeks, trekking along the Russian-Chinese border. The weather warmed up, and on the last day we boarded a train in Manzhouli bound, once again, for Harbin.

When Someone Else Controls Your Environment

When Someone Else Controls Your Environment.

比较好: Comparitively Good, A Comparitively Small Glance at Chinese Culture

比较好: Comparitively Good, A Comparitively Small Glance at Chinese Culture.

My Own Version of Becoming Chinese

Reblogged from The Shape of Things That Were, Are and Are to Come:

While there hasn't been a lot of "spare time" in the last three months, I wanted to take this Mid-Autumn Festival holiday to write a quick (but rather all-inclusive) blog about what's on my mind right now.

One very important thing I try to keep in mind whilst busying myself in China is that in order to really understand what is happening in and around me, I have to stop, be still, and wait for the mundane to unravel.

Read more… 434 more words

Sharing a post from Allie, 2012 alum of the WKU Flagship program

And One Month Later…by Dare Norman

        Where are my words? I have wanted to write so many times.

        About the countryside. How the mountains of Bingyu are exactly what you imagine them to be: rocky and majestic, with steep cliffs and brave trees overlooking a misty valley. The sound of water nearby and dogs barking, a few peddlers asking in thickly-accented Chinese – foreigner, ride a horse? 20 kuai for a ride!

        About Dandong – a city a few meters north of North Korea. How the gap between North Korean poverty and the developing Chinese urban scene is grossly evident. At nighttime, the Chinese border is a carnival with fiber-optic lights, patriotic statues in parks full of dancing people, Erhu music and Beijing Opera, roller skaters. Across the river, there is only darkness.

        About hiking the Great Wall.

        About celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival. How Zhongyang Street is full of shoppers seeking sales, vendors selling moon cakes, the smell of grilling meat, tofu and spices. Harbin Vanilla Milk ice cream. A bright, silver full moon beaming from the sky, deep indigo with stars and chilly breeze. A conversation with my roommate, eating Russian bread with hot chocolate and watching the season finale of The Voice of China.

        About practicing Taiji with friends on Tuesday and Thursday nights.

        About the language pledge. From that scary first day – one minute to say your last sentences in English…okay, time’s up! 开始语言发誓! – to now, communicating pretty freely with a clothing vendor over the price of a sweater.

        About all of the wonderful people I have met: my American (and one Scottish!) classmates, my roommates Zi Lu and Meng Nan, my professor Hu Laoshi, Bubu and Lili who work at a Western-style coffee shop nearby, the shopkeepers at the paint-supply store, the Ayi downstairs who lent me her umbrella, the custodian who really likes my Chinese name, the English teacher and his wife that I go to church with on Sundays, my friend Jerry who is attending Tsinghua University next fall.

         I have wanted to write for such a long time about all of these things, but now that I have a free day – it is China’s 63^rd birthday today, so no school – I am finding that there is no way to express these things accurately. If I could just wish you here, and you could see!

First post from Harbin! by Dare Norman

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Dare

哈尔滨，中国 Hā’ěrbīn, Zhōngguó Harbin, China has been my home for the past four days.

     I can only begin to describe all of the wonder and surprise and utter confusion I have felt since – well, since even before the plane landed in Beijing at 3:30 on Wednesday afternoon.

     The whole flight had no date or time, really. It was just unusually long, unbroken, motionless daylight for anyone who noticed past the movie screens.*

     *I say that, but truthfully I love watching out the window during flights. This one was a bit unfortunate because between me and my main source of entertainment  were a Chinese woman and her daughter who didn’t seem as excited that we were zooming over Alaska, then Russia, or that you could kind of see the curvature of the Earth.

     I did politely ask them to open the window for the descent to Beijing, however. (Landing is scary if you can’t see what is going on!) I remember seeing a lot of blue rooftops, and shadows of creases in mountains a ways off.

     And smog. That, too.

     We hit the ground running.

     Visa check. Security. Find a friend. Grab luggage. Race to meet CET directors. Coffee break – first concrete realization that we are in a new country:  月饼 for sale at Starbucks, and I have no yuan.

     Bus ride – second realization that we are in a new country: traffic laws are not a thing. Friend is bumped by a taxi on the way to the bus. He’s okay, though.

     Hotel check-in. Street names, what? Ordering dinner. Yes, my classmates are all better at this than me. “Is this your first time?” Why, yes, it is. My first time outside the United States.

     There are moments when I sort of just ponder that, weigh the feeling of being through-the-Earth away from my family. It doesn’t seem real.

     And since that crystal, autumn-chilly Friday morning when we disembarked the train and were whisked into the crowded streets of downtown Harbin, everything has seemed too real, almost.  There was so much daydreaming on the plane – of snowy mountains, the Great Wall, instant friends and immediate, noticeable improvement in my Chinese – and the biggest realization that I’ve encountered so far is that

this is life, too.

     The crooked, paved walkways and sidewalk traffic, willow trees lining the road, fruit stands and barbeque pits, surprise rain, eggplant and potatoes with sweet sauce and rice, spicy milk tea at a Cantonese restaurant, lukewarm showers and one electric fan, broken Chinese, hand gestures, smiles, embarrassed laughing – this is life, here. Everyday, normal, foreign-exchange-student life.

                                           Life is always an adventure.

Wait, we can speak English 吗? by Dare Norman

I woke up Friday morning at 6:30, like normal. Got ready, glanced over vocabulary one last time – for the last time – and walked to class. 8:00, written test. 10:15, oral presentation about the importance of art and philosophy to modern society. 11:00, speed packing.  At 1:00 was our graduation ceremony, and several bittersweet goodbyes and a surprise hailstorm later we were off.

 

Upon returning home, I expected I would be ridiculously tired and sad for the whole weekend, missing movie nights and “小脸比赛’s” and all the wonderful people I have come to call dear friends.

Yes, there is definitely a bit of that, but on the other hand it is quite glorious to know I can sleep in tomorrow and that there is not a workbook page in sight.

 

The biggest adjustment to make is my thinking, ultimately. I didn’t realize it, but in the conquest to learn a new language I surrendered much of my thought-life to Chinese speaking patterns. I can’t think/say, “Today’s weather is becoming more and more warm, it is giving my spirit good benefit!” anymore, and it is difficult to undo that.

 

I have to re-learn English, a little.

~

 

The next time I write, I will be preparing for a semester study abroad trip in Harbin, China! This is my very first trip abroad, and I’m sure a lot of you Flagship students will be relating to this experience very soon. I’ll do my best to keep you all posted on the whole process – packing, flying, travel advice, cultural experiences – anything you are interested to hear about.

 

So, until then, I hope you all have enjoyed my writing, and that it has been helpful to you in your own language-acquisition adventure!

 

 再见！

Basketball at the Tibetan Monestery, with JP Stovall

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Critical Language Scholarship, JP

J.P. is participating in a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship program in Xi’an, China.  Students in this fully-sponsored intensive language program visit the Tibetan Cultural Region, and if you are lucky, you can pick up a game with local monks. This could be you next year!!