mmk. in beijing now. staying with some relatives now, and will be *hopefully* moving into our apartment today... blogspot doesn't seem to be working in china and remote desktop is really slow, but gmail is working so hopefully the email post thinger works.
new home: francesinchina.wordpress.com
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
and we're off.
chilling at CVG for the next hour or so waiting to fly to Chicago and then off to Beijing it is. I never actually realized how tiny this terminal was, especially now that concourse C is gone, and I guess I haven't flown out from here in awhile. But it's pretty sweet since they have free wi-fi! and I trickily found an outlet that doesn't even require me to sit sketchily on the ground.
so I got home last Friday, almost fell asleep in the middle of some cornfields while driving home from Purdue. We ended up driving through this local road for a stretch since I missed the turn to switch highways, so that wasted like 20 minutes. oops, my bad.
Since Emily was only going to be home for the weekend, I went to dinner at Cheesecake Factory with the girls.
Then we decided to walk around the mall for a bit even though it was past nine or whatever closing time was. So most of the stores were closed and we ended up just going to Macy's. We probably stayed there for like an hour, before we kept getting yelled at by the intercom saying that they were closing. So, we stayed a little past closing so Pri could try on her dresses a couple more times and end up not getting anything. The store people were probably not so happy about that. But, she did get them held, so it wasn't a complete waste of their time? All the people who've ever worked in retail are going to hate me, but hey, it was their job and it wasn't entirely us being difficult.
So we were supposed to go to this new bubble tea place sometime on Sunday, but that didn't really go as planned. I woke up Sunday morning and literally couldn't get out of bed. So I had gone to the gym Saturday afternoon and I guess didn't work out properly since I was completely sore. And I must have gotten sick or something since I was pretty nauseous and had a fever. So that day was pretty much wasted sleeping on the couch freezing my butt off in the middle of summer.
Monday, probably did some stuff. I can't really remember. I did go swimming though, that was fun. Actually that was a lie. Monday I went jogging at the gym and Tuesday I went swimming. I probably read Light of Eidon on the iPad on Monday. Oh! and went to lunch at Uncle Yip's with my mom and grandma. Of course, we saw people we knew and had to sit by them and talk to them. The food was pretty good, I was still a little bit sick so it didn't taste as good as normally.
Wednesday, I took my grandma to Krohn Conservatory in Eden Park in the morn to go see the butterfly show. Made a couple of wrong turns through the park, it didn't help that there were no signs or anything and trees everywhere so it was definitely even more confusing than Forest Park in St. Louis. And I had to parallel park on the street with the big SUV. But it was ok, since I just went to the end of the line and backed into the spot. Then I happened upon the view area where you can see the river and it's really pretty so after I picked up my grandma we drove back over there. I remember going there when I was really little, but in my memory it was always somewhere far away, like Natural Bridge area or something. I remember we used to take the rice cooker and some SPAM and have picnics there. I never realized it was in Eden Park in Cincy.
Ok, gotta go catch my flight now. Or at least go sit closer to the gate so I don't miss my flight. later.
So we were supposed to go to this new bubble tea place sometime on Sunday, but that didn't really go as planned. I woke up Sunday morning and literally couldn't get out of bed. So I had gone to the gym Saturday afternoon and I guess didn't work out properly since I was completely sore. And I must have gotten sick or something since I was pretty nauseous and had a fever. So that day was pretty much wasted sleeping on the couch freezing my butt off in the middle of summer.
Monday, probably did some stuff. I can't really remember. I did go swimming though, that was fun. Actually that was a lie. Monday I went jogging at the gym and Tuesday I went swimming. I probably read Light of Eidon on the iPad on Monday. Oh! and went to lunch at Uncle Yip's with my mom and grandma. Of course, we saw people we knew and had to sit by them and talk to them. The food was pretty good, I was still a little bit sick so it didn't taste as good as normally.
Wednesday, I took my grandma to Krohn Conservatory in Eden Park in the morn to go see the butterfly show. Made a couple of wrong turns through the park, it didn't help that there were no signs or anything and trees everywhere so it was definitely even more confusing than Forest Park in St. Louis. And I had to parallel park on the street with the big SUV. But it was ok, since I just went to the end of the line and backed into the spot. Then I happened upon the view area where you can see the river and it's really pretty so after I picked up my grandma we drove back over there. I remember going there when I was really little, but in my memory it was always somewhere far away, like Natural Bridge area or something. I remember we used to take the rice cooker and some SPAM and have picnics there. I never realized it was in Eden Park in Cincy.
Ok, gotta go catch my flight now. Or at least go sit closer to the gate so I don't miss my flight. later.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
some kind of wonderful
yes 傅燃 (recognize your name yet?), I did steal that from you, but it is nice-sounding. I like it.
My life is some kind of wonderful. I'm not really feeling it right now, since I'm a little bit really tired and slightly stressed seeing as how we don't really have a place to live in Beijing yet and there's so much stuff I have to do before I leave, but I know it always is and always has been. For some reason everything always seems to work out; I don't know how and I don't know why, it just does. I've been so privileged, so lucky, and I would say blessed, but I'm not sure I want to imply the implications of that word.
People have been great too me; I fully appreciate all you guys have ever done for me, done with me, done around me.
I've met a lot of really nice people in my twenty-one years and, as you may know, nice people are my favorite. I know I'm hard to put up with sometimes, or maybe all the time, but people do it anyway, what's up with that?
thanks kids, and good luck wherever you are this summer. I'll be leaving for Beijing on Friday, which I guess is tomorrow by now, so I'm planning on updating on my past week and a half while chilling at the airport, since I seem to have been neglecting my blog.
and how would this post be complete without 信信?
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
wait for me.
so. sitting in chinese class laughing at people. as per usual. teaching nick some shanghainese.
so blake drove up last week and we went off to chicago for the weekend. i was supposed to play kickball and make dumplings with some chinese students here at purdue, but it was optional so off to chicago we went on saturday morning. got made fun of multiple times for passing 'too much' stuff. also managed to forget the ipod and camera, so we had to go back and get those. good thing i remembered while we were still in west lafayette. i can't find all my extra camera batteries and wires and charger; may have packed it in the boxes i left in STL. it took about two hours to get to chi-town and we drove all the way through the city to millenium park. We walked around millenium park for awhile, saw the bean, which is apparently called the 'cloud gate,' walked to the lake, saw the buckingham fountain, walked by the concert place, oh! and saw these waterfall walls with these creepy people's faces and they spouted water from their mouths and the images would change so the people would be normal one minute and then smiling creepily the next.
around 1:30 we drove down to uchicago to pick up kyle, apparently nearish to where obama used to live. drove up to chinatown, got lunch at 老四川 and bubble tea! at joy yee's. very yummy food, too spicy for blake. lychee bubble tea=best thing ever. there was also some random fruit and weird black bitterish jelly on top but it had lychees inside! and they were good. so we walked around chinatown for awhile then headed to navy pier.
*well, just got back from lunch and its actually time for the history and culture lesson now... i've definitely been at this way too long and probably won't be finishing during this class either.
so we parked a couple blocks away from navy pier, thinking that the parking would be less expensive. hm, not so much. but we walked down the street and stopped by a walmart so blake could get a sweatshirt and stop freezing his butt off. so we also used the bathroom, very exciting i know, but you had to get one of the store clerks to unlock their back locker rooms since they only had the staff bathrooms.
We eventually made it to Navy Pier; it was cold and very windy, like high 50s, low 60s. we walked around the amusement park area, blake got scared of the ferris wheel, decided not to go into the maze museum, walked to the tip of the pier, and went inside to the stained glass museum/area and all the kiosks. Oh! and I think I saw the boat we took during senior trip, which was a little bit exciting.
*ok, i'm actually going to finish this now. i've only been at this like all day. nobigdeal.
after Navy Pier, we said bye to Kyle, went back to the car, and attempted to drive to the Hancock Observatory. i'm assuming traffic was bad, as it apparently always is in chicago, but we managed to park in this garage just off of the magnificent mile. hancock tower didn't have that many people so we didn't really have to wait in line or anything to go up. We went up by elevator to the 94th floor and the walls were basically all windows, as you would expect. The sun came out finally came out while we were up there so it was super pretty and you could basically look out on all of chicago. But then i dropped my camera onto the carpet (all of like 2 feet away) and it broke! well it's not completely broken, just not usable at the moment, apparently there's a 'lens error.' and there's no fix for it except to send it in and get them to do it. we even went down to best buy afterwards to see if they could do anything, but they couldn't do anything except send it in for fixing. Anyway, the hancock center had this open air area where you could go out and the there was the meshy cage stuff everywhere but you could actually feel the chicago air from the top of that building. Overall, very nice experience at a pretty decent price.
So we eventually went back down the elevator and decided to go to the hotel and hopefully find some food along the way. So in order to get out of paying the exorbitant parking fee you could buy like $10 worth of stuff in this specific shopping area at 900 michigan ave. We went into this fancy mall and asked the concierge about the parking discount and what we needed to do to get it and he was like, 'well you're supposed to buy stuff, but i'll just give you a validation ticket...' sweetness! very nice man. so that definitely saved us like $15 on parking which was great!
So Blake drives us to the hotel which is like 30 minutes south of the city and we check into the super elite suite that blake got with his super elite status. Blake then starts playing Starcraft with Eric, so I decided to go swimming. The pool was a little bit icky, but at least they had one and it was at least swimmable. Definitely a little bit creepy since it was completely dark outside and there were random used towels thrown around, and there was no one else there, and I started imagining those freaky little girls you see in scary movies just standing around the pool... I get creeped out easily.
so the next day, sunday, we decided to go to the outlet mall in aurora so blake could go shopping, about 20 minutes further south, and go to all the restaurants that elaine had recommended which I had neglected to look up prior to leaving chicago. we ended up spending about 2-3 hours wandering around that place, going into like every other store so blake could buy a bunch of nice shirts. I dragged blake to all the shoe stores so I could try on/look at all the converses and contemplate buying some, but end up not getting any; i'm sure he appreciated that. and we probably spent about an hour at gap so i could try on the same two jackets like 25 times. but i did end up buying them, under blake's persuasion since apparently he knows more about fashion than i do which doesn't really say much but is still interesting nevertheless, so at least that time wasn't wasted.
then we looked up and went to the nearest portillo's so we could try some chicago-style hotdogs even though according to elaine we were supposed to go there for the italian beef. oops. I ended up getting this cajun chicken pita, which was really good, but i guess not really uniquely chicago fare.
We then drove back into the city and went to Lincoln Park; we finally learned to park on the side of the street to save on parking. We walked along the lakefront for a little bit, but it was super windy and cold even though it was a pretty nice sunny day. Then we went to the free Lincoln Park zoo, and managed to not see a single animal besides birds and fish. I dunno what happened to all the animals, but there were all these 'sorry' signs explaining that they may be inside or whatnot. Also, it was near 5pm so by the time we got to some of the exhibit houses, they were all closed.
So when parking on the side of the street in Chicago, instead of parking meters, they have payboxes every block or so. So you pay at these boxes and it prints you out a ticket to put in your window saying when your time is up. According to Kyle, the city contracted these boxes out to a private company and Chicago's actually losing money from the street parking.
Anyway, by that time our time was up so we drove a couple blocks so we were nearer to the nearest Lou Malnati's, a chicago deep-dish pizza place. Waited for a bit, had some yummy pizza, and then proceeded to drive back to Purdue. Got a little bit lost on the way in Gary, Indiana, which is basically a ghost town, since the highways were being rebuilt or something, paid a couple extra tolls, wasted some time, but eventually got back on the right way. Then, I fell asleep, which I probably shouldn't have done. oopsies. I can't help it, put me in a car for longer than 25 minutes, and I will start nodding off. Anyway, we got back to Purdue at like 11pm.
Blake left monday morning. We were supposed to have a tour of 'discovery park' which is some fancy engineering research and entrepreneurship buildings, but ended up being given an hour long presentation about all the wonderful opportunities available at Purdue/discovery park. at least that's what i think it was about; I may or may not have stopped paying attention part way through. Then had a semi useful panel discussion about working in china. Got chastised at lunch for up and leaving everyone to go to Chicago. and, I think the culture/history lesson in the afternoon was pretty uneventful.
So it was a pretty icky rainy day, but we decided to go down to Chauncey Village and get sushi for dinner. But, apparently it's closed every monday, who does that? so, we ended up going to an indian buffet instead.
I got an email about my housing situation in beijing, which isn't going so well right now. The coordinator guy found this apartment for the three of us, but it's pretty expensive and the landlord and real estate agent seem pretty greedy, so I don't think that's going to work out. So, I still don't really have a place to live in beijing, and we're currently thinking we may just live in a cheap hotel for the 10 weeks. There are a ton around the city and it doesn't really matter if we're really close to the school or not as long as we can get there pretty directly by public transportation, so everything'll be fine and i'm not worried about that.
so today morning i was definitely about 25 minutes late for chinese class, but it turns out that a bunch of people even came in after me, so it was all good. I don't even know why I show up to that class anyway. and the afternoon lecture was pretty boring as usual; i've definitely gotten into the horrible habit of nodding off during class. i think i picked it up early this past semester.
then we went to china one buffet for dinner, which i'm pretty sure is where they got the two catered lunches from. and as ning and dianna would say, i got 'probed' at dinner.
so i've mostly spent the past couple hours looking up hotels in beijing and typing this, and i think that's about it.
*well, just got back from lunch and its actually time for the history and culture lesson now... i've definitely been at this way too long and probably won't be finishing during this class either.
so we parked a couple blocks away from navy pier, thinking that the parking would be less expensive. hm, not so much. but we walked down the street and stopped by a walmart so blake could get a sweatshirt and stop freezing his butt off. so we also used the bathroom, very exciting i know, but you had to get one of the store clerks to unlock their back locker rooms since they only had the staff bathrooms.
We eventually made it to Navy Pier; it was cold and very windy, like high 50s, low 60s. we walked around the amusement park area, blake got scared of the ferris wheel, decided not to go into the maze museum, walked to the tip of the pier, and went inside to the stained glass museum/area and all the kiosks. Oh! and I think I saw the boat we took during senior trip, which was a little bit exciting.
*ok, i'm actually going to finish this now. i've only been at this like all day. nobigdeal.
after Navy Pier, we said bye to Kyle, went back to the car, and attempted to drive to the Hancock Observatory. i'm assuming traffic was bad, as it apparently always is in chicago, but we managed to park in this garage just off of the magnificent mile. hancock tower didn't have that many people so we didn't really have to wait in line or anything to go up. We went up by elevator to the 94th floor and the walls were basically all windows, as you would expect. The sun came out finally came out while we were up there so it was super pretty and you could basically look out on all of chicago. But then i dropped my camera onto the carpet (all of like 2 feet away) and it broke! well it's not completely broken, just not usable at the moment, apparently there's a 'lens error.' and there's no fix for it except to send it in and get them to do it. we even went down to best buy afterwards to see if they could do anything, but they couldn't do anything except send it in for fixing. Anyway, the hancock center had this open air area where you could go out and the there was the meshy cage stuff everywhere but you could actually feel the chicago air from the top of that building. Overall, very nice experience at a pretty decent price.
So we eventually went back down the elevator and decided to go to the hotel and hopefully find some food along the way. So in order to get out of paying the exorbitant parking fee you could buy like $10 worth of stuff in this specific shopping area at 900 michigan ave. We went into this fancy mall and asked the concierge about the parking discount and what we needed to do to get it and he was like, 'well you're supposed to buy stuff, but i'll just give you a validation ticket...' sweetness! very nice man. so that definitely saved us like $15 on parking which was great!
So Blake drives us to the hotel which is like 30 minutes south of the city and we check into the super elite suite that blake got with his super elite status. Blake then starts playing Starcraft with Eric, so I decided to go swimming. The pool was a little bit icky, but at least they had one and it was at least swimmable. Definitely a little bit creepy since it was completely dark outside and there were random used towels thrown around, and there was no one else there, and I started imagining those freaky little girls you see in scary movies just standing around the pool... I get creeped out easily.
so the next day, sunday, we decided to go to the outlet mall in aurora so blake could go shopping, about 20 minutes further south, and go to all the restaurants that elaine had recommended which I had neglected to look up prior to leaving chicago. we ended up spending about 2-3 hours wandering around that place, going into like every other store so blake could buy a bunch of nice shirts. I dragged blake to all the shoe stores so I could try on/look at all the converses and contemplate buying some, but end up not getting any; i'm sure he appreciated that. and we probably spent about an hour at gap so i could try on the same two jackets like 25 times. but i did end up buying them, under blake's persuasion since apparently he knows more about fashion than i do which doesn't really say much but is still interesting nevertheless, so at least that time wasn't wasted.
then we looked up and went to the nearest portillo's so we could try some chicago-style hotdogs even though according to elaine we were supposed to go there for the italian beef. oops. I ended up getting this cajun chicken pita, which was really good, but i guess not really uniquely chicago fare.
We then drove back into the city and went to Lincoln Park; we finally learned to park on the side of the street to save on parking. We walked along the lakefront for a little bit, but it was super windy and cold even though it was a pretty nice sunny day. Then we went to the free Lincoln Park zoo, and managed to not see a single animal besides birds and fish. I dunno what happened to all the animals, but there were all these 'sorry' signs explaining that they may be inside or whatnot. Also, it was near 5pm so by the time we got to some of the exhibit houses, they were all closed.
So when parking on the side of the street in Chicago, instead of parking meters, they have payboxes every block or so. So you pay at these boxes and it prints you out a ticket to put in your window saying when your time is up. According to Kyle, the city contracted these boxes out to a private company and Chicago's actually losing money from the street parking.
Anyway, by that time our time was up so we drove a couple blocks so we were nearer to the nearest Lou Malnati's, a chicago deep-dish pizza place. Waited for a bit, had some yummy pizza, and then proceeded to drive back to Purdue. Got a little bit lost on the way in Gary, Indiana, which is basically a ghost town, since the highways were being rebuilt or something, paid a couple extra tolls, wasted some time, but eventually got back on the right way. Then, I fell asleep, which I probably shouldn't have done. oopsies. I can't help it, put me in a car for longer than 25 minutes, and I will start nodding off. Anyway, we got back to Purdue at like 11pm.
Blake left monday morning. We were supposed to have a tour of 'discovery park' which is some fancy engineering research and entrepreneurship buildings, but ended up being given an hour long presentation about all the wonderful opportunities available at Purdue/discovery park. at least that's what i think it was about; I may or may not have stopped paying attention part way through. Then had a semi useful panel discussion about working in china. Got chastised at lunch for up and leaving everyone to go to Chicago. and, I think the culture/history lesson in the afternoon was pretty uneventful.
So it was a pretty icky rainy day, but we decided to go down to Chauncey Village and get sushi for dinner. But, apparently it's closed every monday, who does that? so, we ended up going to an indian buffet instead.
I got an email about my housing situation in beijing, which isn't going so well right now. The coordinator guy found this apartment for the three of us, but it's pretty expensive and the landlord and real estate agent seem pretty greedy, so I don't think that's going to work out. So, I still don't really have a place to live in beijing, and we're currently thinking we may just live in a cheap hotel for the 10 weeks. There are a ton around the city and it doesn't really matter if we're really close to the school or not as long as we can get there pretty directly by public transportation, so everything'll be fine and i'm not worried about that.
so today morning i was definitely about 25 minutes late for chinese class, but it turns out that a bunch of people even came in after me, so it was all good. I don't even know why I show up to that class anyway. and the afternoon lecture was pretty boring as usual; i've definitely gotten into the horrible habit of nodding off during class. i think i picked it up early this past semester.
then we went to china one buffet for dinner, which i'm pretty sure is where they got the two catered lunches from. and as ning and dianna would say, i got 'probed' at dinner.
so i've mostly spent the past couple hours looking up hotels in beijing and typing this, and i think that's about it.
Friday, May 14, 2010
wow! i speak chinese?!
so. chinese classes. pretty much worthless. tuesday was the first day and they pretty much spent the whole 4 hours learning pronunciations and reading the 拼音, so about 3/4 of the way through i decided it would be ok if i stopped pretending to pay attention. so nick, who spent 2 years in beijing and speaks and reads chinese really well, and i started watching meet the robinsons on my computer. I gave him my headphones so it wasn't as rude on my part and looked up every now and then to see what was going on, but i still felt a little bit dastardly.
the history and culture lesson in the afternoon was really boring, as before. we started watching this really ridiculous movie; it's called the last emperor and is a movie with all chinese people, but made by americans, i think, and everyone is speaking accented english. i don't even know how to explain it, it's just ridiculous. so at one point, the boy emperor is like 8 and still has a wet nurse and there's just this scene where he's nursing and his brother is sitting nearby eating normal food... like i said, ridiculous movie.
so wednesday i spoke to the chinese teacher in chinese because we were doing names and stuff and she wanted to know how to write mine. so she realized that i spoke chinese and the lessons were really worthless. so she said it was absolutely fine if we just watched movies in the back. so after finishing meet the robinsons, we started watching this chinese TV show my mom had copied onto my computer a few years ago, 奋斗. at one point the teacher was walking around and she recognized the show!
side note: thank goodness this thing saves like every 5 seconds automatically.
so anyway, later in class they were learning about introducing themselves and each other to other people, so the teacher calls out to me in chinese, "yueyang, are you watching the first episode of 奋斗? can you show the part to the class where they're introducing each other?" so then i turned my laptop around and everyone watched a little bit of the show. a little bit awkward since i had one headphone in and i didn't know if she had been saying my name multiple times and i hadn't heard her or not.
so for lunch we went to five guys, which i'd never been to before but had been told it was good. the burger was pretty good, but incredibly greasy. i think the best part was that you can add whatever toppings you want and they're all free.
and then the history lesson. so for the first hour or two we finished the movie from tuesday. then they gave us this ginormous packet to read about forming the republic of china or whatever. incredibly boring and dry. they expected us to read all of it in like an hour and then come back and discuss it. i was definitely drifting in and out of sleep during the whole thing and even the parts that i did read, i didn't absorb any of it. i'm pretty sure i didn't get anything out of reading that thing. we ended up spending maybe 1.5-2 hours on it and getting only like 80% through. so we had to save the discussion for today.
so a group of us went to dinner at noodles and co. definitely better than my first experience, but still not that good. we sat there and talked for about an hour or so afterwards and then met up with some other people in the program and headed to a bar. we got some nasty beer and sat in the really loud bar for a couple hours just talking, mostly just listening on my part; some people just like to hear themselves talk...
so this morning in chinese i was being a good student and not watching movies. i tried helping people with their pronunciations and their exercises, which was introducing themselves, saying where they're from, what they study, any hobbies, etc. and i did the exercise too and after i said everything, there was just silence and people looking at me, like, 'way to show us all up.' and then later the teacher had me and nick go to the front and give an example of how to introduce other people and what not. and the class made me do the head bobbing thing with the different tones and speak really slowly and loudly. ha that was fun...
oh, and at one point during the lesson, they're were all following along with the teacher and she was trying to call on one student, but most of them don't really know their chinese names, so all of the students just kept following along. haha.
oh! and i downloaded ppstream which is amazing and lets you watch like everything. so during one of the breaks, some of the kids came over and we started watching kung fu hustle; which is a great movie if you haven't seen it. and if you watch the scenes on youtube, they even have english subtitles, but i don't know if the whole movie is on there. then nick and i continued watching it through the rest of chinese class and even later into the history lesson. but without headphones so as to be unobtrusive, so we had to read the characters super fast and there was this one part where i couldn't stop laughing so i'm just sitting in my chair trying not to make any noises and just shaking with laughter. but i don't think the teacher noticed, so it's all good.
history and culture lesson was boring as usual. did a really worthless discussion about the chapter we 'read,' and talked about socialism and communism. listened to the lady continue reading from her notes in a boring voice. then we watched/slept through this american world war ii propaganda video about china and how it's an underdeveloped country full of peasants who need help to fight the japanese, etc. then they sent us off to make propaganda posters and i wrote some really crappy chinese on our's. yeah, it was really bad; i'm a little bit ashamed. but basically at the top it says, 晚饭吃什么？, and then there's two pictures with, 闲暇有吃的，劳动只有空盘子。 so it says in huge block letters in english WHAT'S FOR DINNER, and then there's a picture with this intelligentsia guy reading a book and with a plate of steaming green dumplings and his caption reads, 'leisure has food to eat,' and then the next panel is this peasant farmer kneeling on barren ground with an empty plate looking up at the mean-looking sun, and it says, 'labor only has empty plates.' i didn't come up with the saying. yeah. definitely not that creative.
then we came back and played a couple rounds of pool. wow, i suck at pool.
mmk. i think that's enough about nothing for today. bye kids
the history and culture lesson in the afternoon was really boring, as before. we started watching this really ridiculous movie; it's called the last emperor and is a movie with all chinese people, but made by americans, i think, and everyone is speaking accented english. i don't even know how to explain it, it's just ridiculous. so at one point, the boy emperor is like 8 and still has a wet nurse and there's just this scene where he's nursing and his brother is sitting nearby eating normal food... like i said, ridiculous movie.
so wednesday i spoke to the chinese teacher in chinese because we were doing names and stuff and she wanted to know how to write mine. so she realized that i spoke chinese and the lessons were really worthless. so she said it was absolutely fine if we just watched movies in the back. so after finishing meet the robinsons, we started watching this chinese TV show my mom had copied onto my computer a few years ago, 奋斗. at one point the teacher was walking around and she recognized the show!
side note: thank goodness this thing saves like every 5 seconds automatically.
so anyway, later in class they were learning about introducing themselves and each other to other people, so the teacher calls out to me in chinese, "yueyang, are you watching the first episode of 奋斗? can you show the part to the class where they're introducing each other?" so then i turned my laptop around and everyone watched a little bit of the show. a little bit awkward since i had one headphone in and i didn't know if she had been saying my name multiple times and i hadn't heard her or not.
so for lunch we went to five guys, which i'd never been to before but had been told it was good. the burger was pretty good, but incredibly greasy. i think the best part was that you can add whatever toppings you want and they're all free.
and then the history lesson. so for the first hour or two we finished the movie from tuesday. then they gave us this ginormous packet to read about forming the republic of china or whatever. incredibly boring and dry. they expected us to read all of it in like an hour and then come back and discuss it. i was definitely drifting in and out of sleep during the whole thing and even the parts that i did read, i didn't absorb any of it. i'm pretty sure i didn't get anything out of reading that thing. we ended up spending maybe 1.5-2 hours on it and getting only like 80% through. so we had to save the discussion for today.
so a group of us went to dinner at noodles and co. definitely better than my first experience, but still not that good. we sat there and talked for about an hour or so afterwards and then met up with some other people in the program and headed to a bar. we got some nasty beer and sat in the really loud bar for a couple hours just talking, mostly just listening on my part; some people just like to hear themselves talk...
so this morning in chinese i was being a good student and not watching movies. i tried helping people with their pronunciations and their exercises, which was introducing themselves, saying where they're from, what they study, any hobbies, etc. and i did the exercise too and after i said everything, there was just silence and people looking at me, like, 'way to show us all up.' and then later the teacher had me and nick go to the front and give an example of how to introduce other people and what not. and the class made me do the head bobbing thing with the different tones and speak really slowly and loudly. ha that was fun...
oh, and at one point during the lesson, they're were all following along with the teacher and she was trying to call on one student, but most of them don't really know their chinese names, so all of the students just kept following along. haha.
oh! and i downloaded ppstream which is amazing and lets you watch like everything. so during one of the breaks, some of the kids came over and we started watching kung fu hustle; which is a great movie if you haven't seen it. and if you watch the scenes on youtube, they even have english subtitles, but i don't know if the whole movie is on there. then nick and i continued watching it through the rest of chinese class and even later into the history lesson. but without headphones so as to be unobtrusive, so we had to read the characters super fast and there was this one part where i couldn't stop laughing so i'm just sitting in my chair trying not to make any noises and just shaking with laughter. but i don't think the teacher noticed, so it's all good.
history and culture lesson was boring as usual. did a really worthless discussion about the chapter we 'read,' and talked about socialism and communism. listened to the lady continue reading from her notes in a boring voice. then we watched/slept through this american world war ii propaganda video about china and how it's an underdeveloped country full of peasants who need help to fight the japanese, etc. then they sent us off to make propaganda posters and i wrote some really crappy chinese on our's. yeah, it was really bad; i'm a little bit ashamed. but basically at the top it says, 晚饭吃什么？, and then there's two pictures with, 闲暇有吃的，劳动只有空盘子。 so it says in huge block letters in english WHAT'S FOR DINNER, and then there's a picture with this intelligentsia guy reading a book and with a plate of steaming green dumplings and his caption reads, 'leisure has food to eat,' and then the next panel is this peasant farmer kneeling on barren ground with an empty plate looking up at the mean-looking sun, and it says, 'labor only has empty plates.' i didn't come up with the saying. yeah. definitely not that creative.
then we came back and played a couple rounds of pool. wow, i suck at pool.
mmk. i think that's enough about nothing for today. bye kids
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
orientation day 1.
I realize I'm still in the country and probably nothing exciting is going to happen in the middle of rural Indiana, but I figured I would get as many blog posts in before I get bored of this and give up completely.
So, we drove into Purdue yesterday from St. Louis and they gave me a room key and nothing else. My room is really nice, but feels kinda like a jail cell. It's in their super new towers and we all have single rooms with private bathrooms. They also provided us with towels and bedding, so it's really nice. The only thing is that everything is completely white, the floors are linoleum tiles or something, and I don't really have anything you would normally have in a college dorm. Otherwise, it is super nice. So I got some really not very good chinese food for dinner and then went for a run around campus. There's literally like no one here; it's a little bit creepy. The campus isn't as pretty and compact and cohesive as wash u, but purdue is a much bigger school and it's still a pretty nice campus. Then I came back and watched TV and talked with some people in the program. None of us really knew what was going on. Oh, and they didn't give us accounts to use the internet, so I didn't have internet for most of the night until michael helped out; which was very depressing since I felt pretty much cut off from the world and I didn't know anyone here. I'm easily intimidated if you didn't know that already.
So we had our first day of orientation today: 8am-5pm. It's held in the super nice BME building. Met some interesting people. pretty boring day, did fun ice breaker activities, very very briefly learned about ancient chinese history, put on a skit about ancient chinese thought; of course i was the pushover daoist, what else is new. oh, and most of the other kids are grad students and probably doing important research type things.
ha. sad story. so we did this activity where you draw china on a map and label some cities and name some important chinese people, and then we watched this video where some people did the same activity on wall street, but people were often horribly wrong and couldn't name like any people. but then i thought about it and i really don't think i would be able to name important people in like korea or japan, not to mention vietnam and like mongolia, probably not even in like france or spain. so, it was sorta funny and sad when the people in the video couldn't name anyone, but i think i would probably be in the exact same state if approached randomly on the street. sad life.
so it doesn't seem like there's much to do in purdue/west lafayette, but we're gonna look around later and find some food. hopefully.
tomorrow morning, bright and early, basic chinese lesson. i hope she lets me just bring my laptop and not pay attention in class. i really need to start working on my personal statement and a couple of other things, so hopefully tomorrow won't be a complete waste of time.
I apologize for leading a boring life.
I apologize for leading a boring life.
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