Culture Shock, and How to Beat It

Some of my posts in the past have been kind of hard to write for one reason or another.  Some weeks I don't have a lot of material to talk about, and other weeks I'm just kind of tired and depressed.  Living in another culture wears you out; this is part of what is known as "culture shock."  Having been here for over two months, I've definitely felt that for the past couple of weeks, and it has been quite frustrating.  This post, however is not nearly as hard to write.  This is because, in the past week, I think I may have finally turned a corner on my culture shock; I'm now feeling like I can actually do this "living in another country" thing for real.  This feeling came about as a result of several events.
The crux event surrounded my Chinese learning; I realized that my class has a study period/tutoring session scheduled with my favorite teacher for two hours every Friday, and almost nobody stays for this class.  I kind of knew this before, but suddenly it violently struck me: "I can basically have a one-on-one tutoring session with a great Chinese teacher EVERY WEEK! Why am I not using this to more of my advantage?" So I stuck around for the entire time (and it was basically a tutoring session) and this teacher in that time helped me really GET how characters are constructed in Chinese.  Remembering the meaning of characters, and how to pronounce them has always been very difficult for me, and I think that this might be the breakthrough I need to really get some traction on this problem.
Next, through a couple of different ways, I was reminded of the purpose behind why I'm here, and how it relates to my calling.  If I have not told some of you what that calling is, this video (and the others on that Vimeo channel) explains it pretty well; remember that I am a Christian, and my other major is Linguistics. Watching these videos helped to refocus myself, and a couple of speakers I heard this weekend helped to cement things in my mind as well.
All that said, I'm not out of the woods yet; I'm still tired, and I still have a cold (though not as bad as before).  But, with those two things figured out, a lot of the other stuff is falling into place.  So, I can post happily, and now I can tell you about some funny stuff that happened this week!
First off, I've been to McDonald's a good bit in the past couple of weeks; in a really weird way, it's comfort food (I never really liked McDonald's in America), and one of the big coping mechanisms for culture shock is seeking out familiar comfort food.  Plus it's the only place open past 10 PM or so, and I've been up REALLY LATE a couple of times in the last few weeks (usually coming home from events with friends elsewhere), so sometimes I literally HAD to go there. So, I'm in McDonald's at midnight, buying a Big Mac meal (or comparable), and I look around, and there's like eight or nine people (no really, I counted) SLEEPING in McDonald's.  Not just dozing off over their meals or textbooks, but stretched out across a bench, or curled up in a chair and sleeping.  Some of them were college students, but some of them weren't, and I really don't understand why you'd do that.  Sure it's the only place open that late, but 1) don't these students have dorms that they can sleep in? and 2) wouldn't the management kick them out?  I'm going to have to figure out what exactly is driving that particular cultural difference.
The other thing I noticed recently, hanging out with a Chinese friend. He's got very good English because he studied in the UK for several years, but it's always sounded just a bit strange to me, which I assumed was Chinese/his particular dialect of Chinese interfering.  Then I suddenly realized; he's got a BRITISH accent!  THIS is what British English sounds like when spoken by a native Chinese speaker!  Which means that almost all of the English speaking Chinese people in America have and AMERICAN accent. As a linguist I found this hilarious because 1) British/Chinese hybrid accent is just a funny concept and 2) I've been hanging out with him for TWO MONTHS and I only just now figured this out.  I am both amused and feeling very silly.  You may not find this super funny; I guess it just goes to show how much of a language nerd I am.
That's all from China for now!

Vacation

So it's finally gotten cold here in the Northern Capital (北京=Beijing=Northern Capital), and that means that I've come down with a pretty unpleasant sore throat.  I'm drinking lots of hot tea with honey, and I think it's helping somewhat, but it's no fun, and I'm hoping to beat it soon.
Someone asked me about this in my last post, but I'll just say it here as well; Beijing definitely gets snow, and apparently significant amounts of it; I'm told that the city actually uses cloud seeding to get more precipitation in the winter as a way of reducing the pollution.  Winter is apparently the worst time of year for pollution because people start using significant amounts of coal to heat their houses; thus any sort of reduction in pollution is a good one.
Last week we had midterms on Monday and Tuesday, and a break Wednesday through Friday, but there were still class activities planned.  On Wednesday we went to dinner and a Karaoke place, on Thursday we played the card game Mafia (杀手, shashou, hitman) for two hours, and on Friday we went to the Olympic Park for about 5 hours.  It was a very tiring week, despite being a break week; I kind of wish it could have been a little less planned, but most of it was all right; the Olympic Park was pretty, though a bit rushed, and Mafia is pretty fun when you're only allowed to speak Chinese.  The karaoke...might take some explaining.
Karaoke in China (and most of East Asia, from what I understand) works VERY differently from the states, and it's a MASSIVELY popular way to spend an evening out.  There are entire...establishments (?) devoted to it; instead of going to a bar or restaurant and singing in front of a bunch of people you don't really know, you get a group of friends together, rent a room with comfy couches, a karaoke machine, a big-screen TV, and huge amounts of alcohol, and sing whatever you want (Seriously; they have a massive selection of Asian and Western music), while watching the music videos that go along with the songs.  It's kind of weird, and I imagine it's a lot more fun if you're not entirely sober; It was still kind of entertaining, but people mostly picked songs I didn't enjoy listening to, so I'll have to try it again with people with more similar tastes in music.
Now that you know way more than you ever wanted to about Chinese karaoke, I'll be going to bed; class comes early tomorrow, and I want to beat this cough as soon as possible.  Oh, except I've just drunk three cups of tea...shoot; I'll be trying to go to sleep.

Autumn in Beijing

Beijing, for all the pollution, is actually quite a pretty city in the autumn.  There are significant numbers of trees on almost every street (other than raised highways), and they all start to turn beautiful colors right about this time of year (see picture below).  The air is crisp, and if it's not always clean or clear, it still looks very beautiful at certain times.  

My campus is quite a pretty place too:

 This is the main street that all of the dorms are on, about two or three days ago.  This day was rather windy, and at this point, a big gust of wind hit and started blowing lots of leaves off the trees.  It was gorgeous, and everyone (myself included) stopped to ooh and ahhh and take pictures!  Coming after a hard day of study, it was a very pleasant relief.

This is one of the other great things about autumn that I have discovered here! It's called a "冰糖葫芦, bīngtánghúlu," which my dictionary informs me is "candied hawthorns on a stick." Having never eaten hawthorns before, or even knowing that they were edible, this delicious discovery made me very happy.  They are a kind of crunchy-shelled fruit, tasting a little bit like apples, but with the inside more the consistency of...strawberries, maybe?  Not quite right, but that's the closest I can come.  They get lightly coated in some sort of syrup (not caramel, but maybe corn syrup), air-dried, and then eaten.  They are delicious! They seem like a Chinese version of a candied apple; same basic idea, same time of year, but they're somewhat healthier, since the coating is not nearly as thick.  Anyway, I discovered these a week or two ago, and since there's a booth that sells them right on my way home from class, it has been very difficult not to buy one every day I when I come home.  

I'm still here!

Ok, after a long hiatus, I am back to posting again!  First things first: I think I've figured out a way to share pictures; I'm going to post a link here to a publicly accessible Google Drive folder that has some photos in it; you should be able to view them (but not edit them) here: https://drive.google.com/#folders/0BwIlhxzg7ZrueEY1SVhZbnZBYkU. The one disadvantage is that this requires you to have a Google account, but it's the best I can do at the moment, and I assume most of you have one anyway, what with all that newfangled cloud computing internets technology you young'uns have nowadays!
On that note, my birthday was a little over a week ago.  I am now 22; unfortunately this is a kind of boring age. I don't get to do anything new except for...look down on all you 21 year olds, I guess? In honor of this being an uneventful age, I had a rather low-key birthday party; basically, my friends and I went out for dinner at a Mexican restaurant.  I then went home and went to bed fairly early; I feel so...middle-aged, and I kind of like it.
I just finished studying with my language partner; we were talking about her little brother, who will be taking the "Gaokao" (高考) this coming year.  It's a standardized college entrance exam, like the SAT, but that comparison makes it sound far too benign; it came up because my partner mentioned in passing that her brother is preparing for it.  The test is in June.  He is studying for it RIGHT NOW.  This is a three-day test that determines what college you get into, and basically controls ALL of your last year of high school. For all of our complaining about high-stakes testing in America, I'm pretty sure high-schoolers here have it MUCH worse.  That is one thing (of many) that I am grateful for about the US.

Traffic in the big city

Word of advice; do not ride buses (or taxis) in Beijing at rush hour!  Take the subway at all costs!  Yesterday I was trying to get to a gathering of some of my local friends, and decided to take the bus down to the subway station.  The subway is fairly close to my school, and as I was waiting for the bus, I thought to myself: “you know, I could probably walk down there before the bus gets there.”  Turns out, I should have; I sat on what should have been a five minute bus ride for thirty minutes!  The most aggravating part was that for most of it, the bus was stuck within fifty yards of the subway station; we were just in traffic.  The bus driver finally decided to just open his doors there, and we all got out.  It made a half hour trip take an hour. 

            On the way back to my dorm, I missed the last subway going clockwise around the loop I take, so I had to take the one going the other direction; my stop was one stop away clockwise, so I had to ride the subway the entire length of the loop.  Very frustrating.  I’ll know for next time to leave a little bit early. 

            This is a little bit of a rant, but I’m honestly still enjoying it here; I just have to remember that there are certain ways to travel and not to travel in this city.  

Finding Quiet in Beijing

Edit: Wow, it took me a while to post; combination of bad internet (I finally broke down and bought a VPN) and a cold.  This is actually from last week

Hey all,

This week, I discovered something; it is not impossible to find quiet places in Beijing; you just have to look a little bit harder than you might in the States.  On Thursday I went to a museum with a friend who has an internship with a travel magazine.  We visited the Beijing Ancient Architecture Museum, fairly close to Tiananmen, the heart of the city.  This museum, however, was completely quiet; no traffic noises, no one selling anything, no construction; you couldn’t even see any skyscrapers!  It felt like we were in an entirely different world.  The museum was surrounded by a courtyard and a somewhat sizable garden, which is probably why it was so quiet.  It was wonderfully peaceful.

            The museum was a collection of traditional-style buildings around an open central courtyard, on the site of the location where the emperor once offered sacrifices for a good harvest.  The buildings themselves were clearly the old buildings either renovated or rebuilt, and inside they had artifacts, models, and pictures of ancient Chinese architecture, from several hundred years B.C. to the present.  It’s one of those places that could be boring, but if you’re interested in just learning things about a culture, it’s pretty fun.  Also, they had some gorgeously ornate artifacts from ancient China.  This is a horribly pop-culture comparison, but you know the “Pool of Sacred Tears” in Kung-Fu Panda, with the cave where the Dragon Warrior scroll is kept in the mouth of the super-ornate dragon?  Picture that dragon as a wood carving; this museum had one of those!  Unfortunately I still can’t figure out how to post pictures, so I don’t know if I can actually show you. 

            Long story short, I had a great time, and if the museum and its surrounding gardens were any closer, I would totally go and visit just to study; I’ll just have to find somewhere like it a little closer to campus.  

Being a Tourist!

Hi all, this is Evan again. Sorry it took me so long to post! A combination of internet problems and a busy schedule, but hopefully I can keep updating more regularly now.  A lot’s happened since I last posted, so I’ll probably put up two posts relatively close together to cover more of it.  Also, these will eventually be less disjointed; the initial posts just have to cover a LOT of subject matter because it’s all so new.

Fun fact: Chinese universities have a lot of vacation days at the beginning of the year: I had class on the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th, then four days off for the Mid-Autumn Festival.  We had a full week of school last week, but after Monday, we have the rest of the week off for National Holiday.  So the first couple of weeks are less schoolwork and more visiting Beijing, seeing the sites, and generally getting used to living here, which is totally ok by me!

First off, classes have been difficult.  I’m glad I didn’t get put in a higher level; it’s hard enough to keep up with the teacher as it is.  I’m working on finding a language partner to help me out, and I’m mostly keeping up with the homework, but the teachers speak entirely in Chinese, and it’s very difficult to follow what they’re saying. 

On the 14^th, I got to eat Hot Pot (火锅, huǒguō) for lunch, which is really fun, if a little messy.  There are pictures in my “pictures” page (hopefully), but the basic idea is that everybody orders communal plates of meat, vegetables, noodles, etc, and puts it in their own “hot pot” (heated pot of broth, sort of like a fondue pot) and lets it cook.  It’s fun, and been a while since I got to eat that way, so I was very glad. 

On the 15^th, I got to go to church for the first time since my arrival; I’m planning on continuing to attend this church; it’s a Chinese church with one English service and four Chinese services, fairly close to campus.  It was encouraging to attend; the place was filled almost to capacity with some foreigners, but mostly with Chinese nationals, and from several conversations I’ve had, it sounds like the other services are just as well attended.  It’s good to see that God is moving here, despite difficulties.

Thursday the 19^th was the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节, zhōngqiūjié), equivalent in many ways to our Thanksgiving.  People go home to visit family, or if they can’t at least call and talk and otherwise keep in touch.  The upshot is that the campus gets very empty on this holiday, so there’s not nearly as much to do.  It’s also traditional to give gifts of moon cakes to others on this day, and some Chinese friends were kind enough to give me some (I gave them some Florida souvenirs in return), so I had a pleasant, if uneventful holiday. 

On Saturday the 21^st, a couple of friends and I went and explored a part of the city known as HouHai (后海).  It’s an older, prettier area around a lake, with a lot of restaurants, bars, and stores.  It has a couple of “Hutongs” (胡同), or alleys nearby.  They are an older, narrower style of street that one generally associates with older cities, and we got to explore them pretty thoroughly; they are a fascinating place; the smells and sights are vivid and intriguing. 

            I’ve been to church two Sundays, but today I had to miss it because our school organized a tour of the Great Wall!  They drove us a couple of hours to a section of the wall near Beijing, and let us loose to explore and hike up and down. One of the things that pictures don’t really convey about the wall is how steep it is to walk on; there are steps on some sections of it, but on others it just slopes up and down, and it can be a bit slippery. In addition, the section we visited was less well kept up than the parts that you see in pictures, so it was quite an exciting hike!  Not dangerous, but a bit of a workout.