HBA, Week 5

I'll get the class-related stuff out of the way first. This week, we had to write our 社会调查的报告 (Social Study Project reports), 1,500+ characters (for third-years), that, at least in my case, proved relatively unfocused and full of internet research - mostly because our time in Shanxi, though fun, was somewhat disjointed. We also had to produce a shortened form of the report to deliver orally on Friday, in place of our regular oral presentation. In general, though, the workload wasn't too bad this week, but I think it's partly just that I've gotten used to it. My new realization about HBA is that it isn't actually more work than a regular semester at Yale (as I'd thought before), it's more that studying that much of one thing (particularly when that one thing is a foreign language that has all sorts of its own frustrations) tires you out. After 5 hours of Chinese class, you don't feel like starting your homework immediately. You get easily distracted from Chinese study because you want to do something else, and, once you get into a pattern of not sleeping much, it becomes self-reinforcing as lack of sleep makes study even tougher. But, as I said, maybe I'm getting more used to it, as last week went fairly smoothly - it proved to be my best performance overall grade-wise as well.
As for the other HBA excitement this week - the first thing was the delegation from the Light Fellowship coming to visit - Deans Gentry and Rowe as well as our own beloved 周老师 (Zhou Laoshi, the head teacher from first-year Chinese at Yale). Seeing 周老师 made me realize how much I miss Yale Chinese teachers, who I generally like more than our HBA teachers (周老师，穆老师，陈老师，刘老师， and 詹老师 are all amazing, though some HBA teachers, like my favorite 鲁老师, are also great). It also made me miss Yale even more. Anyway, the Light representatives took all the HBA Yalies out to dinner, which was fun (plus a free meal), and told us lots of wonderfully complimentary things. Apparently, one HBA professor (one of the ones who actually teaches at Harvard, no less) told them that he thought the Yale students were better than the Harvard ones. And the general consensus seemed to be that Yalies were happier/better adjusted (I've actually had other HBA teachers tell me that). So yeah, about all our Yalie stereotypes about Harvard kids, their own professors agree with us. It's hard not to feel good about that.
Yesterday (Saturday), HBA took a trip to 龙庆峡(Longqing Gorge), a couple hours outside of Beijing.


The place should, by all rights, have been beautifully striking, with steep cliffs rising up immediately from the water. Instead, on account of the worst smog I've seen yet in China, it was gray and uninspiring. To give you an idea of how bad the smog is, when looking at the pictures, you should note that there were no clouds that day. Yeah, it was bad. But hiking up to the top of the gorge was a fun (if extremely sweaty - it was a really hot day) bit of a walk, and riding a boat around the lake was also interesting. Perhaps most intriguing to me, though, was the strange dragon thing they built along the side to hide a series of escalators that visitors rode to get up to the gorge from the park's entrance. Apparently, Chinese are even lazier than Americans on the walking in natural areas front.
Anyhow, that's it for the fifth week - now I'll try to manage to get another Shanxi post done before bed.