HBA, Week 7

So this post might mean I have to change this blog's name. The Olympics are now included, as I attended two events this weekend and have one more ticket for Tuesday afternoon. But more on that later.

Having completed the seventh week means I'm only a week away (4 class days at this point) from leaving Beijing. I'm definitely happy to go home - not because I dislike Beijing, but I definitely miss a lot of things about the US, as well as my family and friends. A note on wanting to leave HBA: I've noticed a big difference between the attitudes of Yale and Harvard students on this point. The Harvard kids think that HBA is the greatest thing ever and say that they can't bear to leave. The Yale kids aren't such big fans of HBA, and have been looking forward to it finishing up for weeks. My (very biased) take: Harvard must really suck for the Harvard students to love HBA this much. It's not that HBA is bad, but if this is so much fun that they can't bear to leave, well, they've never actually had fun.

Last week wasn't too different from the norm, except that we were studying Chinese news, which meant that we had to read or watch news in Chinese every day and discuss it with teachers in our one-on-one class. Reading the news in Chinese is pretty hard, plus it's difficult to find interesting articles, as the Olympics seem to be the only thing covered in the Chinese press right now (and reading about them gets old fast). The other excitement this week was taking the HSK (汉语水平考试=Chinese proficiency test) for the second time on Friday afternoon. I found out today that I scored at level 5, almost high enough to be allowed to attend a Chinese university for history/literature/other things of that sort (a 6 is required), and easily high enough to attend for a scientific subject. Personally, I don't think I'm even close to being able to attend a real Chinese university, but it's nice to have been able to do as well as I did.

Other HBA students will probably talk about the "Beijing Night" stuff that went on this Saturday. I won't because I skipped it entirely. Let me just say that HBA, true to form, managed to make supposed fun seem like work. The entire third year was supposed to put on a singing performance and they wanted to make us practice no less than 4 times (I went the first time, and not after that). But who knows, maybe the final thing was actually fun, I wouldn't know.

What did I do this weekend? Well, that's the fun story of the week. On Friday, after the HSK, I took the subway to Guomao to pick up my Olympics tickets. The office with my tickets was supposed to close at 10:00 PM, but of course, when I arrived at 7:15 it turned out they had decided to close at 7:00 instead. So I had no choice but to had back to my dorm empty-handed. The Opening Ceremonies began while I was on my way back. I think everyone in Beijing must have been watching them, because the subway was nearly deserted, and as I walked back from Wudaokou to BLCU, there were almost no people on the streets - at 8:30 on a Friday night (normally about as packed as it can be). That sort of excitement even got me to turn on the TV when I got back - and they were, frankly, pretty spectacular. What I enjoyed most, though, was hearing the CCTV announcers call George Bush 美国拉拉队的拉拉队长, which is to say "the head cheerleader of the American cheerleading squad."


On Saturday morning, without tickets, but with a game to see at 9:00 AM, I got up at 5:30 to have time to pick up my tickets and make it to the stadium. Everything went smoothly, and I arrived at the basketball arena, where the Fuwa were out in force, with time to spare. The first game was Australia against Belarus - a blowout for Australia. The second was New Zealand against Mali, with the Kiwis holding out for a 4 point win.


After the games, I met up with Ge for the second time in two weeks and we wandered around the center of Beijing together, through Tiananmen, the Forbidden City, and the National Performing Arts Center - the photo is of the last (for those who can't figure it out). After getting home around 7:30, I was quite tired, a partial explanation for my not attending Beijing Night - along with expecting it to be boring and pointless.

The next day I got up at 7:00 to attend a couple of handball matches at the Olympic Sports Center Gymnasium. Handball proves to be about the coolest sport ever, and Americans are definitely unlucky not to have the chance to experience it. Though it's no surprise that it's cool, given that the Scandinavians developed it. The best way to describe it is a mixture of hockey, soccer, and basketball. Like basketball it's played on a court, using one's hands, with dribbling required if you want to go very far. Like soccer, it has continuous play (almost), penalty kicks (well, throws, but the same idea), yellow/red cards, and only the goalkeeper can use his/her feet (analogous given that this is handball, not football). Like hockey it has penalties (ie, a team is down a player for two minutes after certain sorts of infractions), the equivalent of the crease - though with slightly different rules, and free substitution (that is, players can be substituted in and out at any time, no need to wait for a stoppage, and players subbed out can be subbed back in). It is high-scoring relative to soccer and hockey, fast-paced, and a ton of fun to watch. The two matches I saw were Croatia-Spain and Russia-Iceland. Croatia and Iceland won - the latter a big surprise, though one that I appreciated.


My basic impressions on Chinese sports:
1. The Chinese are unaware of how to be sports fans for team sports - they cheer like tennis fans, i.e. cheering after every good play (normally meaning a score) rather than choosing a team and supporting it.
2. They don't try to rip you off and food and beverages. When I learned you couldn't bring your own into the stadium, I feared the worst, but it turned out that you could get a bottle of water for 3 RMB (less than 50 cents US) with other prices comparable. Merchandise, on the other hand, was a rip-off.
3. They keep the stadiums really clean. This is definitely a nice thing.
4. Seeing cheerleaders perform in countries without a tradition of that is really surreal. It's easy to question whether it's a good thing to create them. But Fuwa dancing is fun.
5. Though events sell-out, the seats are never all full, as people come late and leave early. Some people only come for one of the two matches in a session. Others, I swear, were there no longer than 15 minutes. Do they just go to say that they went?

That's all for this post. I'll do a final HBA re-cap next week after getting back to the US.

Shanxi III

The 4th day in Shanxi began in Pingyao with a trip to the 衙门 (Yamen), the administrative center of the city in dynastic time. The most interesting part of the site was the prison, complete with traditional instruments of torture. For the Chinese lesson of the day, it should be noted that the character used to label the prison, 狱 (see picture, the character I typed is different because it's simplified), is composed of the radical (symbol that makes up part of a character) meaning speech between two varieties of the radical meaning dog. Kind of interesting.


Anyhow, the prison was certainly exciting, though the instruments of torture were mildly terrifying. I've also decided that the photo of me with 苏老师 behind the bars in the cell window is a fitting depiction of HBA. A lot of teachers, it should be noted, have negative feelings towards it, or, to be more accurate, towards 冯老师 (Professor Feng, the head of the program), which, from what I can tell, are entirely fair feelings to have. Professor Feng has a bit of an 一意孤行 (a 4 character phrase meaning "to blindly insist on one's own way of doing things") problem, despite the fact that he no longer teaches Chinese classes himself, either at Harvard or in Beijing. As to how this all relates to torture, well, let's just say that 苏老师 thought some of the devices we saw would be great to use on 冯老师.

At the Yamen, we also had the opportunity to see a performance of a Qing-era trial for filial impiety. Though "see" is a loose term given the huge number of other tourists (without exception Chinese) between the actors and me. Given my already somewhat limited Chinese, this left me not understanding too much.

Returning from the Yamen, we had an hour long meeting in our hotel with an expert on Pingyao's economy as well as a couple of traditional craftsmen. Needless to say, given the way our Social Study project works, the expert got most of the questions. Among other things he complained about restrictions on the price of coal hampering Shanxi's development, and denied that global warming fears would have any effect on the coal industry there..

After lunch, we visited a modern court, outside the walls of the old city, where we had the chance to ask judges questions about modern Chinese law. I found this to be the most interesting interviewing opportunity during our time in Shanxi, as the judge who answered our questions not only told us lots of interesting things about law in China and the Chinese point of view on it, but because he had a pretty good understanding of American law he was able to compare the principles on which they are based.

Anyhow, after visiting the court, we returned to our hotel and had free time for the rest of the afternoon. I wandered around the city for a couple hours mostly with 越南朋友 and 山谷女孩, eventually buying my mother a present (probably the most important thing I had to do in China, she is my mother after all). After dinner we went to see a dance performance, through which I barely managed to stay awake. After that it was there was a ghost-storyless gathering in my room (singing of Chinese songs mostly) before everyone headed off to bed, as we had to get up early the next morning to...

Go to the Buddhist holy mountain of 五台山 (Wutai shan, "Five Plateau Mountain"), 6+ hours away. I spent the bus ride sleeping/watching the movies playing on the bus's TV (which I could, for the most part, barely hear, helping with the sleep). Arriving in Wutaishan, however, was exciting for me, as it put me in the mountains, where I'd spent nearly all the summers of my life before this one (though that's in Colorado, not China). So I was certainly happy to be in a place with clean air, beautiful scenery, and all the other natural things lacking in China's cities, whether Beijing, Taiyuan, Xi'an, or elsewhere. The Great Wall also is mountainous, of course, but the pollution renders the effect less powerful.

Our hotel in Wutaishan was easily the grandest place we stayed on the trip, definitely more on the luxury side of things. After settling in and eating lunch, we headed up to one of Wutaishan's many monasteries, which we were shown around before getting a bit of time to talk to the monks. The monastery building and the stuff inside weren't terribly different from others I've seen in China, but the monks definitely seemed more serious, unlike the temples where they looked more like ordinary government employees, not committed religious people.





Leaving the temples, we went to dinner at a Mongolian inspired restaurant, where we were treated to some sort of traditional Mongolian ceremony that involved, for the most part, drinking large quantities of very powerful alcohol, which, as might be expected from my description of the previous drinking episode in the trip, left some people fairly far gone.

The sort of rest that might have helped with the drinking was, however, not to be found, as we had to write outlines for our social study project reports that night. It ended up being fairly late by the time I managed to get to sleep.

I'll finish up my Shanxi saga next week - now it's time to do real homework.

HBA, Week 6

The end is now near enough that I can feel it - just two weeks away (9 days of class at this point. Two of which are test days, which means only 7 more lessons to study, and only 4 more in the textbook).

I just realized that last week I forgot to describe the change in our daily schedule that began with Week 5. In addition to "big class" (11 students, 75 minutes), and "small class" (4 students, reading: 25 minutes, drills: now reduced to 70 minutes) we also have a 2 on 1 class, where we spend 30 minutes discussing with each other - and arguing if our views differ - various questions posed by the teacher, who helps us with maintaining good pronunciation and grammar and coming up with appropriate vocabulary. Like most of HBA, it varies in how interesting it is based on the day's themes and on who the teacher is.

As for the events of Week 6, the defining characteristic of class was that there was basically nothing new - it was as standard a week as it could be. I met with my tutor a couple times (which was massively painful as I can't stand talking to her), did my homework fairly efficiently, and fared decently on dictations/test/etc. Class was somewhat more politics-focused than normal, with lessons on the China/Taiwan issue as well as human rights in China, but, again, nothing really stood out. There was no HBA activity this weekend, but I did get out on my own, because...

杨歌 (Yang Ge, my Yale suitemate from Beijing) returned to China last week after spending the summer doing research in New Haven. We met up on Sunday and spend most of the day visiting places around Beijing together, which, by causing me to start my homework late, is the reason I'm posting today instead of yesterday. We started by heading over to the main Olympics stadiums to take a look. Sadly, all the security crap prevents you from getting to close, but they were still kind of cool to see, my pictures do not do them justice (particularly the water cube).


We then headed to 雍和宫 (Yonghegong/Lama Temple), the historic center of Tibetan Buddhism in Beijing. In addition to the fairly standard repertoire of 佛 (Buddhas), 菩萨 （Bodhisattvas) and the like, there was a 26 meter tall statue of the Maitreya Buddha, carved from a single piece of sandalwood. And considering how big it was, that's pretty impressive. At the Lama Temple we happened to bump into a couple of Duke Study in China students from Yale. The Light Fellowship has really led to Yale infecting the city - randomly running into people from Yale in a place as big as Beijing shouldn't happen.


Finally we headed to 后海 (Houhai, "back lake") which had the greatest concentration of Westerners that I've seen in Beijing. Tons of Americans, plus what seemed to be the entire Russian Olympic Team - they might be living there. I also saw a couple of Cameroonian athletes, as well as various other Olympics types (distinguished by the IDs they wear around their necks) though I couldn't tell what countries the others were from, as they weren't wearing country-specific clothing.

Anyhow, that's it for now - except for the next part of my Shanxi saga, coming up in a little bit.