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.