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.