Hello happy readers, and here is the second installment of life in Beijing.

Living abroad makes you realize how many things you take for granted at home. I naturally miss my friends and family, but I expected that. I also expected to miss American food, which I mentioned in the previous post. But there are some things that you don’t expect to miss, like Discovery Channel, or liquid dish soap. I think it is remarkable that, for someone who didn’t really watch all that much TV while at home, I really miss the ability to just turn on the Discovery Channel or the Science Channel and watch something interesting. I have been watching a lot of CNN International here, which has been nice though the news has been rather dismal.
As far as liquid soap goes, I found some eventually. And maybe it was just my inability to find the stuff, but I’m pretty sure you can pick up a thing of liquid dish soap at a convenience store back home, but here, I could barely find it. Which makes me wonder how folks do their dishes, but I suppose that’s for another day.

Language classes have been very intensive (four hours a day, five days a week) and we have often had an additional lecture (though “often” stretches it, as we’ve not been here that long) for two hours after that. I feel like we’re learning a lot in class (which I’ll get to later) and I know that, while it is a lot to learn, some of it is sinking in. The amount of material that we’re covering though is sometimes overwhelming, but I’m doing my best.
The additional lectures have also been really informative: one professor here lectured twice on recent Chinese history and relations with the United States, so that’s really cool.

The language classes, while difficult, have been helpful in daily life here. At the very least when I buy something I can understand (after a moment or two) what the cashier said the price was. I also recently had an incredibly minuscule “exchange” with a local street vendor, as it could not be called a conversation, that started out pretty well but ended in him saying a number of things I had no hope of understanding. I know learning a language is an incredibly time intensive task, and I know that even after this term I will not know enough Chinese to have anything more in-depth than a child-like conversation, but I was still quite happy that I was able to say and understand anything at all.

Since I wrote last, I’ve been to a number of places, including the Great Wall. I will not make the ‘It’s a good wall, but…’ joke, but rest assured it was pretty spectacular. We were only able to be there for a short time, much of which was consumed by climbing the stairs up the mountainside to get to the Great Wall, but it was still quite a incredible sight.

Many of the people in our group are going to Xi’an this weekend, the city that has (on its outskirts) the site of the famous Terracotta Warriors, and some in our group intend to go to Mongolia for our week vacation, which I hope will be really fun.
When I’m at home, I have a map that has pins for places I’ve been and places I want to go (color-coordinated, because I’m an insufferable nerd), and I’m quite excited to be able to add one in Ulan-bator.

Hopefully everything works out, and I hope you all are doing well back there.

Happy travels,

-chris

P.S. - This picture is actually of me holding up the Great Wall. Seriously. That small section was about to fall, but with my Herculean strength I managed to hold it up and pose for a picture. No, I was not leaning because I was exhausted from forty minutes of essentially non-stop stairs, what are you talking about?

 P.P.S - So I did make the Great Wall joke. Sue me. Actually, don’t.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 7:43 am and is filed under Mongolia, Xi'an, American TV, Chinese Language, Beijing, Great Wall, China/Japan study abroad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.