Turpan

We arrived in Turpan this morning。 It is a city in the east of Xinjiang。 The last few days we have been in Dunhuang，a small city in the Northwest of the Gansu Province。 We saw some very impressive Buddhist Caves with carvings and sculptures inside。 We also saw lots of sand and sand dunes。 Most of the group went for a camel ride， but I went for a hike to the top of a dune to watch the sunset。 Tomorrow we are off to see some more Buddhist sculptures then we will get on a plane and fly to Kashgar all the way on the western side of china。 I am looking forward to it because at the beginning of the trip it was sold as the best part。 I am very tired of being herded around。 Yesterday we rode a bus 3 hours to a Geologic Park。。had some lunch（bad sandwiches） got on a bus and took a 45min ride to see some rocks named things like sparrow， lions， or sea turtle。 We then got back on the bus and rode the three hours back into town。 Had some dinner then got on another bus for 2 hours to go the train station。 8 hours of bus riding followed by 12 10hours of train。

Grasslands

We are on the road. First up was a 12hour train ride to Xi'an(西安）. We stayed in a ridiculous hotel for $100US for the night. Saw some terracotta warriors as well as a hilarious dance recreating the prince's burial.
西安 also had a neat night market where we got to eat lots of yummies and I bought some more dried figs. There was also a fish market complete with fish, shrimp, eels, crawdads, turtles of various kinds, crabs and lots of fish guts in the street.
We then got on another train for 12 hours then on a bus for 7 hours and are now in a place called XiaHe. It is a little town mustly agricultural with a large buddist monestary.
Some of the people on our trip are ridiculous. I dont know how I will survive to the end. The complaining is endless. And being trapped in trains and busses with then or eating meals is unbearable. Too reliant on US ways of life, too self centered and too arrogant. I climbed a mountain this morning while most were sleeping.

Hills

Today we took a trip to a place called the Fragrant Hills (香山公园). It is kind of like a park, but it has some old temples..or rather the foundations of some old temples…most of the temples were apparently burned by the French and English during an invasion. Parks in Beijing tend to be a little different than parks in the US, but they are very similar to parks in India. The parks are unbelievably crowed. Walking toward the entrance to the park we were part of a long river of people flowing through the gate. All the paths in the park were full of people walking, sitting, eating, talking, sleeping, or standing. It was intense, but beautiful. The guide book says fall is the time to go because all the leaves turn red, but it also says the parked gets mobbed with people in the fall and not to go. I cannot imagine the park being mobbed if that wasn’t what I say today. Either way, we had a good time and I got some good bug pictures. As well as me on a mythological beast turtle thing. I get on the train at 430pm today.

孙悟空

So I am about to embark on an epic journey that will take me to the end of the earth…or just the other side of china..something like 4000+km（四千公里多）to a place called Kashgar or Kashi.Near the border of Kashmir region, Afghanistan, Tajikistan,Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia.Ｉwill be back in 3 weeks…October 6 差不多。Ｉ　ｍａｙ　ｏｒ　ｍａｙ　ｎｏｔ　ｈａｖｅ　ｎｅｔ　ａｃｃｅｓｓ　ｏｆｆ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｗｉｌｄｓ　ｏｆ　Ｃｈｉｎａ．　Ｗｅ　ｗｉｌｌ　ｓｐｅｎｄ　ｍｏｓｔ　ｏｆ　ｏｕｒ　ｔｉｍｅ　ｃｒｏｓｓｉｎｇ　ｔｈｉｓ　ｂｉｇ　ｄｅｓｅｒｔ．Ｇｏｂｉ．　　Ａｐｐａｒｅｎｔｌｙ　ｔｈｅｒｅ　ｉｓ　ｌｏｔｓ　ｏｆ　ｓａｎｄ　ａｎｄ　ｖｅｒｙ　ｆｅｗ　ｐｅｏｐｌｅ．　　Ｔｈｉｓ　ｉｓ　ａｌｓｏ　ｔｈｅ　ｆｒuｉｔ　ｓｅａｓｏｎ．．ｓｏ　ｔｈａｔ　ｍｅａｎｓ　Ｉ will be gorging and will be very happy.
There has been a bit of staring here. Today I was riding my bike to the store and some guy passed me..but after passing kept turning around and staring at me for prolonged tracks of time..this seriously affect his ability to keep the bike on a straight course as well his ability to avoid obstacles.Alas, he did not crash.
Last night I had an interesting conversation with my host mom. She started talking about the hair on my arms again. Last time it was about how because I have hairy arms, I am not cold. This time it was about how the hair on my arms is similar to a TV character, gold in color. Then she got her dictionary and looked up a word for me, evolution. She then proceeded to explain how the Chinese were the most evolutionary advanced and how people, like me, were less evolved because we still have hair like monkeys.
Today I went on a bike ride to a market I had heard about a few days ago.Turned out to not be bad place, not at all like the famous silk market where I was harassed and grabbed repeatedly by salespeople. At the silk market nearly all of the shop keepers yelled out things like “I have special price for you” and “Good friend come look at my shop.” At this market, 天意市场, no one spoke English and there were only other Chinese people, big plus. I bought a backpack, not too big, actually rather small…but now that I have packed it seems to big.Either way it is was a great buy. Don’t know if anyone knows of O7LEY, but they make great products and this one is EXTREME, in fact every bag at the stand was EXTREME but they were different brands..like The North Face, something in Chinese with The North Face logo, Jack Wolfskin, Lowe Alpine, and an assortment of Chinese brands. Some people left for their epic journey this evening and I saw them wheeling out huge bags, poor saps. My bag is really just a book bag….but it does say it is 45L..it is wrong but I have nothing against O7LEY.Here is another view of my room

骑自行车到故宫

First week of classes are over. In the last half hour of class on Friday, just before lunch, one of the other teachers came into the room and handed our teacher a large stack of paper. Homework for the weekend and next week, great. Write an essay, do some homework, and turn both in at 8am on Monday, and also we will have a quiz at 8am so prepare. Have a good weekend, bye.

Today we went for a 6hour bike ride around the city. We rode along the outside of the Forbidden City.

This is the view I had most of the time.

This is one of the major streets in Beijing.

This is kind of what most of the city looks like.

Our teacher explained to us about how he does not like politics and government, but how he does like culture. He says those three things are what make up life..and you need all three. He says that the recent development in the city..is too focused on money. For example Beijing used to have a city wall in addition to the great wall. The city wall was torn down and replaced with what is now the second ring road to allow better flow of traffic in and out of the city center. It was proposed at one point by a professor at Beijing University to only build/ develop outside the city wall and let the inside remain true Beijing. He also said that as a child he remembered playing on the city wall. Also he talked about the hutongs and how there used to be far more. A Hutong is like a narrow residential street. There are a few left and we rode through a few. Most have been destroyed and replaced with high rises.

This is the Front of the Forbidden City (gugong).

Notice the man above the door.

This is a nicer Beijing street.

This is a man taking a picture of me. He is hired by the government to take pictures of Chinese culture, or tourists ( Chinese and Foreign) doing tourists things, publicity stuff I think.

Along the nicer streets you can still see traditional old Beijing houses and doors. There are also lots of new structures that are built to resemble the old stuff. Our teacher pointed out which were old and which were new.

Here is a very large, modern door/gate and a nice reflection of me on my bike with camera in hand.

This man’s jacket is for “Beijing Light Automotive Co, Ltd.” ie: Bicycle.

Food.

Today I had an assortment of small eats from some place near the Gugong. Most were rice or redbean of some sort. Most were not good. I had a bun with pork in it that was good, I also had what resembled a biscuit but was closer to the density of solid rubber. It was tasty. I had a ball of sticky rice that I thought was benign until I bit into the center to find green chilies drowned in sugar.

The other day I went out to lunch with some classmates and had some good food, but none of them ate it. There was one bad dish. It consisted of lots of sugar cube size and shape jello cubes with potato flakes within, all douses with vinegar of some sort..not good. There were these awesome slime noodles, transparent, stretchy, chewy, huge and awesome to play with. There was also broccoli with garlic. I ate another duck last night.

Shangke

So I woke up at 5 this morning, but forced myself to stay in bed for another hour. I was excited for class. 4 hours of Chinese and then two hours of econ, who wouldn’t be excited. 6am finally rolled around and I got up and went to take a shower. I met my ayi in the bathroom and she explained how to use the shower (it looks a lot like a shower you might be familiar with except it is in the shape of a 6ft tall telephone booth, works the same as any shower, but is very small and too short to get water on my head without bending down considerably. Shower over, I sat down to another breakfast of strange small cakes/buns/biscuts and hard boiled eggs soaked in soya sauce. Breakfast over; I sat down for a good solid hour of review before my 8am class.

7:45 I roll up in the language class hall to find a schedule posted on the wall informing me that I am in class 332-c. Is that a room number? No. That is my medium class group designation, not to be confused with my small group class designation which I am currently unsure of because it was listed as 132-2, but that was a typo. So next I make my way up and down the hall looking for which room my 8am class is in, I go up and down diligently searching, not once, not twice, but three times. No luck I can find where my 9, 10, and 11 o’clock class is but no 8am class. Turns out they forgot to put some signs up.

Class begins. We get a little tingxie (teacher says stuff in Chinese and you write down what she says using only characters) and then break into some grammar instruction. There was a bit of confusion on the tingxie after class because it was not explained and turns out in previous Chinese classes people have not all done the same thing. Some have written the pinyin(Romanized Chinese), some have translated to English, and others have written characters…so who knows what was right. The grammar instruction was similar to before and there were actually no new structures introduced. Xiake(end of class). We all go into the hall and discuss a bit before finding our next room. In the next room I find the same five classmates but a different teacher. But wait, the teacher is writing the same grammar structures on the board that the last teacher wrote, odd. Shangke( class begins) and is identical to the last class minus the tingxie and with a slightly older teacher. Xiake. That was odd. Goto to the next class, in yet a third room with the same five classmates, but wait the teacher from the first class is back and what is she doing? Writing the same grammar structures on the board that we all seeing for a third time. Shangke, small as the last two classes. Xiake. That was weird again. 11 o’clock class yet another room, but with the same teacher from the first and 3^rd class. Shangke. Same grammar structures except for this time instead of repeat after her and adopt, she asks canned questions(the same question to each of us one at time) and we give her responses using the grammar structure she points at. Xiake. Great I have just had the same class 3.5times in a row. I don’t understand.

Econ was not promising. The teacher gave a poor summary of the assigned reading and possibly made things up. I went to talk to the admin about switching right after class. They told me to wait until after class next week when I will have a better perspective on how the class will be.

Gongyuan hu Xuexi

For lunch today my host father (shushu) an I shared a large fish..or what I imagine was a large fish boiled in oil. It was hard to tell because it was cut into pieces, but the head was quite large. My host mom(ayi) was also there but she does not like ‘lade’(spicy) food so she just stuck to the other dishes. I think I have had boiled cabbage at every meal thus far and this was no exception. Except this cabbage was boiled with lots of dasuan(small white vegi aka garlic). There was also pork of some kind and rice. After the meal I required a two hour food settling nap.

Last week I was so lucky as to go to an orientation activity and be handed homework that I is due at 8am on the first day of class. After my nap I started on it. It was/is a real assignment, a long boring story about flying to china and 80+ new words to learn how to write. 6 hours later I am done and ready to go to bed only to wake up at 6am and practice the characters some more.

Here is where I sleep. It is on the 5^th floor. There is a bed, desk and a wardrobe.

There is also a fan.

This is the building I used to live in before I met my family..but my current building looks the same. In fact my new building is directly behind that one. Little did I know when I walked out with my stuff to get picked up that I had already walked halfway to my new home.

We went to a park today. Shushu took way too many pictures of me. The man( not me) is Shushu.

There were way too many people in the park. Some were playing badminton with no net, others sitting, whispering sweet nothings. Most of the people were either old or kids, as shushu explained. It was true, except most of the haizi(kids) had parents with them that were not old. There were some of the old people playing a traditional instrument(two-string bamboo guitar) and singing in a traditional Beijing style.. It sounded awful, the singing, but the instrument was great. We also went to buy a new pair of house sandals(shoes you wear while inside) because the ones that originally got were too small. And I ate a sweet potato/yam roasted on a little grill next to the road.

Move in day

On friday we went to the Big Bell Temple...which is actually not a temple, but it does have a big bell. It used to be a buddist and Taoist temple, but has since been taken over by the government and converted into a bell museum. There were lots of bells and lots of bell info. There were plaques all over the place telling about some bell or another. There were also plenty of replica bells and a few pictures of bells.

Here is a picture of some chicken I ate.

This picture comes after I ate the little floppy thing on the chicken head as well as its eyeball.

I moved in with my family today. Say goodbye to curvaceous curls man, although i do have a few more weird stories about him...one involves him climbing in someone else's window at 4am.
My host mother is a Chinese teacher at the university. She teaches Chinese as a foreign language primarily to Korean and Japanese students. My host father is a manager at some type of energy consulting firm that tries to cut energy use, i think. He definitely works with electricity, water, and natural gas and using less of all of them. My family lives on campus in a small apartment on the 5th floor. This is odd because in my homestay interview the only thing i requested was that my family did not live on campus.
My parents are both 55 and very nice. Communication for the past 7 hours was a bit difficult. Lots of spoken words and constructions that I dont know yet. They dont speak english, so i have been trying to communicate by saying things like "how do you say..the water of cow" which is milk. They got a good laugh out of water of cow..and have repeated it several times since to laugh again.

life thus far

I am still around. Internet is still hard to come by. There is no internet in my temporary room and they are in the process of moving offices so there is now only one computer for public use amongst the 90 IES students.

I am currently sharing a room with a guy from Rice university in texas. He is a weird guy and difficult to have a conversation with. He is also shocked by china and spends most of his time in the room. He also has curly hair and 5 large bottles of "curvaceous curls" to help accentuate his precious collection of curls.

I move into my homestay tomorrow. No idea who or where it will be. They promised it would be within 30min travel. Their plan is to have us all show up on pickup day and just call out names and have the students and the family acquaint themselves. I did manage to extract a small bit of info..one of the host fathers is a retired geologist, I mentioned I was an EA major and interested in exploring, hiking, having an active host family not too much tv.

The first part of the week was busy. Too many long boring info sessions on policy, procedure, and safety. All read directly from powerpoint presentations project on a large screen or multiple large screens. Some were even in broken english. The next three days are mostly free, aside from moving in and getting to know my family, I only have to do my homework for the first day of class. Yes homework for the first day of class. Yesterday we met our teachers...or rather sat in a room with them long enough for them to give us books and instructions on what are homework was and that it was due at 8am on monday. I dont yet know what my teachers name is or where class is, but i have homework.

Yesterday i went downtown and figured out how the buses and subway work. At the bus stops there are large boards with bus schedules on them all in chinese, which is ok because i can read most of it. What is not ok is the stop names are mostly local names that do not appear on maps and i do not know. So bus riding is mostly trail and error and lots of asking for help. Both the subway and buses are packed...but no one is riding on the roofs, at least in the city.

Downtown we found a few shopping districts and we were assaulted by salespeople. "Sir you want to buy wallet. I give you best price. You good friend." Some even grabbed my arm in an attempt to sell me something i did not want. I bargained with one of them for a backpack and got her down from $25 to $3, but did not purchase the bag because of its poor quality.

The other day, in an effort to force people off campus the program had us split into teams of 3 and gave us little slips of paper with place names on them. We were to go to the place..somehow with out asking english speakers and return with proof of our success. The two other guys in my group immediately returned to their rooms to take naps and recover from a heavy night of drinking. So i ventured alone only to be hugely disappointed when i arrived. I found a department store, something similar to walmart. I was just unlucky, other groups got better destinations.

The IES students are the only ones on campus thus far. The rest of the university does not arrive or start until the 8th or 9th. Many of the IES students have started to form habits similar to what they had in the us. They go out at night to western bars and return sometime between 12 and 4am.

I bought a bike. $13. It is a real winner, black,dirty, old, and it works. I have ridden it around the city some. Biggest ride was 20km...in about 3 hours. You ride in the streets with the cars, buses, and other bikes. There is constant stopping and going. Most of the bikes are single speed bikes and gear low so top speed comes soon and is slow.

Food. I have eaten many types of food and have no idea what most were. For the first few days the program took us in big groups and bought our meals. Most of the food was meat in various sauces with a few cabbage or potato dishes. In addition to restaurants there are many street vendors selling "small foods," kabobs, pancake looking things, dumplings, etc. There are also fruit stands at which i have brought peaches, plums, grapes and pears, all of which are different than what you are familiar with. I havent been sick yet, but still am in the adjustment phases.

We have two weeks of class then we go on a two week field trip along the silk road to the western border of china. It is a long trip and I am not sure i will enjoy that much time spent on buses, trains, or planes, but it should be interesting. The trip will end near the border of pakistan, north of tibet. We will be traveling in 4 groups of 22. I am not keen on the idea of being herded like sheep as has been done thus far on the program..and hope to get away from the mass.