One month down....
Trip Start
Aug 08, 2007
1
7
45
Trip End
May 19, 2008
Beijing,
China
Monday, September 10, 2007
Classes were all pretty good. My Chinese teacher is nice, she moves
fast though and skips over details like stroke order and such. It's
alright since I've taken some Chinese and everything now is review.
It's going to get fun once we get to the new stuff though....However, I
have a really great tutor. Her English name is Ficky and she's from
Shanghai. Her mother is an English teacher, so she speaks great
English, and her father teaches Chinese, so she's really good at
teaching Chinese and explaining things clearly to me. I really think
she will improve my Chinese greatly. I told her to be strict with me,
so she'll make me repeat words over and over and over and over until I
finally say them right. She also wants to just hang out with me.
Yesterday she came to my room and painted my nails (blue and silver,
fun!) and gave me a bunch of Chinese pop music. She took me to a
shopping mall then and was explaining Chinese fashion trends to me.
She's really great, we're already becoming good friends.
My roommate and I have been talking more. I found out she has a
boyfriend, who's in graduate school. She also just got me an English
tutoring job for someone's kid. She's going to get more details and see
if she can get me even more than 100 kuai an hour, which was the
original offer. I'll be glad to have a job. It's the first time in a
while that I haven't been making money, but spending a lot of it, and I
don't feel very comfortable about it. Tutoring will be a great way to
make some cash for food and outings.
I went to my first of what will be many local Beijing punk shows. It
was at a place called D-22, which we took a subway to get to. It's a
decent sized place, dirty as most concert clubs are, but cleaner than
some back home. There were four bands, the headliner being the band I
went to see. The opening band was really great too, Guai Li. There was
another band that wasn't very good, but two of the members had the
puffiest, curliest hair I have ever seen, especially for Asian men. It
was quite amusing.
A month in China and I'm just starting to feel like I'm actually at
school. Now that the homework is starting to pile up, I'm realizing
this isn't just party in China time. It doesn't feel like a month at
all, but that is partially because over half of it was spent traveling
all over the country. Slowly but surely I'm getting settled in at UIBE
and Beijing.
This weekend we are taking a trip to the Summer Palace, so I'll have a
fun entry with photos for sure. As for now, I have homework to do!
