3-30-04

Today I dropped off Ana at the airport. Back to my normal life here. Spring is coming around though, which makes the city "pretty pretty". Flowers are blooming all over the place. However, everything can't be that perfect. March and April here are known for being windy, and very much dusty. Strong winds from the north generously bring a bunch of sand into the city which has now turned my apartment into a desert. It's all over the place!! whether you are eating, you can just taste the crunch of the sand in your mouth. Whether you are reading or want to watch a movie, on your dvd's or in your books. On the table, on the floor, it don't matter where you go, the sand is at your door!! A couple of days ago, coming back from campus, one could barely see the road ahead. It would get into your eyes and everything was just a blur. Everything was yellow!! I didn't get any pictures because I didn't want to ruin my camera. So that's it for now. I'm planning a trip to a safari where you can buy chickens and feed them to tigers. I'll get pictures of that.

Light gets its way through the trees.

3-25-04

It's been a while since I don't update and that's because I've had visit for the past week and will continue until next tuesday. Since Sunday we have been going around the city on bicycles showing Ana the city. I went into the Forbidden City for the first time and it was amazing. More pictures will be added to the Gallery when I get a chance. Other than that, weather has been great and flowers are blooming around the city which makes parks and temples look very pretty.

In the past couple of days we've presenced two fights in the middle of the street. All this seems to indicate that "Beijingers" can get pretty angry from time to time. One was between two taxi cab drivers right in front of my university gate and the other was on some random corner. One guy was beating up another guy and a woman. Interesting. I stopped for 20 seconds or so to watch, and then just kept going.

Alright, class now.

Forbidden City

3-18-04

 

So, here it is, take a good look at this picture.

 

Ready? can you take a guess of what this might be? Well if you guessed wrong, you would have never thought that in 4 years, in this exact spot, the Beijing 2008 Olympic games will be taking place. Jake and I went out for a night ride. By the time I took this picture it was completely dark by the way, that's the beauty of long exposure. So anyways, we started going east, and I remembered that somewhere around where we were at, was the Olympic site. And well, we hit it dead on. I think that I will take pictures every 6 months or so, and see the progress, it should be interesting. After taking a few pictures there, we continued going east, and got to the rich part of town. Very nice streets, restaurants, hotels and appartments. After that, we went to this place where we found all kinds of very nice accessories for our bicycles which now look incredibly fancy. Pictures will come soon. That's it for tonight.

Jake and I enjoy the view

 

3-14-04

 

I knew it! I've been having this dicussion with people about the myth saying that the only manmade construction visible from outerspace is the "Great Wall" here in China. How could that possibly make sense? No matter how long it is, its only a few meters wide. Then how come you cant really see your local Ikea which is without a doubt wider in each way?

An article in CNN.com tells the whole story about how the myth has now been too widely spread and that elementary chinese textbooks must now be changed. So there you go. Many manmade objects can be seen from space with the naked eye, but the Great Wall ain't one of them.

A view of the Great Wall from Space...with radar.

3-10-04

 

In 5 days exactly, my visa is supposed to expire because by now I should have a residence permit issued either by my university (had I chosen to live there) or by my landlord (which is the case). However, for some reason they haven't been able to figure that out, my landlord isn't around or doesn't know what to do. As a solution, the real estate agency that is helping me out with this whole deal decided that they'll give me a fake address for now, so that I can register with it and then we'll just change it to my real one. I mean...why not. During the past few days I feel like my spoken chinese has made some huge improvements. My vocabulary is increasing by the minute and things that make sort of sense are starting to come out of my mouth. In brief here are the pros and cons about chinese:

Pros: -there is no singular or plural.-no masculin or feminin.

-you don't really conjugate verbs, there is no past, present, future. (Unless you want to master the language, but for common daily talking no need for it).

-the basic grammatical structure is SUBJECT+VERB+OBJECT.

Cons:-There are 4 tones and 1 non-existent tone, for a total of 5 different ways of saying a word.

-Needless to say, for each one of these tones, there is a different character. And it's not like spanish or french where you just add a "tilde" and that's it, here the character changes completely.

-Do I have to mention the fact that those characters are hard to remember? there's only 50,000 of them.

-Each line you draw in a character not only has a specific direction, but there is also an order as to which line goes after the other.

So now you have an idea of what I got myself into. This friday I have my first test on characters. I should know about 150 by now. Amount I really know: about 15.

 

3-9-04

 

Today I did another video recording. This time I wasn't really part of the big cast, more like an extra in the background while some guy that claimed himself American, talked in a very bad accent. All we did for 2 hours was play basketball while this guy tried to make moves. He couldn't make one shot! poor guy. Then the directors all pissed start yelling at him for not scoring and he replies saying in chinese "not every American can play basketball you know?" haha. So yea, they fed us, we played, and then they brought us back home and that was it.

 

3-6-04

 

David, the french chinese looking friend of ours, finally decided to buy a bike, so we all went for a bike ride to Fragrant Hills. You can see the pictures in the gallery by clicking here. The ride was supposed to be a little over 6 km. After 7km of riding, we see a sign indicating that we had 7km ahead of us. So we pedalled a good 15 km approx. all the way to the site. Once there, we got on a ski lift and went all the way to the top of the mountain. On the way up you could see little temples as you can see in the pictures I took. We got up top, walked around a little, took some photos, then headed back down but this time we took the steps. It took us at least an hour or more to walk down those steps. Our knees were very much in pain.

At a little street market

When we finally got to the bottom, we started our trip back home, it was almost dark. David took the wrong turn, and we all followed him for like 15 minutes until we realized we were lost. We went through this little village or group of houses where every single person stopped doing whatever it was they were doing to look at the two western guys riding through their little town. Then we stopped in front of something that seemed like a prison. I don't know, it was weird: there were a bunch of guards, walls with barbwire, long black mercedes limos, just a little suspicious when you put it in the middle of the place we found ourselves in. Anyways, after riding for like 6km's in sand and dirt on single-speed cruising city bikes, we finally got back to where we had started. We finally found the right way back home, and headed back. However, on the way back, I was trying to hook up to a truck to just tag along with it without having to pedal (and I usually do this) but this time the truck was going too fast when I tried to match up with it, and I took my first nasty fall in China. Fortunately nothing serious happened.

3-2-04

 

Today I sold my bike, and got a new one. I was going to take a picture of it to post it, but when I took out the camera I realized I had left the memory stick in my computer. So the picture will come later. However, it is beautiful. It's the classical single speed cruiser you will see in any movie with china in it.Today I learned how to pay for the electricity and gas. Also, for some weird reason, today in class I learned more than I have in the past 2 weeks. I was going through the vocabulary words in the book, and I have probably learned around 100 words so far which isn't bad. I don't know 100 characters though, which makes a huge difference. It seems like speaking the language won't be as hard as one might think it could be, but writing it is incredibly difficult. All those characters make no sense to the human eye. I don't know how they came up with that. There is sort of a logic to the way in which they are structured, but still. The fact that the word "shi" has 4 different tones in which you can pronounce it, but in reality it has over 40 meanings, makes it more complicated. Actually, there is a poem that is made only with the word "shi". They put it on the projector the other day in class, and I was the only one to read it!! :) I obviously didn't understand a word I had said, but reading the tones correctly can be enough of a challenge believe me. Yesterday as we were going to pay for the rent, Agustin (my spanish roomate) and I were at the ATM waiting for the money to come out, but it didn't. A receipt saying that he withdrew 2,500RMB came out, but no money along with it. Then, well you can imagine what it looked like for us to go into the bank and try to explain what had happened. It's a constant charade game here. Although I must admit that we can pick up certain key words here and then that can help. Also all the contract signing with the landlord and the agency were done in mandarin. I took care of most of it since my two roomates have class in the afternoon, so I do all the paperwork sh*t job. Anyhow, I wish I had a camera everytime I meet with them. Imagine what its like to ask every detail one might ask when receiving an apartment. A funny one was trying to explain to the landlord that the water pressure was very low and that the bathroom stunk for some weird reason. He seems to have a lot of fun watching us act out all these questions.So yeah, I think I'm almost done with all these errands. Tomorrow I go to the police station with our landlord to register ourselves as off-campus residents, then I go to some other office to declare it. I don't know, it's complicated. Also, arguing with chinese is seldom worth the shot. They are like walls when they say no. And be careful when you give them money, there is no such thing as getting it back no matter what your reason might be.