COOOOOLD

It's super cold here.  I know I shouldn't be complaining too much considering some of my friends are in Harbin, China on the border with Russia, but I can't help it.  I haven't been properly warm in days.  Our dorm rooms have "heaters," but really, they don't do that great of a job.  The classrooms don't use heaters either.  And outside surely isn't warm, so I'm forced to constantly suffer through this chilly weather.

I think it might not be so bad if it wasn't for the rain.  Usually, I really love cold weather (barring that one trip to Chicago where the temperatures were something like -13).  It's brisk and really wakes you up in the morning, but here, the cold is always accompanied by the rain which just seems to seep in everywhere.

Besides the weather, I had a good weekend.  Decided to stay and explore the city instead of heading to Shanghai, which was nice.  On Friday night, a bunch of us went to Maya Bar for food and drink specials.  They served MEXICAN FOOD!!!  I had chicken burritos with real white meat...none of this biting into your KFC sandwhich only to find a bone and some darm sinew. As the night dragged on, we saw a white man pull up in a van outside the window.  He unloaded a grill and proceeded to cook these massive hamburgers.  Although we'd already eaten, none of us could pass up a hamburger.  So we ate them.  Turns out we met a ton of American, German, English, Australian, French expats that night.  They were all really cool (and really old), so it was nice to be able to ask them questions that you can't exactly ask another Chinese person.

Classes are still going well.  I took a few pictures this weekend when we headed out into the city, but most of them turned out like crap because of the weird and awkward weather.  West Lake was constantly covered in this dense fog/misty rain making it near impossible to take a picture that didn't look like I was gazing across the River Styx in Hades.  Anyway, when the weather lets up, I'll have some nice pictures to put up.

Coming Soon...

Decided to stay in Hangzhou this weekend to hang out with the other students, so I'll be sure to take actual pictures of Hangzhou.  It's really pretty so far, but the weather has been terrible.  I hear Spring is comin soon, so the plum trees will be blooming everywhere.

In other news, I signed up for a cooking class taught by a Hangzhou tv chef.  Should prove to be interesting.  Also, I signed up for a Tai Qi class (Tai Qi on Wikipedia) which takes place once a week in a park on campus.  I'm excited about both, so it should prove to be an interesting semester.  Well, I've got to go.  We're going to a local restaurant to learn to make Jiaozi(Picture from Wikipedia) in 5 minutes.  I've got to be off.  Bye!

So, today was a good day.  Not that the rest have been particularly bad, but today's was particularly good.  It's not that I did anything spectacular, but I think I finally have my routine down.

Joined a gym a yesterday that's extremely nice.  It's funny because the showers at the gym are better than the showers at the dorm.  The showers here are insid the bathroom, but not separate from the toilet, sink, etc.  So when you take a shower, all the water just kind of runs everywhere.  There are two drains that the water supposedly runs into, but there was also a mop provided in every bathroom, which says to me "Sorry our drains are terrible, but here's a mop to help out juuuust a little."  Regardless, showers here are sketchy to say the least.  I wear shoes.

Anyway, back to the gym.  It's extremely nice, so I've gone there the past two nights.  After the gym tonight, a couple of us went to KFC which was my first time to eat American food here in China.  It was nice, but not exactly the same as at home (not that I eat at KFC that often in America).  For one, there weren't any biscuits or mashed potatoes.  I was livid, which is funny because I don't know that many exclamations in Chinese, so I just kept saying the same thing over and over.  Also, they don't sell chicken strips.  LAME.  So I got a chicken sandwhich (which turned out to be dark meat, but thankfully without bones) which was pretty good and also some french fries. Yum.

Classes have started and are going fairly well.  I only have 1 class tomorrow and then I'm through for the week, so I'm excited about that as well as the lack of homework tonight.  So far, I'm enjoying my classes even if it is difficult to undersand the teachers sometimes.  I'm taking 4 classes here: A One on One Topics-Based Course (my topic is Religion in Modern China), a Two on One speaking and pronounciation course (which turned out to just be a One on One course because of an odd number of students), Business Chinese, and Modern Chinese Literature.  All the courses are taught exclusively in Chinese, which has proven to be difficult.  Even when the teachers define new words and phrases, they use Chinese to describe them, though I suppose this is good because of how much it will increase my listening comprehension.

Tomorrow night, a bunch of us are going out to this huge club, G+, to hear this famous DJ.  I mean, I've never heard of him, but he's billed as famous (which I guess means I'm buying into the marketing scheme.  Oh well, I'm in China and won't get to do this kind of thing again for awhile).  So anyway, we're all going to do that tomorrow night, and then for the weekend, most of us are going to stay in Hangzhou to explore the city and maybe head to a few of the smaller tea villages in the nearby hills/mountains.

My roommate and I seem to be getting along quite well.  I came home tonight to find a pear sitting on my desk that he bought for me.  He's really thoughtful, and the fruit was tasty.  He probably got it from Hou men(literaly "back door or gate", which is this amazing little neighborhood at the back gate of our campus.  There are restaurants galor and also tons of street vendors selling all different kinds of food.  I've tried some strange grilled meat (they said it was pork.  For my sake, let's hope so), a fried banana with ketchup, baozi, jiaozi, tons of fruit (they have GREAT pineapple and oranges here), and various other noodle and rice dishes.

Well, I'm about to head out.  I just bought some American tv shows in iTunes and some friends and I are going to watch them.  Nothing says comfort like Rock of Love: Tour Bus and The Real World. Yesssss.  

P.S. Here's some pictures I've accumulated.

This is a baozi.  It's basically a small dumpling with any number of fillings inside.  You can get vegetable inside along with different meats, but this one is my favorite.  It has red beans inside of it.  Red beans are this tasty creation that I hardly ever see outside of China.  They look like kidney beans, but they have this intensely sweet taste to them, so this is sort of like dessert.

This is some tuna sushi that a man on the side of the road made for me.  Overall, it wasn't that great, but it was totally worth the 60 cents I paid for it, haha.

PICTURE POST!!!!!

So, Erin and I were walking through a park in Shanghai and were accosted by this random man.  He really wanted to talk to us because according to him, "I HATE talking to the Shanghainese...they're so boring.  I only talk to foreigners."  He seemed really proud of his strenght, and he made us guess his age (88, if you were wondering).  He was also really proud of his teeth.  Apparently, its pretty common in China to lose all ones teeth, so keeping them at such a late age is a real feat.


This was a sign on a door in an antiques market we went to.  Strange things, these Chinese people.  I'm pretty sure if anyone had mammoth tusks, this dirty antiques market would not be where they were.
This was a window at a jiaozi shop.  The woman inside is rolling the dough that she then passes to her left where it is filled and steamed.
Since it's the year of the Ox in the Chinese zodiac calendar, there are oxes EVERYWHERE in China.  This was one of our favorite.

Inside the YuYuan gardens that I mentioned in my first post, there were all these bizarre...I dunno what you'd call them.  They're sort of like nativity scenes, but made out of paper, and I'm not really sure the purpose of them.  Oh, and there's another ox.

This is what the alleyways looked like.  Everything was REALLY  touristy, and Erin and I kept forgetting we were in China.  It was almost exactly like Epcot's China exhibit in Disney World.
In the middle of the pond is a famous tea house...I think it was called Huizhong.  Anyway, there were about a thousand people in or around it, so we never made it inside.

This was our view of the Pearl Tower at around 2:00 one day.  There was an insane amount of smog...it was kind of gross.

This is a picture of a public restroom near our school in Hangzhou.  For some reason, the sign said "Tool Room." Believe me, I'm just as confused as you are.
I was absolutely terrified to eat this at first.  I thought it was some monstrosity of congealed orange meat and maybe worms.  Turns out, it's candied lotus root.  Inside the holes of the root, they stuff sweet rice.  It was surprisingly good, but I think I might have been slightly allergic to it because after I ate it, my tongue went sort of numb and tingly for an hour or so.  Strange times.
And this is the famous Shanghai skyline.  I took this from my cellphone on the night of the lantern festival.  Such a cool experience.

**This post was written yesterday after I'd just arrived, but I just now got the chance to create my blog and post everything**

February 11, 2009

Wow. So today was my first introduction to what this semester will really be like, and it’s going to be intense.  Erin and I got up this morning relatively early to try and catch our train from Shanghai to Hangzhou.  Although we were staying at the Holiday Inn RIGHT NEXT to the train station, it was our luck that our tickets said we had to leave from the other train station, because apparently, there are several.  Anyway, we rushed out the door and made it to the train station right as everyone was boarding, so thankfully, we weren’t late.

The train ride proved to be interesting as we got to see the urban sprawl of Shanghai give away to rolling fields full of farmers (though these “rolling fields” were still overshadowed by skyscraper-esque housing developments.  You wouldn’t believe how many 50 floor housing developments there are in China).  After we got off the train, we were immediately accosted by tons of taxi drivers promising us the cheapest, easiest cab rides to wherever we were going.  We were smart enough to say no, and instead, we waited in the official taxi line for our cab.  Though it took over an hour, our ride only cost 20 yuan when minutes earlier, I had been fine with bartering and paying 100 yuan for the ride from one of the guys mentioned earlier.  Regardless, we got to Zhejiang University of Technology in one piece.

From the moment we got to our dorms, Erin and I didn’t speak any English at all.  I think the last thing I said to her was “I’m never packing this much again if we have to lug it arou...!” before I was cut off in Chinese by the director of our program.  I mean, Erin and I did manage to sneak in a few words of English here or there when we could, but it wasn’t much.  We immediately went upstairs to the second floor to move into our rooms and meet our Chinese roommates.  Mine was more than happy to see me which was strange, but not altogether disconcerting.  All of us were immediately whisked away to lunch with the other students.

Afterwards, my roommate offered to take Erin and I to ChinaMobile (the state run mobile phone company).  Two of his friends came along, and after literally an hour and a half, we managed to make it out alive and with two working Chinese cell phones.  One of the stranger things about the experience is that in China, you buy your SIM card separately from your phone, so you get to choose a number that’s been recycled from a previous user.  The most important part of picking your own numbers is to pick the number with the least amount of 4’s in it (because in Chinese, the word 4 or si is extremely similar to the word for death si which makes it a terribly unlucky number).  Conversely, you should pick a number with the most number of 6’s considering 6 is a lucky number.

After this harrowing experience, my roommate and his friends took Erin and I to see our first glimpses of West Lake, though at the time we had no idea what we were doing considering we could understand scant few of their quickly-spoken and garbled Chinese sentences.  Finally, we arrived at the famous West Lake and were greeted by a jaw-droppingly beautiful lake surrounded by verdant mountains.  The trees are almost in bloom here, so as you can imagine, the setting was near perfect.  At one point, we all decided to charter a boat rowed by a nice, older Chinese man further down the lake.  The sun began to set at this point, and the distant mountains were thick with mist (though it should be noted that the “mist” is actually just China’s pollutants blocking the sun and scattering its rays, haha.  Nice effect, though).  After going back to the dorms, we went on a small tour of the campus, which by the way has two rivers running through it.  Very cool.

I guess the hardest thing so far is going to be keeping the language pledge which says that I cannot speak ANY English at all while I’m here.  It’s going to be strange, but I suppose I have to do it.  Today while Erin and I were buying our phone and seeing West Lake with my roommate, I felt like I was going to pop if I didn’t say something in English.  Everything was so beautiful, but all I could say about it in Chinese was “That’s so pretty.  Really beautiful.  Oh wow.”  It was frustrating, but I’ll just have to get over it.  Either that or save all my English up until Erin and I can go by ourselves somewhere, haha.

I’ll keep everyone posted with pictures and such as soon as I plug in my camera, and I’ll try to keep this updated fairly often.  It probably won’t be that hard to update though considering this is one of the only ways to communicate in English.  Until next time.

大家好！In Chinese, that means hello everyone!  I've decided to start this blog for all the reasons familiar to most study abroad students....I wanted to keep in touch with family and friends, everyone seems to recommend it, etc.  Also, I wanted to start this journal because it's virtually the only place I can use English everyday.  I'm at the C.V. Starr Middlebury China Program at Zhejiang University of Technology in Hangzhou, China.  At my school, we have to sign the "Language Pledge" which basically says that you cannot speak English until you graduate from the program.  Exceptions are made for emergencies, talking to parents and friends online, and a few other instances, but mostly we have to speak Chinese.  I guess that's a good thing, but right now the task of speaking exclusively Chinese for 4 months seems insurmountable(see what I mean? How would I ever know the word for insurmountable in Chinese? It's rather difficult...).  Regardless, I suppose I'll have to considering they'll kick you out if you're reprimanded for breaking the pledge three times.

I travelled to China with a friend of mine, Erin Callahan, who will also be going to the same school as me.  Although school doesn't start until Monday, Erin and I arrived in Shanghai, China on Saturday, February 7th.  We were heavily jetlagged, so as soon as we got to the hotel, we pretty much just went to sleep.  Overall, it was around 22 hours of travel.  NOT something I'd like to repeat in the near future.  Anyway, we woke up the next morning in Shanghai (at around 5 or so, keep in mind, because of the jet-lag) and decided to do some exploring.  We walked down to the Bund to see Shanghai's famous, futuristic skyline, but unfortunately, the pollution that day skewed our view.  Some of it might have been fog, as Erin kept insisting, but I had my doubts.

Our next task was the most difficult yet.  We must have walked to 10 or so restaurants haphazardly translating menus before we finally found one that had pictures for us to point to and order.  Apparently, we need to learn more food words.  Anyway, we ate an unremarkable lunch and continued on our way to The People's Square which is this ginormous park with everything surrounding it.  I know that's deceptively vague, but that's really the best way to describe it.  In fact, that's the best way to describe Shanghai. BIG.  Whether you mean big in size or gaudiness, it all applies to Shanghai.  It seems like this is where all of China's consumerism has come to roost.

Throughout the rest of our long weekend in Shanghai, Erin and I made it to the French Concession which is this area of town that the French controlled for a bit as a trading post during the 1800s (I think it was then).  While walking through the maze of tightly winding streets, it was easy to forget that we were in China and not actually in Europe.  We also went to YuYuan Gardens which was an area of the city that was a garden/monastery some time in the recent past, but now it's morphed into this touristy-mecha full to the brim of Chinese tourist and fake antiques.  Although it was a really fun experience, I doubt I'll make it back there again anytime soon.  I'm not really a fan of the immensity of the crowds there.  When trying to move around, you didn't really walk...rather, you shuffled your feet and scooted inches at a time.  And if the crowd turned one way, then by damn, you'd better want to go that way because there's not much of a choice at that point.

Besides those things, we really just spent time overcoming jetlag.  We hung out in the hotel lots and studied Chinese.  One night, we went back to the Bund to see Shanghai's famous skyline at night, and boy was it spectacular.  It made every other city look positively medieval in comparison.  It turned out that that night was the last night of the Lantern Festival.  Erin and I kept seeing these strange flickering lights all over the sky which we both thought were UFO's until one burst into flames.  It turns out that people were lighting lanters and floating them into the sky.  One of these lanterns actually caught the Mandarin Hotel in Beijing on fire and burnt it to the ground this weekend.  Brand new hotel.  The Chinese government covered it up really well considering everything, but that was kind of crazy.

Anyway, that was the highlights of our stay in Shanghai.  I'm about to head to bed for the night, but do my best to post as much as I can this semester.  I think I'll probably be doing that alot considering it's rather nice to be able to put my thoughts together in English rather than Chinese.