Far Out in the Far East

Finals are over!

I'm exploring western China for the next two weeks. I'll be visiting Luoyang, Xi'an, Chengdu, Guilin, Longsheng, and Yangshou.

No pilgrims. No indians. No turkey. No story of the white man having dinner with the natives' and then taking their land. No Thanksgiving in China. Instead I will be taking a final. Ironically, I will be writing about how the white man came to China and took their land for a time. And about how its ridiculous that Taiwan has kept two superpowers on edge for all these years. And about how Kissinger had an ego. And about Clinton's bad decisions...and Bush's too.

(Our program is throwing us a Chinese Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. I really hope we're having duck like in A Christmas Story)

I read in one of the books required for class about how in 1986 the government institued a 11 pm lights out policy at Beida to save electricity. Apparently the students have been protesting ever since. All this time, I've been ignorant to the fact that my peers have to work around this bogus rule. Luckily, international students are given the luxury of 24 electricity priviledges. I'm shocked that this has never been brought up with my Chinese friends.

Man, blogs are hard to keep up with. Unless you're really into yourself, it's impossible to take the time to write about your life when you'd rather just be living your life...if that makes sense. Anyways, I have one more week left of school before I venture with small group of Americans on a two week "study trip" around central and south China. I still have a paper and three finals before I can officially call it quits. It's been quite a week -- Obama was in Beijing, US Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, was at Beida -- all very exciting. Obama was all over the Chinese news. I found it interesting that went Presidents Obama and Hu were talking to each other, the Chinese translator would translate Obama's words of "President Hu" as "Chairman Hu." That says something about the Party.

Last week, aside from writing 30 pages of papers, I spent some time playing with some children of migrant workers. (The kids can't speak any English so having to communicate with them really tests your Chinese.) The parents seemed to like us so yesterday a group of us took a group of them to see the inside of the Bird's Nest. After running up and down the grand stands a few times the kids got a little restless so we went back outside a started a game of duck duck goose. We drew quite a crowd and we later learned that the people thought that the fact that everyone was in a circle meant that someone was going to put on some kind of show in the middle. Later that day I went to a tea store with a few friends where sat sampling tea for two hours and eventually ended up buying a ton of it.

Also, I can't get on Facebook anymore, again.

inside the Birds Nest

If you know me you know that I like to have a plan. You know that I like to know exacty what's going on. Well...all odds were against me yesterday when had a Sino-American paper due by the start of class (6:30 pm). I had class in the morning that day but I figured I would have plenty of time afterward to print the paper that I'd pretty much finished the night before. During my morning class I was informed that the professor preferred the paper in MLA style--I had written the whole thing in Chicago style. I spent from 1 to 4 going back through all of my sources trying to find the page numbers where I got all of my information (Chicago doesn't require page numbers). Around 4 o'clock I emailed my paper to myself so that I could open the document on a computer in a little printing room on campus. I went to the printing room. Now, the printing room is no larger than your average kitchen, with about 15 people bustling around in an attempt to copy or print something at any given time. Once I secured a computer, I navigated my way to my email through a sea of Chinese characters. I document wouldn't open. I communicated my problem to the really busy (non-English speaking) student worker. The worker, in an attempt to help, deleted the email that contained the attachment to my paper. He stared at me in horror and then panicked and just left. A little ticked, okay, extremely ticked, I stormed back to the History Department where I pleaded to some laides to allow me to print from a computer there. By this time it was almost 5. I manage to print the paper but the printer I used only took A4 paper (?) or something so my paper printed out five pages too long. I spent 20 minutes of trial and error guessing what the characters on the computer mean to get my paper back to normal. I managed to figure it out and felt super relieved. All I needed was a staple. But no. The entire History Department lacked a stapler so I went to the store and bought one for one measley staple. Oh, I had one last thing to do. The professor wanted us to submit our papers to an anti-plagiarism website. I needed to log onto my William and Mary portal to access this, but the system just so happened to be down. Luckily other students encountered the same problem and it wasn't a big deal.

Stress.