Sixth Week: New Semester, Social Study Report, Long Qing Xia

This week has been by far the most difficult week at HBA. Not only did we have to get back into the rhythm of memorizing characters, daily quizzes, daily essays, etc. We also had to write our social study reports, which for fourth year students had to be at least 2,000 Chinese characters (about 4 pages double-spaced). Well, these are the highlights of the week:

Second Semester changes:
This week marked the beginning of the second semester, the final stage of HBA. For some reason, HBA likes to start the new semester introducing some changes into the class structure which aren’t necessarily helpful. So for fourth year, our teachers introduced a new 对话课 (Dialogue class) in which two students debate certain topics with the aid of a teacher. In general I think introducing the class isn’t bad, but it doesn’t add anything new. In addition, the introduction of this new class messed up a bit our previous schedule, so for the first few days even our teachers were a bit confused. Everything is fine now, though.
The other major change that was introduced into the curriculum was a new oral test section. The oral test consists of a group of ten students holding a formal debate on a certain topic, and we’re graded on our performance. I’ll be honest and say that I’m not excited about this whole debate thing, but I see that it really has a big potential of helping us improve our formal spoken Chinese. Therefore, although it adds much more stress than I need, I support the teachers’ decision to introduce this type of oral test. This past Friday our debate was on euthanasia, which was pretty interesting topic. The only complaint I have about our first debate is that we didn’t have much time to speak. Our teachers are already thinking about how to solve the time issue for next week.

Quick HSK update:
As I’ve written in my previous posts, we will have the chance to take the HSK one more time before we leave in order to see how our Chinese level has improved. This week, our teachers informed us that fourth year students have the opportunity to take the more advanced HSK test. At the start of HBA we all took the Beginning-Intermediate test, which is slightly easier, but now we’ll take the most challenging one. I’m a bit afraid of the advanced level test, since I found the Beginning-Intermediate somewhat difficult, but it’s still a great opportunity that HBA is providing us with.

Social Study Report:
The Social Study Report is responsible for making this week the most miserable weeks of our lives. As I said in the beginning of this post, we had to write a 2,000 character paper on the research we did during our social study week. However, besides writing the report, we also had to do our daily assignments, which also included short essays. Therefore, for the first few days I hardly had time to breathe. On Wednesday night I finally finished the paper, and felt a great sense of relief and freedom.
My paper topic was 《蒙语在内蒙古的现在与未来》(“The present and future of the Mongolian Language in Inner Mongolia”). The paper is divided into three sections: the status of Mongolian as an official language, how Mongolian and Chinese co-exist in Inner Mongolia, and the influence of Mongolia (the country) on the language of Inner Mongolia. Using the information I gathered from the interviews I did during our trip, I described the current use of Mongolian in the region, how Chinese and “Outer” Mongolia has influenced their language, and that the future of Mongolian in Inner Mongolia seems promising. I think the topic is very interesting, but had I had more time to write the paper I would have tried to go much more in depth. But overall, I’m satisfied with the final version of the paper.

Trip to Long Qing Xia（龙庆峡）:
Well, the last highlight of this week is our trip to Long Qing Xia, a famous tourist spot in outer Beijing. My camera was running out of battery power, so I was only able to take a few pictures. Well, I leave you with the few pictures I took, and I’ll post again next week.

Fourth and Fifth weeks: End of first semester & Social Study Week

I would like to start by apologizing for taking so long to post, but this week has been pretty difficult (as I'll explain on my next post). Well, these were my fourth and fifth weeks (July 7 - July 20) :

End of the first Semester:
On Friday, July 12 we had our midterm exam, which marked the end of our first four weeks at HBA. In general, I feel very satisfied with the quality of the program. I remember that when I was in HBA last year, a lot of fourth year students would complain that the fourth year program was disorganized and that they were a bit frustrated. However, I feel that up to now, the fourth year curriculum is very good, and our teachers are very hard working. I have no major complaints about the way they teach or organize the course.
Although I think the program is very well organized, most of us students are already pretty tired of all the work we've had to do so far. All we want to do is rest and recover from these past four weeks. The fourth year workload is perhaps the most intense at HBA, at times more intense than fifth year. Everyday we have lots of assignments which take up all of our time. We hardly have time to rest, except on weekends when we go out to see other places. However, I'm still enjoying the experience and I'm glad I came back.

Social Study Week:

(McDonald's in Huhhot with Mongolian and Chinese Script)

As I wrote on my previous posts, my Social Study project was in Inner Mongolia. Inner Mongolia is really a fascinating place unlike anything I had seen in China before. The blend of Mongolian culture with Han Chinese culture was very interesting. I'll try to summarize my experiences in chronological order.

The Grasslands-

We spent the first few days travelling through the Mongolian grasslands. Life for us in the grasslands was a bit difficult, since we had nowhere to take a shower, and the bathrooms were not in very good condition. However, it was still a very fun experience. We slept in traditional Mongolian tents, like the one below:

In the grasslands we had a chance to interview some herdsmen of both Mongolian and Han Chinese origin. What I found interesting about conversing with them is that the preferred their lifestyle to moving to the big cities like Huhhot (the capital of Inner Mongolia). Although their life is pretty difficult (they have to wake up around 5 am to start working on the fields), their environment is much more relaxed without the pressures of city life.

(Us interviewing the herdsman)

In another part of the grasslands, we also had a chance to ride horses. This was the first real time that I rode a horse. It looks like riding horses is not that difficult, but after that day I think I won't ride a horse ever again. Riding a horse, especially when the horses like to run a lot like the ones we rode, makes you very tired. It's like a workout. When we got of the horses every part of our bodies were in pain. But it was still a very good experience.

Erdos (鄂尔多斯）:

After the grasslands, we went to a city called Erdos. Everyone was excited of finally getting to this city, since after three days in the grasslands we finally were able to take a shower! We had various different activities in this city. For example, we visited a cashmere factory in which they explained the whole process of making clothes and how their factory worked.

At the factory we were able to interview various workers and ask them about their daily lives in the city. With only a few exceptions, most of the workers seemed to be Han Chinese.

Also in Erdos we were able to see the Tomb of Genghis Khan. The tomb is really very beautiful, but they did not permit any photography inside the tomb, so I can only provide photos from the outside. The most interesting part of the Tomb of Genghis Khan is that his body is actually not there! Apparently no one knows where his body is. It might not even be in Inner Mongolia. However, there are still guards watching over the tomb, and it has become a very famous tourist spot.

Perhaps the best activity we had while our time at Erdos was going to the desert. The desert we went to is also a big tourist spot, called Xiangshawan Desert. There you can ride camels, to sand slide, parachute, etc. It was very fun, although it was really hot! Here are some pictures:

Huhhot （呼和浩特）-
I think Huhhot is probably my favorite part of the whole trip. Huhhot is really a beautiful city, especially at night. In Huhhot we were able to visit various places. We first went to a milk factory called Mengniu, where they showed us all of the facilities and how the produced their dairy products. A lot of our teachers said that the cows at Mengniu have a better life than us, since they're constantly being taken care of and have nothing to worry about, unlike us HBA students.

We also had a chance to visit a Tibetan style temple in the center of Huhhot. Although similar to other temples, I found this temple to be very beautiful. I don't really have a good knowledge of Buddhism, so visiting this temple was very interesting and rewarding.

Well, I leave you with more pictures of Huhhot, which was the last destination of our trip. I really enjoyed going to Inner Mongolia. It was something different than what I was accustomed to in Beijing, which made every part of the trip exciting. I really recommend anyone to go and visit!

Third Week (Ming Tombs, Hot Peppers, and Bird's Nest)

This week not many new things happened, but I got to travel more around Beijing and took lots of pictures! So these are the interesting things that occurred:

Language Tutor Session:
Last Friday I met again with the Chinese tutor HBA provided me. I would say it was a very interesting experience, since what happened was something completely unexpected. (始料未及）So I met my Chinese tutor at the library around 3:00 p.m., and I tried to start a conversation with her. Since one of our assignments for the weekend was to conduct interviews regarding marriage in China, I asked her about her opinion on marriage. She didn't really have much of an opinion, but she did describe Chinese marriage in detail. A few minutes after we finished talking about this topic, a young Chinese man approached us. My tutor then explained: this young man was a friend of hers. He was a High School student, and my tutor had told him I was from Yale, so she asked me if I could talk to him for a while since he liked speaking with foreigners. I said 'of course' and started to have a conversation with the student. About fifteen minutes later I realized my tutor was asleep! And she kept sleeping through the entire two hours she was supposed to tutor me, occasionally waking up and saying 不好意思 (~sorry).
Well, although my tutor was sleeping, I had a great time speaking to this High School student. Since I needed to conduct interviews on Chinese marriage, I started our conversation with that topic. He explained that he was a bit upset that marriage in China is now more westernized. However, he said, it's neither completely traditional nor completely western. Well, after the marriage question we just started to converse about more general topics. He told me that he was from Anhui province, but that his parents worked in Beijing. Since I'm interested in Chinese dialects I asked him about his own native dialect and its relationship with Mandarin. He also explained that he was very interested in economy, and that that's what he wants to study in college. What surprised me most about this High School student was his opinion on the Chinese government. While speaking about various political topics (Tibet, Taiwan, human rights ...) he told me very clearly that in many aspects the Chinese government is extremely bad, and that the Chinese have no way to express their complaints or to make the government listen. This was coming from a High School student, so it really surprised me. I asked him if he usually spoke about these topics in this manner, and he replied that he regularly speaks about these things with his classmates. In general, I found conversing with him very interesting, since he had very mature ideas and helped me understand Chinese people his age.

Spicy food and Karaoke:
After my meeting with the Chinese High School student and my sleepy Chinese tutor, I went with my classmates and teachers to a Sichuan style restaurant. Sichuan food is really spicy, and almost every platter was red (hot peppers). The teachers ordered a great variety of food, some as exotic as spicy frog (!!!). Although I didn't find the food overly spicy, others were not as fortunate. Wang laoshi, for example, apparently felt uncomfortable after eating such spicy food and had to take a short walk to feel better. Another student ate a hot pepper and started to cry, while others were complaining and asking the waiters for water. It was a very fun experience.
After the spicy dinner, we all went together to sing karaoke. I think this time was more fun, since more teachers came along. Some of our teachers get really excited with some songs, so it was fun listening to them sing.

Ming Tombs:
Well, on Saturday HBA took us to the Ming tombs. I had already gone last year (though I failed to take photographs, this year I'm redeeming myself), I decided to go again just in case I don't return to Beijing. In general I found the tombs somewhat interesting, so it was still worth going again. Here are some of the pictures I took:

Chinese Family/Friend:
Finally, on Sunday morning my Chinese friend took me to see his university and the "bird's nest". Apparently the bird's nest will not be open to the public until the Olympics are over, so unless I have tickets for the Olympic activities (which I don't), I'll only be able to see the stadium from outside. Here are some pictures:

(Statue of Mao Zedong in my Chinese friend's university)

(One of the many Olympic stadiums, located in Chinese friend's university)

(Bird's nest)

Next Week:
As I stated in my last post, I am going to Inner Mongolia to do my Social Study project. I will take the train to Inner Mongolia on Friday, and will be back in Beijing a week after. I might not be able to post while I'm away from Beijing. Therefore, I'll probably make two posts (Weeks 4 and 5) when I return. In the meantime, I have to return to memorizing characters and preparing for the exciting experiences I'll have in Inner Mongolia!