The Wild Goose Pagoda, Qing Tang Hu Lu and the Chinese Countryside

Okay so the past few days have been a little hectic.  Saturday turned out to be a pretty good day after the test.  One of the requirements for the weekend was to find a map of Xi'an (a di tu). 

 

In the process of getting this map, I got to see more of the city.  Or at least my little corner of it.  My host family lives fairly close to the Wild Goose Pagoda Temple (da yan ta).  This structure is pretty magnificent by itself but all around it is this park.  The park is a nice change of scenery.  There are trees and plants and no tall buildings.  All the buildings in and around this park are meant to look like they're from the Tang dynasty, just like the Pagoda. 

 

It's a really cool walk and I highly encourage it.  There are also a lot of vendors on the side streets.  I'm not even sure what half of the stuff is but it looks pretty cool.  There's lots of jade and there was this one shop that sold clothing that looks like it's from ancient times. 

 

China puts a lot of emphasis on history.  But not just any history, their own history.  My host sister said she has never taken a history class that isn't about China.  She was surprised to learn that in America we study World History, not just American history.   I mean Chinese History is a lot more complex than American history.  It's longer and the dynasties all have different significance.  Apparently 13 dynasties have made Xi'an their capital.  I didn't even know there were 13 dynasties.  Bolin made history so easy (so did the AP World History textbook, but everyone who has taken AP World at my high school knows that Bolin is really the one to clarify everything.)

 

Right by the Wild Goose Pagoda is the largest fountain in all of Asia.  It's really cool.  (Side note: Cool is a slang term that does not translate well.  I accidently said it when trying to explain something and my host mother was very confused) It plays music and the jets of water are coordinated to the music.  I definitely want to watch the fountain again. 

 

Saturday was the first day I tried street food.  I know all the booklets said you shouldn't but my host mom bought it for me and so I couldn't really refuse.  Plus it was in/right outside this mall so everything looked pretty clean.   I tried qing tang hu lu and cho dof.  Qing tang hu lu is actually pretty good.  It's fruit on a stick that has a really sweet candy coating.  It reminds me of candy apples except I think it's pears.  I'm not really sure I just think pears because after I told my host grandparents who live in an awesome Chinese village, my grandfather got me this sickly sweet drink that had pears on the label.

 

Cho dof on the other hand is the vilest thing on the face of the Earth.  It is absolutely disgusting.  Cho dof is smelly tofu from Shanghai.  I literally started gagging after one piece (well one bite but I was polite and finished eating the small piece).  I explained to my host mother that my stomach was still settling from everything.  That Cho dof was very different from everything I had ever tried and I didn't like it (wo bu xi huan).  I can honestly say that Cho dof has been really the only food I have hated in China. 

 

Saturday was also the first day I was asked to take a picture because I was American.  I actually took two on my outing.  The first was some mother who had her little girl take a picture with me.  I really didn't mind.  She was sweet and asked in Chinese if she could take the picture, where I was from and that one day her daughter was going to go to America to study.  The girl was shy and a little embarrassed but she smiled and gave me a high five.  My second experience was not nearly as fun.  I had been enjoying the fountain when a man pointed at me and made a camera motion with his hand.  It was awkward as he refused to acknowledge my attempts at conversation and he smelled a little bit. 

 

As my host mother and I were walking back to the grandmother's house for dinner, we stopped at the art museum.  We only walked around the first floor but I enjoyed it.  There was a whole section of Vermeer paintings.  I particularly enjoy his paintings after I read The Girl with the Pearl Earring.  It's a pretty good historical novel.  The more interesting parts of the book are the descriptions of Vermeer painting.  Each painting in the book gets so much detail.  It was incredible to finally see the paintings in person (and the originals too). 

 

After dinner, I got home and promptly crashed.  I sat down on my bed with everything around me and was asleep almost instantly.  I woke up at two and realized it was probably a good idea to take out my contacts.  My classmates have been complaining about difficulty sleeping but I'm not.  I'm just tired. 

 

On Sunday, I got to go to a Chinese village.  It was brilliant.  We had to go pick up my host sister who was visiting her grandparents because her grandmother was sick.   We also stayed for lunch, the best dumplings I have ever eaten in my entire life.  It's also probably the most I've eaten at a meal since I arrived. Which is really saying something because all of my host family keeps insisting that I need to eat more and I don't eat enough.  No I'm already full. I can't eat anymore.  It also doesn't help that for some reason I'm never hungry.  I'm going to blame the time change, but I never really need food.  I'll eat it when it's there but I don't have a proper appetite. 

 

The grandparents have a little field that I thought was awesome.  They grew corn so I was reminded of home. I actually took a lot of pictures of the Chinese village so later when I'm not lazy and plug in my camera to my computer, I'll upload them and explain more.  I felt more at home in the village than I did in the city.  It wasn't picturesque or anything but there were less people and everything was calmer. 

 

The family also had three dogs. So now I don't have to worry about them accidently serving me dog or something similar.  The dogs were adorable and definitely welcome.  They would follow my host sister and I everywhere when she showed me the village.  One kept insisting on jumping off the piles of dirt.  It was the funniest little thing.  If you can't tell, I really miss my dog. 

 

I really miss my family too.  I kind of broke down on the phone. I had been fine before but suddenly it hit me just how far away I was. I think that might have been the reason that later my host family took me to a supermarket in this huge mall that had imported good.  I resisted a little bit but I'm so glad now.  I had bread with butter this morning for breakfast and it was absolutely heavenly.  I'm sure butter has never tasted that good before.  I'm not even that big a fan of buttered bread.  I eat it but it's not my go to snack or anything.  I hate to think what I would be like if I ate pizza or something else I really like if I feel like I can wax poetry about my buttered bread. 

 

After the international supermarket, I tried hot pot for the first time.  If you ever go to China, find a hot pot restaurant.  It's absolutely delicious and a cool experience.  Everyone is given their own personal pot of boiling water (or at least I think it's water it's got some spices and stuff in it already) and you take food off the conveyor belt to put into your boiling pot.  Hot pot is so good although it's also a struggle if you're bad at using chopsticks.  My host father would have to pull stuff out of the pot and put it on a side plate so I could eat it.  Also, potato noodles are absolutely perfect despite the fact that they're extremely slippery and nearly impossible to pick up with chopsticks. 

 

It's getting late so I think I'll save the first day of school spiel for tomorrow.  (I'm writing this at night I'll post in the morning.)

It's a Small World But I Still Have No Idea What You're Saying

I will be perfectly honest.  This is my second day in Xi'an and I'm struggling.  I understand very little and I'm just lucky my host family speaks very good English  (well the mother and sister do.  The father's is minimal but still better than my Chinese).

 

I'm actually so lucky.  I have air conditioning (if I can figure out how to work it). I have WiFi (although only in strange places in the apartment).   I don't have to share a room much less a bed with my host sister.  (And it's a nice room)  And most importantly I have a bathroom with a western toilet that has a lock on the door.  All of these things are something one or more of the other NSLI-Y participants have to deal with.  Yes there is really a girl who shares a bed with her host sister.  She lives in a tiny apartment with one bedroom.  The sister (who is almost completely silent and when she does talk it's hard to tell if she's speaking English or Chinese because she speaks so quietly) snores incredibly loudly "worse than a fifty year old man". 

 

The introductory ceremony was a bit odd.   I mean the teachers really only spoke Chinese so most of the time I had no idea what was going on until someone started clapping.  Then one of the host siblings spoke.  It was the standard welcome speech but it was in English so it was automatically my favorite.  Then one of the NSLI-Y people spoke and as much as I tried to follow what was going on I was just as lost as before.  It was only afterward that I found out the boy was going to Harvard.  I mean they said Harvard in Chinese.  I barely understand simple everyday things.  Why would I know how to say specific college names in Chinese?

 

The Pre-Test was absolutely brutal.  I mean, I got maybe a word here or there.  It was primarily listening.  I'm not all that great at listening.  I'd say it was my weakest point.  I even somehow managed to mess up the speaking portion of the test.  It was not fun at all. 

 

At least the food in the cafeteria was good.  I've read so many awful things about the cafeteria food on other NSLI-Y blogs.  It was such a relief to have that information be completely wrong.  I also enjoyed the meal because there was no one telling me to eat the bao zi.  Since my family discovered I liked bao zi, they have been serving it at every meal and insisting I eat it.  It was just such a relief to not see it and have it mock me. 

 

After lunch, we were given our special phones.  The phones have a Chinese SIM card so we have a local number.  It also means that if someone calls us we don't pay anything.  We're supposed to keep track of our balance at all times.  That doesn't sound so bad until you remember our phones are all in Chinese.  Every setting is written in Chinese.  We can type in English and receive messages in English, but all the settings are in Chinese.  I'm really figuring out my phone through trial and error.

 

Right now I'm waiting on my bed for my host mother to be done resting.  Then we're going out to find a map.  I'm sitting and typing while It's a Small World is coming through my window.  Pretty ironic.  And I guess the songs kind of right. A lot of the communicating I have been doing is not so much in words but in actions. Smiles, laughter, eye contact.  If I had to rely on words alone, I would be so lost.  Thank goodness I don't have to. 

First Full Day in Xi'an

Thank goodness I got to sleep in today.  I was told to just call my host mother when I woke up.  By the time I got dressed, my host sister was back from her test.  She came with a friend and she was very sweet and enthusiastic.  She also spoke English

 

I know people keep saying you shouldn't start by speaking English with your host family, but honestly if I did that, I would have never been able to communicate anything.  My host mother has good English although she doesn't think so.  We have almost a tradeoff system going. I say the word in English.  She says it in Chinese.  It works pretty well.  (Note from a later point:  She'll say something in Chinese.  I'll either answer or say "wo ting bu dong" which means I don't understand what you said.  Then she'll explain in english breaking out the dictionary if need be.) 

 

I was left home alone for a while after my sister left to visit her grandparents (father's parents in a village.)  She helped me figure out the phone before she left because I was slightly confused.  It kept making a sustained beeping noise and not really doing anything. 

 

At 1, my host mother came home and made me lunch.  It was this noodle soup thing that was just okay but had some really tasty cucumbers in it.  I swear everyone is insisting I eat more and more. 

 

We drove to the school and I met the English teacher.  The English teacher brought me to the police station so I could register.  I now am officially a temporary resident of Xi'an, China.

 

I then spent some time waiting in the English teacher office.  They were getting ready for some activity with another school coming from America for just one day and interacting with their students making dumplings.  Apparently there's a lot of paperwork involved. 

 

During this time period, I had my first encounter with what one of my classmates calls a squatty potty.  They aren't nearly as bad as they sound although I'm very thankful my host family has a western toilet (a pretty cool one at that. It's all fancy and has all these buttons that make it do things.  I haven't really played around with it yet). The squatty potties are the only toilets my school has so it was really only a matter of time before I had to use one.  I know this is some weird information, but the squatty potties are almost infamous. 

 

My mother then followed a bus in her car to see if  "bus route suitable" for me.  It was an interesting experience.  Honestly, I was expecting the roads here to be much worse.  I mean I would be scared to drive here (not that that's really saying much I'm scared to drive in the US) but it didn't seem nearly as chaotic as I imagined.  There was a lot of stopping but you seemed to drive slower to compensate for it. 

 

We then ended up at the grandmother's house.  Apparently we eat there for dinner everyday.  They're nice people. 

 

My first traditional Chinese meal (and my host Grandfather)

 

All the food was so good.  The grandmother made beef and potatoes especially for me because she thought all Americans like beef and potatoes.  Those were so perfect. The brown liquid prominent in the photo is porridge.  It's made out of rice and is basically just really watery rice.    The white things on the left are bao zi. Bao zi are steamed stuff bun.  Bao zi is also the favorite word of my Chinese class at home. The boys in my class will go out of the way to put Bao zi into a sentence.  Needless to say I ate bao zi and enjoyed it just because of my personal history.  In reality, the bao zi were a little too spicy for me as they had lots of peppers in them. 

We then went back to the school to wait for my "American teachers"  (the program resident directors). I'm not sure if they came with us because my Chinese is so bad or because my host mother works for the school.  My host mother took the three of us to this supermarket that was extremely confusing and about 4 stories tall.  I needed school supplies but probably ended up frustrating several workers in the store with my bad Chinese, crazy pantomiming  and inability to figure out what they meant by things.  

So after shopping, I came home and organized my stuff for school tomorrow.  We have to take a test and we have orientation.  I'm not looking forward to it.  I also mixed up the words for shower so I was given a large plastic tub to clean my feet in and told to wash my face.  All in all not a bad first day.

Misadventures in the Beijing Airport

It's Friday around noon.  You know how I was saying all those complementary things about the airlines, how airline food tasted alright and everything was organized and running on schedule (okay I might not have said all of it) but I take it all back.

 

Those ten minutes of sleep on the plane ended up being all I got on that flight.  It started to feel longer and longer once we hit the four hours left mark.  Around the two hours left mark I somehow managed to break my headphones.  All the windows are closed the entire time so you don't get to see the blinding whiteness of Siberia or the North Pole.  The cabin is dark and you sit and try to wait.  You can read but after being awake so long, it doesn't really have all that much appeal. 

 

The Beijing airport is a confusing place.  A confusing and hot place.  (Well everywhere is hot in China.  If I had one word to describe China right now it would be hot. )  We got in, successfully made it through customs, found our bags and thankfully nothing had been lost.  At this point we had no water and had been up 24 hours straight (or at least 24 hours if you didn't really sleep on the plane.  My ten minutes don't count against the straight thing.  I'm not even really sure I was asleep or if I just zoned off. )

 

We got our tickets from the group counter after being yelled at in very rapid Chinese.  Then we went upstairs to try and find our flight only to discover we were in the wrong terminal.  This was after our first experience on a Chinese elevator.  Your first experience on a Chinese elevator seems very significant, as it is so different from a Western elevator.  It looks identical, but then the rush of people surges forward.  You have to be quick.  You have to jam your way on, no matter if the elevator is going up or down, because eventually it will go your direction and you need to be on it.  Fitting 20 kids and their chaperones on to two elevators alone is an impressive feat.  Now imagine doing it when everyone has so much luggage.  It's basically a miracle.

 

So after we managed our little miracle, we stared at the ever-changing flight board.  There were so many flights. It took us a while to even figure out our flight wasn't somewhere on the board.  We had to go to the other terminal.  We went down 4 flights of escalators instead of taking the elevators (which was definitely a good idea). We rushed around now slightly frantic for time until we got on a slow moving train that connected the terminals. 

 

The most strenuous part of our journey was definitely security.  It was so confusing.  Theoretically it's like the security in the US.  In practice, not so much.  After your bags go through, you're occasionally asked to take out other stuff.  Several of us (including myself) had to take out all the cords and chargers we had in our bags despite them not being listed on the sign of things to take out.  You're also being shouted at to do it in Chinese or very broken English when it becomes clear you have no idea what is going on. 

 

Once we got through security, we rushed to our gate only to realize we didn't have a gate yet.  The plane wasn't here.  One lady even said it hadn't even left Shanghai yet.  We all went and bought some water and other drinks (I had some amazing peach drink stuff) before collapsing at the gate closest to the information desk. 

 

We eventually found out our gate and went downstairs to wait.  It ended up being two hours.  We got so many funny looks and it was obvious why.  There was a bunch of American sleeping or sitting and talking in English on the floor of the airport by the elevators.  I was awake the entire time, too nervous and confused to sleep.  They also gave us our dinner before we got on the plane since we were so late.  It was absolutely awful.  There was rice and some questionable meat stuff and cabbage.  The entire thing smelled so terrible I felt sick.  I merely picked at the rice.  It was a good thing I wasn't really hungry.

 

Eventually the plane got there.  There is a loose term though.  Our entire flight had to cram itself onto a tiny bus so we could drive to the plane.  It was the most squished I have ever been.  By this point, I'm having some issues standing on my own feet.  I've discovered I get clumsier the more tired I am.  I slept the entire plane ride to Xi'an. 

 

Our teachers came to meet us.  They had a huge banner and were all wearing these really pretty short Chinese dresses.  We drove with them to the school.  Our host families had been waiting there since 8.  It was then quarter to midnight.  They wanted to get out of there and go to bed nearly as badly as we did.  Of course, there were pictures and a bit of ceremony before we got to go to our new homes. 

 

Thankfully, we decided to move orientation and the testing to Saturday, so we had today to sleep. 

 

My host family has been speaking mainly English to me and despite the fact that I should probably be annoyed and trying to get them to change, I'm actually a little relieved about that.  They gave me a tour of their beautiful apartment in English.  They taught me how to get water and use the shower in English.  These are conversations I wouldn't have been able to follow in Chinese and I'm so grateful I actually know what's going on. 

 

It was just my parents who came to orientation.   My sister had a math final today and a toothache so she went to bed early.  I was kind of left on my own and was told to call my mother when I woke up.  It was almost one when I finally went to sleep.  Needless to say I slept until ten thirty, but waited to call till eleven so I could get dressed.  My host sister ended up coming home at eleven from her math final with a friend.  She's off to spend the day with her Grandmother, so I probably won't see her again today. 

 

My host mother should be home any minute.   She works at the school I'm going to, so she said she would be back around 1.  I have to go register with the police and do a few more things around town with her so I'm ready for when I go to orientation.  I'm actually really glad I had the house to myself for a little while.  I was able unpack the way I liked it and also not have to worry about my family members.  They're all trying to be really helpful and make me feel at home.  I'm just a little overwhelmed and also feeling slightly guilty because I know I should be talking in Chinese.  I just want school to start so I can expand the limited vocabulary I have.  It also doesn't help that when I try to speak in Chinese I always seem to mess something up.  It's a bit of a problem. 

 

Hopefully by the end of the day, I'll be able to post this.  I've figured out electricity and how to charge my stuff, but I still don't know how to connect to the Internet.