A Week of Firsts

I have now spent a week in China.  It was definitely a week of new experiences.  I would have posted this earlier except Friday was another first, this one slightly unfortunate.  I got a cold. I basically slept the entire day.  It was almost frustrating though because my host family kept putting their hand to my head checking for a fever and then saying "Oh you're okay."  I think they finally understood that I was sick when I didn't eat anything until eight o'clock at night.

 

I'll start with talking about the sick thing before moving on to my adventures the rest of the week.  I woke up around 4 AM Friday morning with a churning stomach, a runny nose, a pounding headache and the feeling that I was very cold.  I know for a fact that it was as hot or hotter than it had always been as I had myself wrapped in a pretty thick blanket.  I was able to sleep fitfully for two more hours before waking up again.  This time I knew it wasn't going away and so I called my resident directors.  They said that it was around the time when everyone gets sick and that when my family got up to have one of them call my resident directors.  (I've decided that I'll use my resident directors' Chinese names.  Despite their encouragement for all of us to keep a blog while abroad, I'm pretty sure they'd rather remain fairly anonymous.  My RDs are Wei Lao Shi and He Lao Shi. They're really wonderful people.) I have always liked the fact that my family slept late until yesterday.  I sat at the kitchen table, waiting, for what felt like a really long time but was really only about 40 minutes.  After that, I just slept so not really anything interesting there. 

 

Monday was the first day of school and it was very confusing. That's about the only way to describe it.  The morning lessons were fine, a little stressful, because there were times when I didn't know what was going on but it was fine for the most part.  We did one of those getting-to-know-names games where we all stood in a circle and called "Dūn (our name). Dūn (our name). Dūn wán (someone else's name)."  Dūn means squat so every time we were called on we would have to squat.  We would then call the next person with the phrase Dūn wán which effectively means I'm done squatting it's your turn.  Besides the game, it was a lot of question and answer with the students.  The teachers would ask things like "What's your favorite season?" or "What's your favorite animal?"  Now, I had never covered animals in my school in the U.S. so I was confused when that question came around.  Luckily one of the other students explained dòng wù meant animal, but the only animals I could remember were dogs, cats and horses.  I'm not sure if the others in my class had covered animals yet either because a disarming percent said dog. 

 

Our teachers Tóng Lao Shi and Zhuāng Lao Shi speak almost no English. They know a couple words, but vocabulary was mainly pictures of things and actions in hopes that we would understand.

 

Lunchtime was the first and unfortunately the last time all the NSLI-Y kids sat together at lunch. Each and everyday now we're required to intermingle with the Chinese students.  I mainly sit with my host sister and her friends.  I can only remember on of her friends name and the name I do remember is the English name. I'm supposed to be talking with them and making friends, but really I'm just sitting there and listening.  I don't know enough Chinese to actually have a conversation.  It's frustrating.  I know I'm not going to learn anything if I'm not immersed, but the silences (or the rabid Chinese interspersed with my host sister explaining something in English) is going to drive me mad. 

 

Culture class was an interesting first.  Our lessons all week were about Chinese music.  I used to think music was the universal language.  I've easily been proven wrong.  Our teachers give lectures in Chinese.  I get about one word every ten and the words I do understand are like "my" "this"  "music" and "Chinese".  Our first lesson was on traditional Chinese music.  We focused on láo dòng hào zi, ya yuè and mín jiān gē qu.  While the lecture was going on, I was completely and utterly confused.  Luckily, the kids in my class (We're the panda class because panda's are slow and we're the beginner class) were just as lost as I was.  After I got home though, I looked up each word individually and was able to figure out what had been going on.  The láo dòng hào zi is a call and response song sung by groups of men that in ancient times would haul boats into shore.   It's a strong and deep sound.  Basically only one man, the overseer is really singing.  The others are all chanting something like Ho Yeh.  Ya yuè is music that was performed at the emperor's court.  It literally translates to refined music.  It's typically got poetic lyrics and lots of dancing women. I however spent a long time fixated on a couple words from this part of the lecture that literally turned out to be the name of a musical instrument.  I still don't really know what mín jiān gē qu is.  I looked up the words but it translates to basically folk songs or songs sung by nationals, but our entire lesson was on folk songs so I'm still confused. 

 

Monday was also the first time we went on a school-sponsored trip.  Our schedules said we were going to do community service.  Our teachers talked about us visiting an elementary school.  Our bus dropped us off at a University.  The campus was beautiful and there were a bunch of college students waiting with a banner, but it still wasn't the best sort of way to spend the afternoon.  We were given an entire spiel on how the school was International and very good in broken English.  I was handed some sort of business card despite the fact none of the other students were and I watched as the mid to higher level students happily conversed with the college students.  I kind of just sat there and looked through the brochure.  It was just a really awkward experience.  It got even stranger though when one of my resident directors tried to negotiate a program with the school for the school she works for (She works for Harvard.  She actually told my host mother she works at some school in Boston because if people knew she worked at Harvard, she would be mobbed.)   They gave us bottles of stuff that despite having water written on the label in three languages was definitely not water.  The best part of the whole "community service" was the bus ride back to school.  I spent it talking to He Lao Shi and a couple of my classmates.  I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard.  Monday was just confusing.

 

Tuesday I rode public transit for the first time.  My host sister and I had to take the bus home from the grandparent's house because the mother needed to go back to work.  It wasn't crowded and we even got to sit.  One of the weirdest things though is the fact that all the toddlers/babies effectively don't wear pants.  They're no diapers and there are holes in the clothes for the child to do their business.  I know this is gross beyond belief, but it's one of the weirdest things I've encountered here and I felt the need to share.  Needless to say, with a little boy sitting across from me, I was extremely happy we were the first stop. 

 

Wednesday I saw my first car accident.  I feel the need to site this because Chinese people are either the best or the worst drivers in the world.  I was seriously terrified of their roads.  (On Thursday, I did the traditional Chinese thing and held Colleen's hand as we crossed a particular busy road during our scavenger hunt thing.) Buses squeeze through tight spaces.  Cars turn whenever. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to anything and yet nothing ever seems to happen.  I mean in my host mother's car, it is physically impossible to wear a seat belt and even in my host father's car, my host sister never wears one.   It's like a strange sort of magic.  All the cars, buses and motorcycles just avoid each other, and pedestrians know that they NEVER have the right of way and just continue on normally. 

 

Wednesday I also had the best ice cream thing of my entire life.  Colleen and I went exploring during our extremely long lunch hour.  We discovered a store behind one of the buildings.  It began as a search for the NSLI-Y office, which actually has air conditioning.  If you learn nothing else from my blog, understand China is hot and humid, and the air conditioning can't really be felt and there's something weird about the filtration that gives you a runny nose all the time.  So anyway, we find this little store behind the school.  We immediately rushed to the little freezer section. There were actually so many different types. I chose to be moderately adventurous and chose a mango popsicle thing.  We walk up to the counter, each with a five Yuan note in our hands and try to buy our ice cream.  Apparently, what we weren't told was that the store only accepted the meal cards that all the proper students had.   Luckily, my Chinese teacher Zhuang Lao Shi appeared right at the moment explained the predicament and bought us the ice cream.  She even refused payment.  (I mean in total it was about 6 Yuan, which is roughly 1 US dollar, but it was still really nice.)

 

I got to play the er hu, a traditional Chinese stringed instrument.   It actually made me miss my cello so much.  It was silly, but I kept holding the bow wrong, because I was so used to my cello bow hold.  I was so irrationally happy because of that little instrument.

 

I also had my first cup of tea.  I have a tea addiction.  There really isn't any other way to phrase that. I can't stand coffee, so tea is my constant form of caffeine. You'd think because my family would drink a lot of tea.  Especially considering we have an entire tea ceremony table set up on the porch.  But my first cup of genuine Chinese tea (not counting the two I had on the plane) was from the school cafeteria. 

 

I now have keys to the apartment.  It really gave me a feeling of independence.  Before I was stuck at home for two-four hours by myself everyday. Now I can go out exploring by myself although I haven't had a real chance yet. 

 

Wednesday night, Wei Lao Shi and He Lao Shi came over to the apartment with the assistant principal for a host family visit.  They apparently go and visit everyone, but it was still unnerving, especially because they were all staring at me.  The assistant principal would speak very quickly to me and expect me to be able to answer.  Wei Lao Shi kept telling me to relax, but honestly how was I supposed to relax? 

 

Thursday was actually a lot of fun.  I had my first quiz, which as you can guess actually wasn't any fun, but the rest of the day was pretty awesome. Wei Lao Shi and He Lao Shi took us on an excursion after school.  We were divided up into groups of three, one from each class, and given a list of things to do.  My group was Colleen and at 7 feet, the tallest person on our trip, a boy nicknamed Egg. Our first task was to get on the 701 bus and get to an underground mall.  We crammed ourselves onto the bus and the annoyed faces of the locals were actually amusing.  We may have gotten off a stop too early but I'm entirely not sure, because the mall seemed to be almost right across the street. 

 

In the mall, we were required to bargain.  I've been nervous about bargaining.  It's a very important part of Chinese life.  There's a well-known agreement that merchants are trying to rip you off and you're going to give them a price that is completely unreasonable.  Then you meet in the middle.  I didn't want to start with anything too extravagant so I found a gift for my little sister and decided to go from there.  The woman wanted 30 Yuan, so I offered her ten.  We talked for a little bit.  I would get reassuring looks from Colleen.  I would tell her that it was way too expensive.  The final straw came, when I set the toy back on the shelf and began to walk out of the shop.  She stopped me and offered the toy for fifteen Yuan.  I took it but didn't feel all that great about it until later, when my drink at Starbucks cost more.  (I'll have more on that in a second.) 

 

So the next part of our adventure was to find the movie theater.  Each group was given a different location but they were all around the dayanta (Wild Goose Pagoda). One of the other groups had the Starbucks and we met up with them later to celebrate our victory after nearly two hours of walking.  Once we were in the Pagoda Square I was able to navigate us all the way across to around where I remember my host mother mentioned a movie theater.  We found two places that said movies on the sign, but they weren't what we had listed and they also had bumper cars in them (Needless to say we remembered them because bumper cars will definitely sound good at some point).  The movie theater turned out to be on the third and fourth floor of a mall in a corner.  I'm pretty sure we had the hardest one. 

 

So anyway, after we celebrated our success with Iced Shaken Lemon Tea from Starbucks (and there seriously needs to be a petition to get this drink on the American menu), we all needed to get home for dinner.  I had two options: I could go back to the school with the group and split the bill for a taxi (which would be safe and very effective as we weren't far enough away for it to cost too much but still far enough away that it was a 40 minute walk if we didn't get lost) or walk home which seemed fairly close on my map.  After a while, my group still couldn't get a taxi, so I decided to walk.  I texted my host mother and she told me to go to my host grandmother's instead.  This shouldn't have been a problem.   My grandmother lives very close to the dayanta and I sort of knew the way.  Except, I didn't have her house on my map of places.  School? Yeah.  Home?  Of Course.  Grandmother's House where I am everyday to eat dinner?  Sorry No. 

 

I made my way Art Museum, saw my fourth movie theater of the day and promptly realized I had no idea where to go from there.  I should have been completely freaked out.  I was lost in a city of 8 Million People, except I wasn't.  Xi'an never feels as big as it is.  Sure there are a lot of buildings, but the people are pretty spread out and there is a lot of greenery.   I just kept walking.  Pretty soon I realized I didn't recognize any of the statues.  I simply called my host mother and she said to make my way back to the art museum and she'd give me directions from there.  I did it wasn't all that far. 

 

Then she told me to walk two stoplights east (towards the movie theater) and turn left at the third stoplight.  I did exactly that and didn't recognize the place anymore than I did previously.  I walked back to the third stoplight and called again.  It took forever to explain that I was at the third stoplight at a specific plaza.  A few minutes later my host mother drove up in her little red car.  I was right where I needed to be.  She had meant that it was past the third stoplight a little bit on my left, not to turn let.  Still at that point, I was hot and sweaty and just happy to finally be able to get out of the sun.

 

I know I've been absent for a while.  As you can tell, I'm busy and still adjusting.  Yesterday was fairly interesting.  I saw the City Wall, but I have to go now.  My host family is taking me swimming and I'm ready to jump for joy.   And then we're going to a Chinese buffet with Western and Chinese food.  I'm not sure what to expect.  My opinion of their "Western food" is pretty low.  They suggested I open a restaurant Saturday after I made lunch that consisted of Italian noodles, with some weird sauce from the supermarket, sautéed onions and extra Parmesan cheese.  I've also tried their "pizza" which is most definitely not pizza and is basically microwaved bread with cheese.  But still, I get to go swimming!

 

For some reasons, my pictures aren't showing up.  Hopefully I'll find a solution soon, but if not I'll post them when I get back.