Weather

As I sit here in my room, there is a dust storm passing through Beijing. I am basically trapped in the apartment, afraid to go outside to visit my friends on campus, for fear of killing my lungs. I feel this is a very appropriate time to write about Beijing's weather and pollution. Especially because I know how much Midwesterners love to talk about the weather, and because apparently St. Paul has experienced a batch of 60-degree days which is much warmer than anything I have had here. Since I have been in Beijing it has snowed twice but this is our first dust storm. The two times it snowed were actually not natural snowfalls. It was the result of cloud seeding by the Chinese government. In order clean some of the pollution out of the air every once in a while they launch missiles packed with silver iodide out in Inner Mongolia. These clouds packed with moisture then flush out large amounts of pollution when it rains or snows. It is kind of like a toilet bowl for the skies. So naturally when it rains or snows it is not a pleasant thing, because the city's filth is just falling back on to you. The second time it snowed, I had left my bike outside. The snow that accumulated on it was nasty stuff, most of it didn't even fall off by riding it for 20 minutes. I had to bring it into the apartment building for it to melt off. The next morning, after all the snow had melted off, was when I realized how bad the snow really was. Instead of pools of water that might of formed under the bike, there were pools of dried dirt on the floor!

            When it snows in Beijing it is kind of a big deal. Like any other city that does not receive snow frequently, Beijing's infrastructure and citizens are not equipped to deal with the snow. Traffic is terrible. It is very dangerous to ride a bike because of all the ice patches and the bikes don't have the best traction. Therefore, everybody either drives their own car, takes a taxi, or attempts public transportation. This causes a huge congestion on the streets. One Monday when it was snowing I decided I would simply take a taxi to class. I left my homestay half an hour before classes expecting traffic to be a little slower due to the weather. I discovered that everybody had the same idea as me and I spent 10 unsuccessful minutes searching for a taxi. So then I decided to try the bus, but the busses were also running slow. I must have waited 45 minutes before the appropriate bus showed up to take me to school, then the ride there was also very slow. I ended up arriving to class a full hour late! Ever since that Monday I have avoided taking the bus to get to school for fear of arriving late.

            This dust storm is a different story. As I woke up this morning I could see a yellow tint to the widow peeking out from the curtain. I just assumed it happened to be really sunny, obviously I forgot where I was. In Beijing no such thing exists. When I opened my window I discovered a yellow haze covering the city. It is possible to visibly see the dirt on top of parked cars. The worst part is that it seeps into the house. On top of my laptop there was a thin coat of dust, and every breath I take I notice the dust. My hands also feel dirty. These sandstorms are the result of the desertification of the Mongolian steppes and other lands experiencing drought and that are overgrazed and deforested. These expanding deserts cover a third of China. Before China started cleaning up Beijing for the Olympics apparently the city had a lot of these storms. I don't know how frequent they are anymore but they are pretty disgusting. The worst part is the wind that accompanies the dust. I can't imagine walking the streets and getting dirt blasted at me.

 

A quick note on the pollution here. It is pretty bad. Every morning I look out my window, if I can see the summer palace (on a hill pretty far away) clearly it is a good day, but there are some days that even the building across the street is a bit hard to see. After my first time playing basketball outside I nearly coughed up a lung, it felt like I had asthma. Even on my morning commute to school there is a stretch of road where I always get short of breath.

Chinese Class

Every day I take four straight hours of Chinese. I was able to test into the 320 level, which I think is just where I should be. I am able to understand everything the teacher is saying and at the same time I am learning new vocab and grammar. However the three other students in my class are students who were here last semester and it doesn’t seem as if they really understand everything that goes on. But I can’t say that I am attentive to everything that occurs during class. Sitting for four hours is a very difficult and it is easy to get distracted, unfortunately if you do zone out (even for a few seconds) you instantly become lost and worst of all the teacher know it and calls on you. Thus my attention span as been put to work. I don’t think I have ever had to concentrate this hard for so long. This is an intense ordeal but I am told it will become easier as I get used to it. For the first day of class I spent 4+ hours memorizing 60 new characters, read through a dialogue and learn 10 or so grammatical structures. As the weeks have gone luckily I have been able to cut this time to about 3 hours. We start the class of with the quiz, then move through all the grammatical structures. The last half hour of class or so my class of four divides up into two and we have two students to a teacher, here we are able to read through all the characters with the teacher making sure all of our tones are correct. On the first day of class I discovered that all this time I have been doing my tones incorrect. I am very pleased to have discovered this early and the next day I was not corrected at all on my third tone.

 

The way we are learning Chinese is by topic, some of the topics we have covered have been globalization, unemployment, cultural preservation and traditional habits, traffic issues, the preservation of the environment, poverty and social welfare, and the legal system. These lessons very interesting but at the same time very difficult. Often I find myself trying to express my true opinion but lacking the proper vocabulary to say what I want. Instead we are forced to fall back into sentence patterns and examples that the teacher gives us. We often compare America and China, which is fine because the Chinese teachers want to know more about America, but it really annoys me when they make sweeping statements about the way the US is or the way China is, disallowing any room for nuanced thought. To give one example, just yesterday we were talking about intellectual property rights (知识产权 zhi1shi2chan3quan2 for those interested) and got on the topic of downloading music. I couldn’t quite express that I believe we shouldn’t pay Itunes for them to just pay record companies who then give a fraction of what they earn to the artists. I would rather just have the artists gain all the profits of a song bought online, but since record companies are the ones pulling so much of the profit from music sales I just download music here illegally (which by the way in China is completely legal, in fact their version of Google [Baidu] and Google.cn both have a section [like Google maps or Google translate] that links you directly to mp3s to download). Since I can’t elegantly explain this in Chinese I am just forced to say that I support downloading all music illegally and care nothing for the livelihood of the hardworking musicians.

Contrary to what many of you might think I am not dead!

It is my first free weekend in a while and I have decided to come out from behind China's great Firewall. I realize that my posts have been really scare. This is not because of a lack of topics or news, but rather an overload. I have been overwhelmed with experiences in the month and a half I have been here. So, after not posting for over a month where do I start? I guess the best way would be just to give a rundown of what I have been up to. After spring festival classes resumed and I moved into my Chinese homestay. I have met up with the other Mac students in Beijing; been to the Silk Market twice (knockoff everything usually for less than $20 US); eased my way into using squatters; taken my first Chinese test, started my internship, spent 12 days in Yunnan province, 4 days in a Tibetan village, 5 hours in a spa, and 2 hours using Yaks to plow fields (I would love to know an Iowan farmer's impression on their farming practices) and it wasn't the fertile fields of the Midwest but more of a claylike dirt on the Tibetan Plateau. When we first got here IES made us make goals that we wanted to accomplish in our time in China, this is also a pretty good indicator of what I have been up to and a testament to how busy I have been.  Here is my list with checkmarks next to those that I have finished.

• Have a successful conversation with a cab driver (X)
• Improve my awareness and ability to deal with tones (in the process)
• Bargain with a street dealer to get something at 1/3 of the original offered price (X)
• Ride a bike during rush hour (X)
• Avoid any stomach/bowel/digestion problems (laduzi/diarrhea is the infamous one) (It turns out this is nearly impossible in China and I failed this goal)
• Spend 5+ hours in a Spa (X)
• Visit Shanghai
• Eat Korean food in Wudaokou (X)
• See a live panda
• Get into the habit of doing Yoga again (X)
• See old people doing QiGong in the parks in the morning (X)
• Learn the names of all the Chinese professors at IES (X)
• Play soccer with some Chinese kids (X)
• Visit Sichuan
• Understand how to navigate Chinese versions of Youtube (X)
• Get a massage (X)
• Settle into some sort of daily routine (X)