So I have finally started a blog, a little later than I planned but better late than never. I am currently in Hangzhou after a month in Beijing and then traveling to Hainan, Qingdao and Shanghai. Beijing seems like it was so long ago that I can barely remember it, except for the fact that there were too many people, too much pollution and enough brand name knock offs to fill the closets of every celebrity in Beverly Hills. Not to say there weren’t good aspects as well, because there were. Our area of the city was a little out of the way for most things, but had the essentials, supermarket, clothing stores, restaurants, knock off DVD store, and a bus station, which we didn’t really understand how to use until the last couple days. There were a few restaurants in the area that we got to know pretty well, even if we did order the same thing over and over again, and almost everything is drenched in so much oil you get fatter just looking at it. A lot of restaurants have picture menus now, which help a lot, but some of the time you just have to guess at a character and point and hope that what you ordered seems somewhat edible. We went to a restaurant the other night where we didn’t understand the menu and ended up just asking for chicken, which is exactly what we got, including the heart, innards and other parts, all covered in a brown sauce so you didn’t really know which part you were eating. However you can always resort to dumplings, buns and street food, which they tell you isn’t all that clean but tastes better than some restaurants anyway.
The classes in Beijing took up the most time and unfortunately were the least interesting, so I won’t bore you by going into details. We did get to visit the Great Wall and Forbidden City, which was under renovation so you couldn’t really see all of it. Probably the highlight of those trips was going down from the Great Wall on the alpine slide. We had a choice of taking the gondola or walking down and the program would reimburse us for the gondola ride, however the slide was deemed too dangerous to be school sanctioned, even though it seemed pretty safe too us, and even if it wasn’t you could buy insurance for 1 yuan, which in US terms is essentially 13cents. We sat on these little car things and went down in a metal pipe, very fun except that the cars didn’t go very fast. At least that far out of the city you got away from some of the pollution. However the pollution problem is complicated by the number of people who smoke. I think there were more smokers in Beijing than I have seen in every country I’ve been to in Europe combined, yes, including France. Fortunately in Hangzhou there don’t seem to be nearly as many people determined to get lung cancer.
I had about a 2.5 week break after classes ended in Beijing and went traveling with Hana and Josie, meeting up with other people in Hainan and Shanghai. There were way too many experiences to write about them all, and some unfortunate incidents including a very expensive cab ride, an assault by Chinese men with beer bottles which ended up resulting in 9 stitches in Josie’s head and hanging out in a hospital until 5:30am, as well as Hana being bitten by a monkey and almost getting hit with fireworks. Now for those of you of the older generation reading this, aka family, don’t worry, China is actually one of the safest places in the world for foreigners to travel, and everything ended up alright in the end. Aside from these isolated incidents the traveling was a lot of fun, and we ended up making some friends from different countries in our hostels, as well as being able to relax some once we reached our destinations. Because it was Chinese New Year not a lot was open, but we did get to see a lot of celebrations in Sanya, where it sounded like a war zone because people lit off fireworks nonstop for hours. You could see the smoke floating all around the city. It was also really odd seeing little kids running around with boxes of fireworks like they were candy, lighting them off with seemingly little supervision. We were slightly tamer in buying a bunch of sparklers and a big red lantern thing that you light from the bottom like a hot air balloon and send flying up into the sky. I think it is supposed to be good luck, except for the poor bird who might run into it during its flight.
After break we arrived in Hangzhou and were welcomed with orientation meeting after orientation meeting. I suppose necessary but not the most exciting start. We still haven’t gotten a chance to really get out and see the city, but what I have seen is pretty nice. The campus is a little small, which is inversely proportional to the amount of students at the school. There is a river running through the middle and several bridges, including one old fashioned one and a Chinese style gazebo, which is quite picturesque despite the green water running underneath. There is also a Frisbee field and soccer field, where a lot of Chinese students go to play around after classes, unfortunately they are all boys and will rarely let a foreigner play with them, nevermind a foreign girl.
Just in back of the school is a road that is a mecca for cheap, fast food, and is currently the location of my lo mien study. Seeing as I will be here for several months I see no need to eat mediocre noodles when there seem to be so many options, so I am surveying each type of noodle at each restaurant on the street (but a short street mind you) to determine who has the best, and then I can become more or less a regular and be content knowing that I am actually eating the best I can get for my money. And no worries on the health factor, there is also a fruit market, which I do go to, right next door. However it also has a lot of seafood (live and dead) as well as poultry, where you can take your pick and they will chop its head off for you then and there.
Seeing as I have just about written a short novel since I had to play catch up I suppose it is time to get back to homework. Kudos to anyone who actually read this entire thing. And if you are only reading this because you skipped to the end, well, that’s cheating, but I suppose impressive as well.
