It's all Chinese to Me

Ni hao! 

Monday morning we had our first Chinese lesson with a graduate student from the University. She focused on basic characters and sayings, such as hello, goodbye, thank you, excuse me, too expensive, I don't understand, and others. I love you, but I doubt I'll be using that one any time soon. We learned to combine characters to make different words as well; China is symbolized by the characters for "center" and "nation", while I found it ironic that the United States is represented by "pretty" and "nation."

After lunch, we went to visit SMC, the company I did my pre-trip presentation on. The company deals with pneumatic valves and other such concepts. The show room was interesting because I'd seen a number of the parts before from Papa working for Portacel. There were machines making noise and moving everywhere, and the showroom was roughly the same. It was pretty cool, but I know I don't want to work in a plant making pneumatic parts.

For dinner we went to one of Vivian's favorite restaurants on campus, which is supposed to be a representation of American dining. It was very weird having a fork and knife and not chopsticks, and the American bread was by far the best part of my trip. Brandon ordered it jsut to see what it was, and they delivered him the hardest, driest square of toast I've ever seen in my life.  In between tears of laughter and bites, Brandon serenaded us with "America the Beautiful," until we had to explain to Vivian why we were laughing so hard. We had a get together with students from Tsinghua following dinner at a café of sorts. It was interesting to talk to the students about their majors, where they live, and a lot of other stuff. One of the girls we talked to was from the Sechuan (sp?) province, whose native inhabitants are considered an ethnic minority. She was a business administration major, and said it takes her 26 hours on a train to get home to visit, so she doesn't go home often. It's a lot harder for students to get plane tickets home here than it is in the States, so she only sees her parents at winter and summer breaks. I go home roughly once a month, and I can't imagine spending 26 hours on a train! One of the students played a traditional Chinese instrument for us, which resembled a harp. The music was beautiful, and all the Chinese girls got very excited when she started playing. We also ran into a Mormon missionary from Salt Lake City who's been studying at the University, and he was able to tell about some interesting places to see while we're here.

Tuesday morning we began with a lecture on Chinese Social Culture and History. The professor who taught us has taught Chinese and American history here in China and also taught Chinese history in the States. She was able to give us a nut-shelled background of China (a detailed background would take forever because there's thousands of years of civilization here), and an overview of the impact of the different dynasties. We had lunch at the American pizza place on campus, which was very good. I don't like tomato sauce, and this pizza was like Cici's in that it had minimal to no sauce on it; excellent. We had our third company visit in the afternoon where we visited Capital Bio, a biotech and research company. Capital Bio makes equipment for medical testing and treatments, such as DNA slides and examination devices. On our tour of the facility, we learned that the buildings on the grounds are all shaped like some object connected with biology. The front reception desk was a large carved dinosaur egg, the main building was a lung, I believe, another building was shaped like the heart, etc. Talk about challenging architecture! 

When we got back to campus, we ate dinner and crashed for a few hours before meeting to go shopping at Wangfu Jing Street, the really nice market place. It was much more exciting at night, with all the neon lights and people and everything. We had to wait at the meeting spot for almost an hour for Vivian and Rachel because they had to stop somewhere along the way (we all took taxis in small groups), but we got to make friends with one of the street vendors. She wouldn't leave us alone, so eventually we just started making conversation with her while continuing to turn down her offers of fake Rolexes and cheap Olympic merchandise. She tried to sell Josh's Mao watch to Phil, but Phil eventually bought one of his own, because who can turn down a waving Mao watch? We nicknamed her Lucy because we couldn't pronounce her Chinese name, and got a group picture with her. :)  When Rachel and Vivian finally arrived, we split up with pieces of paper with the address of our dorm written in Chinese for the taxi drivers. This time I went around with Josh, Phil, Rob, and Jess, who "needed some estrogen, and someone with TASTE." We wandered around fulfilling our gift duties and sampling tea at the teahouse before we met up with the rest of the group in this market alley where there are a lot of meat vendors and other souvenirs. Walking past the meat vendors was tough because it reeked, and everything there was skewered and raw, so the only that had been changed from when it was alive was no heads and skinned. You could still see all the legs and stuff though, so it made everyone walk really quickly. They also offered friend seahorse and scorpion for only a few yen! Jess, Julia, and the boys managed to pit the shoptenders against each other in a bod for chopstick sets, and finally pulled of a  decrease from 180 yen to 30 yen for decorative five-sets. That's about four dollars for really fancy chopstick sets, down from roughly 26!! The benefits of bargaining. The shoptenders grabbing me and the smell of the meat and all of the people shoving around started getting to me really quickly, so Julia and I left to wait outside the alley pretty fast. After everyone finished their shopping, we split in taxi-sizable groups again and caught rides home. It took roughly half an hour for Kayla, Kristy, Katie, and I to catch a cab, which was absolutely absurd. On the plus side, I got a good amount of my shopping done!