life is good

less than 10 minutes til olympics! and about 12 hours til i board a plane for US. everyone who went to the hospital has now returned. we’re happy and packing and our teachers are getting up at 5am to see us off to the airport tomorrow.

this time in china, even though it was only 2 months as opposed to 6-7, has changed my mind about a lot of things china. last time changed my mind too, but my idea of china before coming to china doesn’t count as much. Harbin’s changed my mind for the better.

i went to the post office this morning to send things, which i’m never doing again from china b/c while it’s always fun to get a package from china, it costs about 10 times what the things inside the package cost. but it’s on condi. anyway, b/c of olympics everything’s extremely strict and so i ended up only being able to send one or two of the
things i wanted to send, so i decided to send cards to some of the people whose gifts got vetoed.

i asked for an envelope and put my letter inside and then licked the back to seal it. i looked up and every office clerk in the place was looking at me like ‘what the hell is wrong with foreigners’ - they were all kind of looking b/c i’m a foreigner, but when i licked the envelope, which by the way had no glue on it - that’s apparently an American or Western thing, they looked at me like i was absolutely nuts.

then the clerk helping me took my envelope and sealed it with glue. she also decided then to grab my postcards, maybe so i wouldn’t lick them too. it’s so funny realizing the things that are uniquely American/Western or uniquely Chinese.

it’s like yesterday - which i can’t remember if i already wrote about - how i used my two fingers to make quotation marks in the air when i said “chinglish”, since it’s not actually a real word, and the man thought i was nuts and trying to signal to him that i wanted 22 shirts instead of 40.

apparently also true for shrugging. one of the chinese student zhuli’s said to my friend the other day:  “whenever you do this <shrugs>, i have no idea why”.  idk though, i feel like shrugging is universal. i think it might just be that zhuli…

ok i’m gonna go. some friends are leaving early b/c not going home with us and i want to go say goodbye.

last email from china (this time anyway..).

we got t-shirts made for the group. they say some cute little thing in chinglish on the back like:

900 New Words
250 Bottles of Water
45 Hours on a Bus
4 People to the ER
2 Boat Rides in Thunderstorms
4 surgeries
Spending Condi’s Money and Understanding 50% of What is Said
PRICELESS

sadly, we will now have to take sharpies to the line that says “4 People to the ER”, cross out the four and make it 5. it looks like the same will have to be done for the surgeries line.

our friend A is at the hospital right now, where we’re frequent customers, and they’re deciding if she needs a collar bone operation right now, or if she can wait til back in the US. she has a ‘broken’ collar bone. - i put ‘broken’ in quotes b/c that’s the chinese translation, but i’m not sure that it’s what we’d consider broken in the States.
what it means is that there’s one section of her clavicle that does not connect in any part. this is too much detail. anyway.

we were playing the flying bird, and we play rough - but this happened during warm up. we play on this field that is ‘luan qi ba zao’ - which translates literally to ‘chaos seven eight terrible’. and it is. the grass is up to our knees, there are holes, muddy sections, broken glass sections where you’re not allowed to fall or dive for the frisbee, - it’s a mess. but the soccer players kept reserving the other nice field and since we’re not an ‘official’ HeiDa team, we can’t reserve it. so, we play on chaos seven eight terrible field.

and it’s great. we drag rusty net-less old soccer goals to make our endzones, we use piles of plants to mark out of bounds, and we get really dirty and usually a little beaten up. but only a little.

we were warming up and A and this other very large girl both jumped for the frisbee and collided in mid-air and i heard something bad happen in A’s body from 10 feet away. she fell and turned completely pale and without a word grabbed her shoulder and walked off the field to sit.

after a while it was clear it wasn’t just a bump and we called a cab to go to hospital. sigh. yesterday was our last day of classes. today was our final exam day. we tested for 4 hours this morning. tomorrow we ‘graduate’. we thought we might be safe from this craziness that keeps happening.

this was a physical injury though. this wasn’t H City getting in and giving you appendicitis or enlarging your spleen, etc. it still sucks.

okay, happier note. in other news: classes are over. yay? obligations aren’t yet. i still have somewhere to be tomorrow at 8am. no i am happy though. i treated my teachers to lunch today. during which they ordered an excessive excessive amount of food, as is chinese tradition, because they don’t see food that you don’t eat with rice as food.

for example, mcdonald’s - all food at mcdonald’s, like burgers, quarterpounders, etc - are snacks, because they don’t come with rice. dumplings are also snacks. you eat four plates of dumplings and a quarter-pounder and tell me it was just a ’snack’. anyway. oh - also, chickens aren’t considered birds. they’re in the ‘house animals’ category, like cats or dogs.

okay in the time it took to write those paragraphs A’s begun surgery. i guess ‘broken’ really is broken. on a serious positive note though, all these injuries are showing how caring everyone is. the administration here is..a lost cause. especially on the incompetent incompetent american side. but the students on this program know how to step up when needed. we take shifts bringing food, spending time with, and tutoring the people who can’t leave their rooms after surgery. we took turns sleeping on the floor of the hospital while friends were staying there in case they needed to go to the bathroom or had an emergency overnight, someone was also there all day.

we really take care of each other. and everyone’s so genuine. getting to see that part of everyone come out was amazing. the disasters that it took to bring those things out were unfortunate to say the least.

well, i meant to write a different post but this is what you got. oh well oh well. all in all everyone’s well.

and i’ve already graduated.

in the beginning i was much more strenuous of a student. which sounds better in chinese. renzhen. i was much more renzhen. now i’m just…tired. literally, - not tired of things, i just literally want to sleep. i want to sleep all the time here though. something’s not right in this city. 4 hospitalizations and 2 surgeries in 7 weeks?

i think it might be getting up at 6 everyday - and then even earlier on weekends. we never get a break. 2 free days in 2 months. i didn’t realize how badly i need weekends to catch up.

we have 4 final exams tomorrow morning. in a lot of ways i’m excited to be going home. idk this is a weird part of life.

i don’t think i can take much more of the food here. we ordered a pizza tonight for dinner and it was the healthiest thing i’ve eaten in a while. china’s food can be ridiculously oily all over, but this city’s speciality is being the most oily in all of china. i will miss excessively dangerous boating rides though.

alright i’m gonna go shower. have to be somewhere in a bit. we have to wash our own laundry here - by hand - and i do wash them i swear but i feel like i always smell.. ok that’s all for now.

so last post i was trying to describe my weekend, but i couldn’t for the life of me remember saturday, so i just talked about sunday’s glacier/volcano. but i’ve looked at some photos, and it turns out we did a lot on saturday.

one of those activities included being on a boat in a dark loud thunderstorm. it looked like armageddon was on its way while we were walking through this place that has cold springs of water which has really high iron content and is naturally carbonated and tastes like you’re drinking metal bars and we stop at the water where there are two boats
waiting. we’re not surprised, and since inner mongolia’s lightning storm boating experience we weren’t really that scared either b/c not much could top that one.

so we hop on the boats and armageddon jr arrives and i have a video of the whole extravaganza. if i can figure out how to post a photo on here of the sky i’ll do that.

and then today was great. i just got back from throwing the flying bird. (frisbee). i loooove frisbee. it was 6 on 6 and another friend showed up towards the end so the other team got her and we asked a member of the audience if he wanted to play. (there’s always an audience).

after declining politely we dragged him onto the field and he was absolutely amazing. ultimate frisbee’s not a common game in china, but after a 5 minute explanation he was making goals and catches all over the place.

anyway that made my day as throwing the flying bird always does. we have a rematch next week.

afterward we went for food. by ‘food’ i mean ‘beer and french fries’, but i actually just got a plate of tofu and watermelon juice. which sounds awesome, but eating here actually sucks. only in china can a diet of tofu and broccoli be this bad for your health. you don’t stand a chance against the msg and oil.

oh - and the restaurant/chef mishap from yesterday carried on. tonight w/ the tofu they told me not to pay again
(i forgot my card anyway so a friend paid) and the woman even said it was ‘bu hao yisi’ which sort of means embarrassing. i said i was ‘bu hao yisi’ and i think we forgot the whole thing. we got 3 dishes tonight - all of which we ordered.

okok i’m off for real.

ps - two weeks ago i saw oodles of siberian tigers. also ligers. they actually exist. it’s not just in napoleon dynamite. 20 of them do anyway. for $5 i got to play with a baby siberian tiger. which shouldn’t be allowed for so many reasons. oh china.

yesterday i hiked a volcano. it was hot. then i climbed down into an underground glacier.
it was cold.

i’m feeling a wee bit brain-dead. i really do like it here. but i think if it weren’t limited - if i didn’t know it was only a short period of time, i might go a little bit crazy. it’s the pace of life more than the pace of class. and the lack of sleep. i love my roommate but she never ever let’s me sleep. ever.

there’s only one person in the hospital right now. which is good for us. it’s guy #4 though. i’m not kidding. this is ridiculous. the chinese people here all think it’s normal. i’ve lived in china before for four times this amount of time with no hospitalizations. others have lived here for years hpospitalization-free. - multiple surgeries and hospital stays are *not* normal.

the guy from my class, JBG, came back today. and the guy who got foot surgery, FDS, walked (well, crutched) his way to the cafeteria today.

we got them shirts that say - “i went all the way to china and all i got was this lousy appendectomy”, with an arrow to the appendix area. hehehe. and ‘man of steel, made in china’, b/c FDS now has a piece of china’s metal in his foot.

we thought these were very clever. and our friends are both still on pain medication galore, so they’re pretty much always happy.

ok it’s after 9 i should go get things done and sleep.
today at dinner i was given two plates of food both not what i ordered. no - one was what i ordered but it was made into a soup. i asked them if they could add mushrooms to the soup and instead was given a plate of fried mushrooms in addition to the unexpected soup.

this is fine, but when you can actually speak and say exactly which dish you want and they just don’t listen b/c you’re a foreigner and give you what they want to, it’s so upsetting.

and this woman’s done it to me so so many times. it’s not the food, it’s that i actually can communicate they just don’t believe it. she gets so happy when i come too and starts throwing out names of dishes…but not happy in a good way. happy in a slightly evil way. a - foreigners are so hilarious - kind of way.

anyway, so today they brought over a plate of fried mushrooms and i told them it wasn’t something i ordered, but in a kind of sad yet not entirely defeated way, and explained that i had asked if they could add mushrooms to the soup.

this is getting way too long for such an unimportant story. anyway, the reason i’m writing this random long story about soup, is this:

after the girl brought fried mushrooms over, the chef himself came out and apologized for the miscommunication (which being a foreigner was most likely my fault anyway) and offered to make me any other dish i wanted, even if not on the menu, for no cost - i said nono that’s okay, then later he offered to give me the money back - which never happens -
and i said nono i’m sorry i made such a big deal it’s no trouble, etc.

so finally he went back. and i felt really guilty (until the guys came, saw fried food on plate, devoured on command), and my faith in humanity was restored once again.

i know i sound like a brat, getting upset about something so trivial, but it gets so tiring just being here sometimes. being stared at - not just regular stares - ‘you have three heads and i want to have your babies’ types of stares, and people follow you with video cameras, secretly take your photo, think you can’t understand so forcefully pull you into their photo with no words exchanged, jump into your photo when you’re trying to take one w/ friends and have their friend take one, shout ‘hello’ or russian words at you over and over, follow you, etc etc. alllllllllll the time.

it makes it difficult to have a normal conversation. or..move.

misunderstanding after misunderstanding. but then mr. chef comes by and is so nice and china just gets you again.

today i released a dove (which no doubt returned 2 minutes later) off of the roof of the tallest building in central Harbin. it might have been a fabulous peace and freedom moment, but i hate birds. i’m so scared of them. it wanted to get out of my hands and i wanted it out of my hands and it turned more into me chucking the dove over the railing and ducking. someone has a photo of it. not a peaceful sight.

there’s so much more but i have to go make flashcards so i can study while we’re in the peasant village.

holy mongolia. we just got back from inner mongolia. daqing region. i was soo excited for this trip. we were going to ride mongolian horses, sing mongolian drinking songs, go white water rafting, dress up in something (idk what because I couldn’t understand that part, but i was in). none of that happened.

we left at 6am because one of our teachers really wanted to take us to a very rarely seen/out of the way mongolian village. but it rained. it thunderstormed. so we arrived around noon, ate, were told we could play by ourselves until 5:30, when we needed to eat again. all we do is eat.

it was great - we went around this city and talked to people, we walked around this lake, it was really nice. the city was flooded, but in a really pretty way.

apparently in china you can’t do anything if it’s raining/thunderstorming - except: take speedboats out.

no joke. after meeting at 5:30, we went to this mongolian village to eat with the villagers. they slaughtered a lamb for us. we were all starving but had to wait in the bus for 20 minutes 10 feet from the village to see if the rain would stop. it didn’t. but first:

we went to…i really can’t explain what, where they had horses and a lake. we went in groups of two in speedboats around the lake. no safety precautions whatsoever, which would be fine except that there was thunder and lightning everywhere. it was like the movie ‘a perfect storm’. the first group went and it was just thunder and lightning, but not too much and no rain.

i’m a wanderer and tend to always end up in the last group. plus i had to pee. there wasn’t any bathroom so the woman taking us around asked me if i could pee by the horses. i said that would be absolutely no problem. she told me to check the cars parked by the horses to see if ppl were in them and i said we were all clear.

mid-pee a tour group and a half come back to their car. and not a family tour group, a largely middle aged men (and some women) tour group. i was in plain sight, but luckily it’s china and they couldn’t've cared less.  

so i run back onto the last group of ppl going on boats. the sky is black. we start going around that lake - which was huge, we mistook it for the ocean when we first saw it (in our defense we only ever know about 40% of what’s going on, including where we are. partially b/c we can’t speak this language, but mostly b/c no one bothers to tell us. they just put us on boats).

anyway, we start getting really wet. i’m wondering why the last group didn’t look this wet and then we realize it’s raining not splashing. it’s apparently reached the point in the storm where it’s too dangerous even for the chinese boat drivers, so they turn right back.

by the time we reach the docks it’s absolutely pouring and everyone’s so scared of the ligtening they start running in every-man-for-himself fashion. the dock p.s., is made of bamboo with metal rods every 4-5 feet. we really didn’t want to be on that dock. as we’re running one of the teachers (the only one that went) shouts to me “thisis by far the most dangerous thing i’ve ever done”.

by the time we run back to the buses we’re drenched. i cannot even convey how wet we were. in any language. this was an insane storm.

my teacher told me that i showed good filial piety (big deal in china), because i told him on the boat that if i were gonna die now, i’d want it to be death by lightning on a lake in inner mongolia. he asked why and i said that it’d give my parents a story-starter for the rest of their lives.

what a way to go. but, i did not go. i’m safely back in harbin drowning in work, but liking it for now. we got the results from one of our 4 tests on friday back and everything’s very much out in the open here - for example they will write the scores and ranks of students in public places and hang them up..

so he told the entire class what each student got wrong and how they did on the test, and when he got to me (last b/c i sit by the door), he says “gan ni, she didn’t have a single problem. every question she got right”. the only one. yes, i’m bragging. i need the moral boost that bragging gives me right now. chinese chinese chinese can start making you feel absolutely useless and stupid when you can’t speak chinese.

i like the language pledge too. i like it all actually when i understand it/when it’s easy for me. and this week things are starting to come easier. one problem i was having is that i have a really great group of friends here, but they speak english when no one’s looking. this weekend though i said ‘how about for the next four hours we stick to the language pledge’, and they were happy to. didn’t even make me feel like the one nerd who wants to keep the pledge. we’re all nerds here. no one’s pretending to be cool.
 
it’s really common around here to hear “wu dian yi hou wo gaosu ni”: after 5pm i’ll tell you. the language pledge is super enforced until 5pm and especially on weekdays, but after 5 if you really needed to say something to another english speaker that chinese just can’t do for you, you can use chinglish/english.
so when we’re having a conversation and just not understanding, or if someone hears something really complicated and asks you to explain it, you can say ‘ask me again after 5pm’.

so after the near-death speed-boating experience (which btw i’m not exaggerating about - just thought i’d differentiate b/c i exaggerate all the time), we went to the mongolians. ate their lamb. drank their horse liquor..which i can’t explain but it’s kind of like ‘baijiu’ which translates to white wine but is absolutely not white wine…it’s just the hardest liquor..ever. ask a chinese friend about ‘baijiu’ (pronounced: ‘buy joe’). you get drunk just from smelling it.

we had a jolly good time and in the morning about half our group had la duzi (literally: stomach pull, so i’ll let you use your imagination). i was not one of them. i am iron-stomach stephanie. also, i don’t eat a lot of meat..maybe that was it? i ate pounds of raw veg though..and baijiu. fantastic combo.

and now we’re home and back in our routine. tomorrow we have to go talk to people on the street to find out slang terms/street talk. it’s our homework. i love this kind of homework.

ok i should go. midterms in 2 weeks. yikes! next up: we spend 3 days in a peasant family rural village. no showers. no electricity. no doors (so mozzies and bugs at night), no beds - just flat hard surfaces, and it’s 4 ppl per hard surface. it kind of goes without saying, but no AC, so it gets nice and warm at night. one of the zhuli’s said that when she slept in a peasant village she woke up when the sun rose (which we kinda do anyway here) and there was a duck about 2 feet from her face that had wandered in.

i’m pumped. i could go on and on and write forever b/c there’s a lot i don’t get to say because it’s too much to say in chinese, but i’ve got homework and laundry and such.

sorry this post is probably kind of weird sounding. i think it’s a combination of translating things from chinglish to english in my head making them come out weird, and also feeling really rushed b/c i’m worried about getting all my hw done.

i just got back from doing part of the tremendous amounts of hw we have each night.  except this was something that translates to a ‘pre-task’..so idk how to explain it. but it was this:

i had to take a public bus to an underground Russian goods store. no taxis allowed, but if i found a place to rent a bike, i could do that. i have no idea which buses go where, the name of any underground russian stores - or even if it’s literally under the ground, or if it’s black market, or both.

i’m not allowed to ask the mentors or the teachers for help or clarification. and i need to come back and write an essay or tell the class tomorrow about the quality of the goods, how much i could bargain down a women’s clothing item, what the bus fare was, etc etc.

i had a freaking ball. and bought a polka dotted dress for 40 kuai. it was originally “538″. (they started for real at around 180). the rest of my homework is in books though and i haven’t started. i’m going to go to my zhuyi’s room to go over it later, which forces me to do it before it gets too late. 

yesterday afternoon our ‘class’ was tai ji lessons. which was more stressful than it sounds because you can’t always see the instructors and if you hadn’t studied the tai ji words you’d end up in some weird positions trying to guess where they were directing your body to go.
at one point i turned around and was facing my friend (which means one of us was at least 180 degrees off) who was in a completely different position. we both mouthed ‘how did i end up over here’ and then the instructor, who was the scariest 90 year old woman you could imagine, came over and yelled at us. tai ji’s not my forte. it’s also all on film.

homework.

no time to use internet. no internet to use. no time to do anything. they treat us like royalty. too well actually b/c don’t get to go off and make our mistakes and be forced to figure things out alone in china.

break downs daily. my brain is being assaulted - speaking constantly, listening, studying, 4-hour classes, intimidating students, and by the end of the day my brain is tired and i’m so fragile and anything leads to tears. embarrassing.

yesterday i decided even though i have no time that i needed to go for a run. it’s my therapy. and exercise makes you
remember things better and i needed to get some stress out. went w/ friends to the track to run but they wanted to lift weights after and i wanted to keep running so i told them i’d go back later myself.

i got lost for about an hour. it’s mr p’s genetics. the track by the way is a 2 minute walk from our dorm. i wandered for 30 minutes before ending up back at the other side of the track. then asked a guard for directions and he told me he’d walk me. i was worried the whole time about not having time and getting my work done, (which i didn’t) and that made this even more stressful. they moved me up one level yesterday so i had catching up to do and class got a lot harder.

anyway, these two policemen are walking me back (to the wrong place) and one won’t stop talking to me. and he’s speaking dialect, so i have absolutely no idea what he’s saying and he’s getting so pissed that i don’t understand something so simple and starts shouting at me (i finally understood that he was asking how china was different than america. it was not a conversation i wanted to have at that point, but i figured if i was talking he might not be).

anyway, along the way we run into my zhuyi, which is kind of like a student mentor. he’s a chinese undergrad who’s studying to be an english teacher. anyway, this guy already thinks i’m absolutely retarded b/c i don’t understand him half the time. and on day one when he told me my phone couldn’t call internationally after i had spent all my money on an international phone card, and not to worry b/c i could call all my chinese friends, he saw me flip out in chinese about how i have no friends in china and all i want are my friends and my american family. there may’ve been a tear or two. not a pretty stephanie.

anyway, when we bump into him i’m 25% relieved and 75% embarrassed as hell. not only can i not speak this language, but i also can’t find my way from the track to my dorm which is 5 feet away. he thanks the officers after telling them they were taking me in the wrong direction, and then tells them that i’ve only been here 3 days. he walks with me and keeps telling me not to worry, that it’s not a big deal at all, etc etc and i fight tears b/c that was yesterday’s last straw. i cried a little but by this time it was too dark to tell.

it’s just so frustrating. humbling to the point of humiliation.  and so constant. 

anyway, my zhuyi is amazing and he walks me back home, then offers to walk me to the track and back again so that i wouldn’t get lost next time. we do this, and then bump into more american students. i tell them that i got lost 5 minutes away and we all laugh. my emotions here are crazy.

later i go to my zhuyi’s room and he helps me w/ my homework until almost midnight.

anyway i barely made it into advanced. i didn’t test too well AT ALL, and when i had my interview (in a room in front of 8 teachers), i lied and said i’d only taken 2 years worth of chinese instead of 4 b/c i was embarrassed at how little i knew. in retrospect, that was an idiotic move. anyway, i’m good now.

it feels like i’ve been here a year. it feels like i’ve known these people for years.

it’s day 8 of china and day 3 of classes and i’m so worried i’m gonna burn out. it’s the pace and intensity - which wouldn’t be so bad if we had afternoons to study, but we don’t. we don’t even have a single weekend. going to the grocery store to buy fruit is a time luxury.

we are being spoiled rotten though. in the beginning they told us so much about how selective this program is, that they spent 120 million $$ on it (not just china - 500 kids total), that we’re amazing - but there’s a catch. they make us feel oh so good about ourselves for a little while, b/c if we are the “amazing kids” they’ve put so much faith and money into, we had better step up and prove that we’re worth it all.

we have private tutors, we live in a ritz-carlton that they call a ‘dormitory’, we have huge flat screen tvs we’ll never watch, chinese students to take us anywhere we need to go and help us with anything, etc etc. - ie, we have absolutely no excuses to not excel.

except maybe time.

anyway, i’m still amazed by it all. i really need to go.

on day one we took an overnight train from beijing, slept for 6 hours, got up at 6, took our luggage to our rooms and then took a 2-hour written exam. then we waited in a room together while they interviewed us one by one and reviewed our written exams. while they discussed our results and divided us into classes, the zhuyi’s made us dance to backstreet boys and russian techno (i’m not lying, i have it on film), to keep us from sleeping. we also had to sing (also on film). and not in a group - one person up front w/ a microphone. i sang ‘head shoulders knees and toes’ in chinese. it was by far the least impressive performance, except for one guy who sang happy birthday in chinese.

then we slept and the next day was class day one.

ok i really can’t put work off any longer. internet’s nice though. it’s probably really bad that i have it. i’m sure it won’t work by tomorrow though.

sneaking in some yingwen