Back To School

This week it was back to the books. It was fairly difficult for me to get used to waking up early (7:30) again and having to do homework, but I was happy to see my classmates! Because the majority of my classmates are Korean I hear a lot of Korean throughout the day. Sometimes I feel like I’m learning more Korean than Chinese. I sit in the middle of Ma and Song Ye Eun (I can’t pronounce the rest of Ma’s name so she lets me call her just “Ma”) and they talk over me during class enough that I’ve picked up phrases and know how to respond to them sometimes. It’s really fun to see their reaction to me understanding them. Friday night we all went out to Tube Station to eat the biggest pizza in Beijing! I am not the class leader but I basically organized the evening because I had been there before and knew how to get there. I have to admit, it felt very strange leading Koreans, English, Turkish, and Italians through Beijing. But we made it there without getting lost!

This weekend a few of us also went to our professors house for apple pie again. It may take about a hour and a half to get to their house but when American food is the reward there is no question about going. They’re doing some work on the subway so one of the lines was down which resulted in a bit of a jam for us. We’re used to people, but not this many people.

Our Thursday outing was to the Summer Palace. When I came two years ago we visited the Summer Palace, but this time I saw a completely different side of it. There’s a giant duck floating around China right now as an art piece. I guess it started in Amsterdam and has been around the world – it was in Hong Kong this summer – and now is at the Summer Palce. So as soon as we heard it was there we headed toward it. We actually had seen it when we climbed Xiang Shan, but we didn’t know that it was at somewhere we were going to!

There were giant duck stickers on the ground pointing you toward it.

These are all the buildings we saw as we tried to find the duck

….And the duck was deflated that day because it was so windy…

It was the perfect day to visit the Summer Palace! The weather was gorgeous and had just enough chill to be comfortable. The wind was unfortunate, but at least we were by the water and not back at school where dirt and dust was flying everywhere.

Mom, I see street cleaners a lot and think of you every time.

They’re repairing the sidewalk and road by our street. The sidewalk had seemed perfectly fine before so we asked our language partners (Chinese students at CNU – each of us has one and we meet once a week) why they were repairing it. They said that they were doing it to make it safer for the blind. There’s the normal sidewalk, but down the middle there are tiles that are bright yellow (like the blind will see that) and have different ridges in them (that makes sense). It’s interesting because the sidewalk is almost done and we can barely tell a difference, except that it is a bit straighter now.

A few blog posts ago I mentioned joining the ping pong club at CNU. I have now decided that this ping pong club does not exist. I have gone every single Thursday and Sunday with Jeongsoo at the said time to play but none of the club members are ever there. Finally Jeongsoo texted one of the members and she said it began Sunday. Well, today is Sunday and I went. Once again none of the members were there. We just decided to play ourselves for awhile and watch some of the other people play, which was just as fun! A bit of a disappointment, but I figure that as long as I keep playing with people I'll improve enough to say I've completed my original goal! 加油！