Today was a day that felt like the beginning of a routine in the best
way possible. I woke up, got dressed and such, went to the C-Store for
my Disney yogurt, and then met up with my classmates to walk to the
Russian Building for Chinese class at 9AM.
In class,
we started with a review then a dictation. In the dictation, Zhang
Laoshi read us 10 different syllables, and we had to write the pinyin of
the correct initial, final, and tonal sounds. I did pretty well, but it
was good that this was a practice; now I know what to expect, how best
to study, and where I need to improve. I got one of the initial-finals
wrong and two of the tones. She gave us mirrors today so we could look
at our mouth shapes and muscle usage to see how to position ourselves to
correctly pronounce the sounds. We finished the groupings of syllables,
then played a game to put it all together. We finished by learning to
write the characters for "sorry" and how to type in Microsoft Word in
Chinese.
Our class managed to walk from the Russian
Building to Building 3 correctly today, and we had Japanese food for
lunch. Mine was chicken and vegetables with sauce over rice, but there
were also vegetarian, beef, pork, and combination. We have a short
meeting during lunch where Gu Laoshi updates us on the goings on, and we
finalized plans for the next couple days. Tomorrow is a holiday, so we
have a special day planned, which I will write about tomorrow.
After
the meeting, I came back to my room for a break, then had Public Health
class at 2:00. The professor is an MD PhD and the head of the
department of Social Medicine at BeiDa. He did a lecture on public
health concerns and reforms in China. He compared China to the US and
Japan a lot, particularly in relation to swine flu response and income
to cost of living ratio. It was a lot of things I already knew with the
statistical numbers filled in, but it was taught in a very Chinese way,
and I can only describe it that way based on how it was unique compared
to teaching in the US along the lines of what I've been experiencing
here.
Once classes were done for the day, I got to
take another break before dinner. I met a group at 6:00, and we ended up
at the same restaurant that I was at last night. I was the only one who
had been there before, so it was kind of cool to know what the food
would be even though I could neither communicate nor read. I also
successfully used a public restroom for the first time on this trip, so
that was a good milestone to have passed. We ate hot pot with clear and
curry broths, lamb, beef, tofu, potato, mushroom, fish ball, cabbage,
and spinach. It was just as good the second night.
After
dinner, the group went underground from where the restaurant was to go
to the arcade. It was really fun! There were all types of games, from
the classic basketball and claw games to Plants vs. Zombies, Fruit
Ninja, and a variation of DDR that had the foot pads in an X and
incorporated arm movements by using a motion sensing camera. I won 276
tickets on my own, but nobody else wanted theirs, so I ended up with a
total of 528 tickets. To redeem them, we needed a card, but we didn't
know how to get a card, but then one of the guys said, "oh, this card?"
and whips one out of his pocket. Since 528 tickets could get me a
pencil, I kept the card and will add tickets the next time I go.
I've
been feeling kind of like a toddler in my helplessness to communicate. I
joke that I am illiterate, but in Chinese, I am. While I know I'm
learning, it's still hard for me to be so dependent on my friends who do
know Chinese. Though, today the language started sounding less
foreign.
Today is awesome because the arcade was really cool!
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