Ni hao from China! We are all finally settling into life in Beijing and things are proving to be quite an adventure. Everyone is doing his or her own adjusting but we are all in good spirits. The weather in Beijing is muggy and hot, but that doesn't stop us from enjoying all the things Beijing has to offer!
Classes officially started with an opening ceremony attended by all of the students' professors. The students got to know the campus a bit better with a guided tour around BNU. The afternoons are the time for the students to explore the city on bus, in taxis and along the subway lines, and now that the students have made friends with BNU's English language majors they can get more than just the tourist's experience of Beijing. For example, some students have already met many Beijingers by playing them in ping pong or by exploring the older alleyways.
Eating at restaurants remains a favorite activity since it accomplishes so many goals of the FSP: you get to explore the city while looking for new places to eat, you get to interact using your Chinese in looking at menus and ordering, and best of all you get to experience Chinese culture in the tastiest way possible! All tastes find accommodation among Beijing's finest and humblest restaurants, all for what amounts to only a few US dollars every day for even the most generous meals.
Students have their language classes everyday from 8 am until 11:35 am, and then Professor Willaims' literature course Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursdays from 2 pm until 4 pm. The students have quizzes every day and a test every Friday, as well as several written assignments. Soon the students will have the opportunity to attend extracurricular classes such as Chinese calligraphy and Taiji/Wushu martial arts classes, along with a few Chinese cooking demonstrations.
In the dormitory, students room together in one room doubles with full baths. All the students are together on the fourth floor and I am stuck right in the middle of all the rooms. We have some Princeton students sharing the dorm with us as it is the foreign student dormitory. Our rooms are quite well-furnished with an individual A/C unit, a television, telephone, and even safes to store our valuables in. The maids who clean our rooms everyday and the staff at the front desk are the best and it is always fun to practice some Chinese with them.
You can look forward to many more pictures very soon as we are visiting the Temple of Heaven and the New Oriental Plaza this weekend, as well as having dinner with some Dartmouth Alumni!
~George [Program Director's Assistant]
July 16, 2005
The group just got back to Beijing from Datong a few days ago and it is definitely good to be back! We've all been pretty busy with all the activities we pack into each week but a new update has been long overdue. Let's start where we left off:
Our dinner with Dartmouth alumni (6/24) was a big success and it was great seeing what past grads are doing in Beijing after Dartmouth. Some alums graduated twenty or more years ago, and some graduated just last year, and you would never guess the things they've gotten themselves into since: Chinese grade school teachers, Great Wall expert guides, Chinese television actors, business owners and bird keepers were among the dinner guests. We had a banquet at BNU's Shixi Restaurant and listened as the alums told about their experiences and gave some advice for this year's FSP members. Some Chinese students from the Dartmouth Class of 2009 made a surprise appearance as well, getting their first tastes of Dartmouth culture as the alums set up a table for a few games of pong!
Next came our planned visit to the Temple of Heaven (6/25). Everything was going very well as we made our way through secondary attractions like the Echo Wall and the Round Altar, but when we finally approached the main structure, the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest, we found to our great dismay that the whole thing was covered with scaffolding and tarp--it was undergoing renovations for the 2008 Olympics! Needless to say we were all very disappointed but salvaged the day the best we could by heading to New Oriental Plaza early and trying out the underground Gourmet Street's dishes, as well as getting in a bit of shopping at Wangfujing. We got to taste a great variety of food from traditional Chinese noodles to Hong Kong-style roast meats, Korean Kimchi pizzas to Japanese piping hot cream puffs, and Wangfujing has some great shops including a foreign language bookstore and a small store specializing in chopsticks.
The next week, our students met again with BNU students in order to discuss the literature that Professor Williams' students had been studying in class, as well as to learn what life as a Chinese youth entailed (6/27). This time, the BNU students were Chinese majors and our Dartmouth students were able to learn a lot from them and the students soon made many new friends.
The next day, we had the opportunity to see a performance of Red Detachment of Women (Hongse Niangzi Jun in Chinese), a Cultural Revolution-era model ballet (6/28). There were eight of the so-called "model operas", which were meant to embody the ideals of revolution and communism, praise Chinese wartime victories and heroism and act as models of how art should serve the revolution. Red Detachment of women takes place in Hainan Island, a southern Chinese territory, and follows the story of a young woman who escapes her exploitive captors to join a Red Army detachment made up of local women. Most of the story is communicated purely through dance, but there are some sequences in which songs are sung by a chorus offstage. The students really enjoyed the performance--the dancers were very skilled and the production was colorful and full of energy, making it a favorite among the group.
That weekend, we rode north from BNU to climb the Simatai section of the Great Wall (7/2). Unlike other sections of the Great Wall in Beijing, the Simatai section has not gone through much renovation and its distance from the city dramatically cuts down on the number of tourists who would otherwise be swarming the Wall. The lack of renovations also allowed the students to see the Wall 'au naturel', without the gimmicky contrivances meant to lure tourists. We set out on a clear, mild day and climbed the steep and winding steps of the world's most famous fortification. As the Wall creeps along the spines of many mountains, we were doing no less than climbing mountain peak after paved mountain peak. At regular intervals we would encounter guard towers, whose cool interiors and breezy windows gave the group a break from the heat and the challenging climb. The group was certainly very excited to be climbing the legendary Great Wall of China, and we were all impressed when we looked out from a peak in the wall and saw how endless this structure really was. When we had reached the end of our climb we took a ride down on the cable car and encountered a deep silence and a beautiful valley as we descended between two mountains--a poignant close to a day of adventure on the Great Wall.
The students held their final official meeting with their BNU friends next (7/5). This time they got to meet more English language majors, and by now our students had a much better idea of life as a Beijing college student, but they also had thought of many more questions to ask. The Chinese university system is in some ways vastly different from the way things work in the United States. Students from both countries experienced mutual surprise and awe at the differences, and were able to discuss what each side felt were advantages and disadvantages. In the end, all the students came away with a broader understanding of their peers across the world.
Then came our trip to Datong (7/8-7/11) by train. The students got to experience sleeping in "hard sleeper" carriages, which are made up of open compartments of six bunks with a corridor running along beside them. We pulled into Datong station early in the morning and helped ourselves to a breakfast buffet at our hotel before beginning our tour of Datong. First, we visited the Yungang Caves, created during the Northern Wei Dynasty. The caves house spectacular Buddhist statues, some of which tower fifty meters high! Walls are decorated in fine detail and some statues retain their brilliant gold paint.
A group of students then joined Professor Williams and myself in venturing deep inside one of Datong's three hundred coal mines. Datong is the top producer of coal in China, and most of the population's livelihood is connected to coal mining. The mine we visited is state run and employs ten thousand miners who live withint the wall of the mine complex with their families, a total of fifty thousand people. Unlike some of the small private mines, they pay great attention to safety and are the only mine in the country set up to receive tourists. We dressed up in mining suits complete with hardhats and flashlights and took an elevator down 300 meters to the mine's tenth level (below us there were another eight levels!). We rode the train tracks to reach the inner shafts and were then guided through a segment of the coal seam especially set up for tourists that taught us about advances in Chinese coal mining since the Han Dynasty, 2000 years ago, to the present day. We returned to the surface smelling and looking like coal. It was a sublime experience and the students gained an appreciation of the extreme hard work that provides China with its major source of energy.
The next day, we all packed up our belongings and then toured the Upper Huayan Monastery, which forms a pair with the Lower Huayan Monastery to the north of the city. The monastery houses Buddhist monks who still inhabit the ancient grounds, which were built during the Liao Dynasty circa 11th century A.D. The monastery was quite beautiful but most stunning were the five massive golden Buddha statues inside the monastery's Daxiong Hall.
Next up was Erling Village. This wasn't any sort of historical or cultural site per se, but rather a typical rural Chinese village on the outskirts of the city. The students encountered the true average Chinese people, as the majority of the Chinese population still live relatively impoverished lives. The people of Erling Village, however, were very welcoming and were unwilling to accept any form of payment in return for allowing us to visit their school, temple and homes.
In contrast to the modest abodes of Erling Village, the Hanging Temple was impressive to even the most jaded traveler among our group. Originally perched on a sheer cliff over one hundred meters above rushing water, the Hanging Temple is an astounding architectural feat whose height is now only forty meters from the valley floor; a change brought about by the effects of flooding. The temple may have been constructed on the cliffside because of the perfect quiet and isolation being situated below a cliff could afford, as well as the protection from periodic flooding the height provided. The temple may also have been used as a rest stop for pilgrims. Unique to this temple is the fact that all three of China's major religions are represented: Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism.
Before we left Datong we took some time to climb Heng Mountain, one of five sacred Taoist mountains in China. The mountain is home to several temples and Taoist priests and provided unreal views of the surrounding landscape: graceful mountains and lakes, valleys and terraced fields. The mountain itself was thick with forest mounted on beautiful rock formations. The man-made structures never conflicted or overwhelmed the mountain but rather harmonized with its natural beauty, thus realizing one of the prime ideals of Taoist philosophy and religion.
We returned from Datong on Monday and the students enjoyed a day off from classes. Our next outing came on Wednesday (7/13). Chinese acrobatics is an extremely old form of traditional entertainment dating back to China's Warring States Period, almost 2500 years ago. Everyone was very excited to catch a performance but unfortunately, horrendous Beijing traffic turned a 15 minute bus ride into a 75 minute ordeal. We arrived right at intermission and caught the second half of the show. Students were floored by the performance, for most had never seen anything like it before: juggling with feet, contortists, diabolos tricks, and deft-defying jumps on the vertical poles pushed the limits of the human body's physical potential. The students left feeling stunned and amazed. No one knew that such a part of Chinese culture even existed before that night!
The next night, we threw a surprise birthday party for one of our students. Peter turned 19 on the 14th of July and we decided to get him a *huge* Chinese-style cake in addition to our weekly pizza study breaks. We all had a great time and Peter very much enjoyed the surprise.
Now we're just trying to recover our energy in preparation for the upcoming Shanghai trip, less than two weeks away. Enjoy all the new pictures that are being posted throughout the week, we've got tons! Till next week...
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~George [Program Director's Assistant]
Tuesday July 26, 2005
Another week has fallen off the calendar and it's time for another update! Last time we left off, the group was just about to visit a few sites around Tian'anmen Square (7/16) in the center of Beijing. We first explored the underground air raid shelters dug out in the 1960s that were meant to provide cover if the Soviet Union and China ever went to war. The tunnels went on for miles and miles, connecting to other cities and could once even reach as far north as the Great Wall. Unfortunately, our tour guide was extremely strict about not taking any pictures or videos. He insisted on the tour route through the tunnels, which were full of framed military photographs and images of Mao and Marx.
We then stood in a huge line around Tian'anmen Square waiting for our turn to enter the Mao Zedong Mausoleum where the leader's body is on display year-round, encased in a clear glass coffin. His body requires regular maintenance and reapplication of his mortuary makeup. Needless to say, photos of the interior were not permitted, and the line was required to keep moving. We got the impression that security was tighter in guarding a deceased body than it was at the airport when we arrived!
At last we came to the Forbidden City/Palace Museum. The Forbidden City was home to several dynasties' emperors and acquired its western moniker by its virtue of being off-limits to commoners: unauthorized entrance into the palace was cause for instant execution. Nowadays, the Chinese government insists on calling it the Palace Museum as a more politically correct and non-feudal name. Either way, the palace is the largest extant example of imperial architecture in all of China, consisting of nearly 10,000 different rooms. Our students explored what they could in an hour, squeezing through armies of summertime tourists from all parts of China and the world. The royal garden was a highlight as it contained many beautiful and unusual trees and stones.
The students then enjoyed a day off from classes on the 18th, and the next day were treated to a performance of traditional Peking Opera at the Huguang Guild Hall. We watched two very famous pieces: first was "Farewell My Concubine", in which a defeated general must part with his beloved concubine, and next was "Sun Wukong Borrows a Fan", a story taken out of the Tang Dynasty tale Journey to the West. The first piece featured song and a sword dance; the second piece had lots of staff fighting and impressive acrobatics. Students were also impressed by the elaborate costumes and makeup worn by the performers, as well as the very stylized way the actors would move and talk.
The next day our Dartmouth students joined hundreds of other Chinese and international students in attending the World Chinese Conference at the Great Hall of the People (7/20). Representatives of education from several nations converged to discuss the growth of teaching Chinese across the globe. Countries represented included Korea, Singapore, Ethiopia, France, Canada and the United States, as well as a representative from UNESCO. It was a great opportunity for our students to learn more about how Chinese is being studied and taught in other countries. The conference reminded us all about the rising importance of Chinese in the world. The Great Hall of the People itself was a grand and imposing structure, with large marble pillars and vast halls.
The students took their midterm exams on Friday (7/22). Afterwards, we celebrated Ryan L.'s birthday with cake during Chinese Table. The cake wasn't as huge as last time and we didn't have any trouble finishing it. Ryan's birthday was especially memorable since we were eating at a hotpot restaurant. Thirty-five boiling pots and a packed room turned lunch into a trip to the sauna. The food and cake were still quite delicious and we all wished Ryan a very happy birthday.
One last note: the group was supposed to spend the day at the beautiful Longqing Gorges outside the city on Saturday (7/23), but we wound up postponing the trip till August 6, a week after we come back from Shanghai due to inclement weather--the weekend saw continuous rain and thunderstorms, which would have presented many difficulties on the boat rides and hikes through the gorges. We will look forward to better weather for the rest of our trips!
The students have now begun their second set of language classes under new professors and are making fast progress. Students now know their way around the city very well and are beginning to feel more and more comfortable in their language abilities. Check in next week for more updates on our group's adventures!
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~George [Program Director's Assistant]
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