Apologies, again, for the long timespan between updates. Hopefully I can make it up to you all with this one.

First, as a note, China's well aware of what's been happening in France and Germany, of the protests there; China itself has been restless over it, both in support of that cause and against it. However, one major thing should be noted here - there's been very little problems toward foreigners as a result. In fact, it's almost been friendlier since then.

The reasoning's pretty simple: most Chinese are willing to accept that if you've come over here - for tourism, study, or business - you can't be that bad of a person. For them, it's the people who haven't seen and don't want to see what's going on in China, how it's changing and developing to meet up with the rest of the developed nations, that they aren't fond of, and even they aren't bad. But those who've been directly involved in the protests make them bitter.

They see the Olympics as a chance at proving this, really. They want to show that, while China may have its problems, they're quickly able to adapt to meet the needs of the people. Frankly, that's true, from what I can tell. It's not a universal trait, but most of them seem willing to work with what they have.

Speaking of change... There's been a lot going on around here, construction-wise. The street's been overcrowded due to them digging out ground for a new subway line, which will hopefully alleviate a lot of the traffic along what is one of this area's busier roads. In addition, the line will directly service a fair bit of the Olympic area.

And in our dormitory, I learned the reason for the bad internet access the past three weeks; apparently they've been working for a while on the wiring and electricity in order to set up a cafe and a restaraunt in the dormitory's spare rooms. I suspect they guess it'll be profitable; the cafe seems to be doing okay, the restaraunt, no one seems to be going to yet. I myself haven't tried it, but plan to with a friend tomorrow. Part of it is that, well, eating out - or even just eating - in China tends to be more communal than back in the States, so it feels more awkward going alone. That, and since right now is a mini-vacation on campus, no one's really around to go there.

The only downside of the past few days has been the weather; hot, smoggy, and generally unpleasant, but still not terrible, all things considered. I'm preparing for when Dad arrives, myself; he has some vacation time, so he decided he'd come out to visit. Trying to plan and find things around Beijing for us to do. Even riding the subway line 13 for the time it's above-ground could make up a bit of a day.

Going to end this update here; a lot of text. Next time I get an update out will likely be with pictures around Beijing as Dad and I tour around!

-Tom

Hello everyone!

Ack, I know I said I'd get these out more often, but then China keeps me distracted for days on end. The weather here's been pretty bad; they've had thick pollution and sand storms from the Gobi on the same day, more often than not, and it's better to not go outside often, if at all, on days like that.

It's oddly not as common here as it is in other cities in China (Haerbin had a lot, notably) to see masks over the mouth to filter out dust and smog. I'm not really sure why they aren't as common here, though. If you're wondering what they look like, most are usually just white covers over the nose and face, though some are decorated fairly wildly.

Everything's been fairly peaceful in Beijing, so no worries there. On the clearer days I can see to the Summer Palace from my dorm room, I think - the largest building I showed, with the huge courtyard, is the building I refer to. Can't currently access Photobucket to show the one I'm talking about, irritably, but it should be in the pics there somewhere. At night, past a small courtyard outside the dormitory, there's a constant glow from the Wudaokou subway station and intersection, even bizarrely late at night. Seems like it's always busy; makes me wonder what the areas around downtown are like this late, but no real way to go see since the subway closes around 11:00 PM.

Really, most of my time has been spent trying to get internet to work more consistently here, and studying like crazy. My grammar class is fairly difficut, as is my reading class; listening class is going too slowly for my tastes. The main interest for me has been the science listening class - finally learning how to actually use numbers for more than just counting in Chinese (up until now, I could only say "add" - 加，jia) is rather nice, and since it's covering mainly vocabulary we wouldn't normally learn in our main classes anyway, it feels like it's what's helping me improve the most, despite being only once a week (Tuesday afternoons).

Not much else to say here. Rained today, first day it's actually rained all day; was nice to hear the rain against a window again for once. I'll try to get a bigger update out later this week, but with China's internet as it is right now and myself rather busy, I'm not promising much right now.

Apologies this update, too, comes late; I had to move rooms due to not having hot water, and acquired a new roommate from Japan the same day. The end result is that I misplaced my connector cord from my laptop to my camera for a few days.

And, well, I went to Harbin. It's a colder city to the northeast of Beijing, and a big metropolis in its own right. In addition, it's incredibly famous for...

Ice sculptures. Harbin (or as the Chinese call it, Haerbin) has an ice sculpture festival every year. It's really incredibly impressive. This update will be very image-heavy; my apologies for this, but it's really the sanest method to do this all.

Bats!

A fish. This picture wasn't too clear, but the crowds were thick and it was cold (-10 to -15 degrees Celsius?), so...

Celebrating the Chinese New Year - Year of the Rat, we had this statue present. This is how it's commonly depicted - more of a Jerry-like mouse than anything else.

Praying mantis.

These divided the sections of the display. I actually don't think I ever saw what was behind this one, oddly... there were some that blocked off pay-to-see sections, so I didn't go those ways.

Faces and masks! I loved how intricate these were; simply awesome to see, especially with the light.

More abstract sculptures. Some of them are pretty cool, some which I avoided weren't as interesting.

And some animalistic ones.

And then there was the octopus grabbing random things. I found, and still find, this one undefinably hilarious to see. I believe the subtext was related to Atlantis.

Finally, humanistic statues. Please note that I only got about half, primarily the ones I considered deeply impressive.

A slight side note before I continue; Harbin is about the same temperature during the winter as Kalamazoo, Michigan, but is often far less windy. So while the temperature often dives down to -10 degrees Celsius, you can, since there usually isn't much wind, get away without hat/gloves that would be essential in Kalamazoo. Of course, if you come during a snowstorm or towards the spring end of their winter (when the northeastern winds begin to pick up), you really want the gloves and hat. I wore them all the time, anyway; Beijing's gotten me used to nice spring-like temperatures.

Little igloos!

Bigger igloos! About 50 people were in this at one point; I had to wait until most of them came out before I could go in and get a good picture.

And, for you winter enthusiasts...

They had slides carved out of ice. Two sets, in fact; the first two pictures were this really windy road that looked somewhat dangerous due to all the bends, and the second one was the traditional sledding type hill.

To wrap this up, I'm just going to let some of the buildings speak for themselves here. Yes, full buildings and ships made out of ice.

Sorry for so many pictures, but seeing all this was just... awesome. Next time will probably be pictures I took around Harbin itself, though on my main walk I didn't have batteries for my camera, irritably. There will also be some more talk on the Chinese New Year, which is supposed to be over but which I'm still hearing fireworks from five days after the fact.

Use Your Back Button

Hey, everyone! Sorry it's been so long, but I've wanted this next update to be a visual one of sorts, and I finally got my camera and computer to work together, so.

Anyways, this is pretty much me taking pictures of some of the more oddball sights in the northwestern part of Beijing. I hope to get some pictures of the shops/stuff as well, but... it's a bit rude to take photos with people in them here, unless you know them. Nothing major, sometimes unavoidable (especially in tourist spots like the Summer Palace and Tiananmen Square), but it's awkward most of the time.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture074.jpg

This sight was just confusing. It wasn't a park, it didn't seem like it was near anything really relevant, it was just there. This was on the way back home from the Summer Palace on a different trip, idly.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture075.jpg

Meanwhile, I just enjoyed the skyline on this one.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture086.jpg

Spotted around the northern side of Beijing. I saw this while eating a small pastry and almost choked. The Chinese translates better to "Do not stop and sell things here." I have -no- clue where they got the goose part from.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture078.jpg

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture080.jpg

East of Beijing Language and Culture University there's a huge construction site. These were the two best shots I got of the cranes working there - there weren't any good spots to try and get a shot of the construction, sadly, but it looked decently interesting from what I could see.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture082.jpg

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture083.jpg

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture085.jpg

Three shots of a rather large building on the northeast edge of town. The place has a bank, a preschool, what kinda looks like an elementary school, a gym... and it's supposed to be a business. I think. The place is huge, and the only thing I was really able to tell is that it seems like it was a structure for the Olympics.

The next shots are buildings on the main road north out of Beijing.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture087.jpg

See these blue... fences, effectively? They're everywhere. They're... commonplace. They're used anywhere and everywhere there might be danger, plus some cases where it's just amusingly inconvenient. But here, I was walking through a rather run-down area, and the horizon had these kinda cool buildings blocked off by the blue fences and the wires; there were construction machines behind the fence that I didn't catch, that were just digging down quite deep to lay the foundations. It was intimidating.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture089.jpg

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture088.jpg

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture091.jpg

All of these were near the end of the day, so the light was bouncing off everything. Especially liked this building, but taking a photo of how it looked head-on was impossible due to construction where I'd need to stand.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture090.jpg

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture092.jpg

This, on the other hand... I have no clue on. It was simply eye-catching. I'd guess, based on where it is, that it is either one of the Olympic offices or it's a large corporation of some sort.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture097.jpg

And behind it was this building.

It was bizarrely enough placed (large, urban-like building on one side, small ramshackle apartment complex on the other, that I felt it worth noticing.

To the southeast was this:

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture100.jpg

Again, not a clue what it was, construction was really heavy on this road so I couldn't go any further, but that excavator there? It was about next to the building, for a size reference.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture100.jpg

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture102.jpg

A shot of a larger east-west road in Beijing, as reference, looking west toward the mountains.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture105.jpg

Remember the comment I made when talking about the Chinese New Year and the bad pun about luck returning? Yeah. Here's the visual representation: fu （福）, upside down.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture108.jpg

The lobby of the dorm I'm staying in. For reference? This is the only one like it on campus, and it's where 95% of the foreign students are placed.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture109.jpg

Observant onlookers might note that the character the left boy ha is "fu", again. The right side's character is 财 Cai, which can roughly translate to riches or fortune.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture112.jpg

The outside of the dorm. Upside-down "fu", and one of the traditional lanterns.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Around%20Beijing/Picture115.jpg

Finally, a picture of a Chinese good-luck charm and the character "fu". Yes, that really is prevalent this time of year.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set1010.jpg

Front of the dormitory during the day, a bit earlier in the year.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set1012.jpg

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set1014.jpg

Same building, back and front. This is where most of my classes are.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set1002.jpg

And this is the room when my first roommate was here. Aside from the laptop, the water bottle and the backpack on the floor? The entire mess is actually his. Yes, Dad, I'm actually decently-well organized here, compared to my usual. We'll see if this keeps up when I return!

A few words:

lai (来) (lie) come (toward the speaker)

qu (去) (cshoo) go (away from speaker)

jin (进) (gin) move inside (used with lai or qu; jinlai is come in, jinqu is go in)

chu (出) (choo) Yes, that's all the difference between chu and qu. It's confusing. move outside (used in the same way as jin).

Howdy all! Sorry this update and the next one will be so slow in coming, but here in China it's almost time for my final exams of the semester; they start this Tuesday. So there's a lot of studying, a lot of bookwork, and less time to get writing like this done, no matter if I want to do it or not. Still, there's no reason I can't get an entry in between now and then, so...

I got a bit sick with what felt like a mild sinus infection late December, so I ended up going to Beijing Language and Culture University's "yiyuan" (医院), or hospital, to get some medication. I chose to try some Chinese medicine (after clearing the medications with my teacher to make sure they were all both real and not harmful), and I'm still taking some of them. Let me establish one thing right now: Chinese medicine tastes really really bad. Worse than any Western medicine I've ever had. It's... They have three forms at the clinic I went to: pills (mainly vitamins), powders to mix into hot water like a sort of tea, and little doses of liquid. The pills are okay, the powders aren't bad. The liquids are simply noxious. Fortunately, they helped a lot - I've been doing well ever since.

It's interesting; I had expected the weather in Beijing to closely resemble Michigan, but that really hasn't been the case. We've seen less than an inch of snowfall here, and the weather has been consistently in the range of a pleasant fall. It was surprising especially since it got this cold far quicker here (around October), but it hasn't gotten any worse. Still, walking around in just my hoodie, jeans and sandals with socks is fine by me.

Finally figured out how to work the laundry machines here correctly - far more maintenance than is intuitively obvious from the design, as they shunt the hot air straight through the lint catcher. And no one here ever bothers to clean it. Still, knowing how to work it is half the struggle, in and of itself.

For those of you who are intrepid travelers, a few words in case you fall ill in China:

sheng bing (shung bee-ng) 生病 - sick, ill, fall ill

fa shao (fah shaow) 发烧 - fever

ganmao (gahnmao) 感冒 - cold

tou teng (tow tung) 头疼 - headache

duzi (dewzee) 肚子 - stomach ( 肚子疼 is stomach pain).

There are a wide variety of celebrations that take place during the Chinese New Year, and multiple customs that are also observed along with it. Children are given hongbao (红包), little red bags with a small bit of money in them. Red represents fire, which is supposed to chase away bad luck (White is unlucky because it represents death in Chinese culture). Often, the character 福 (fu) is hung upside down on the doors of houses; this is related to 福倒了 (fu dao le), which means, in effect, "luck returns". However, this version of "dao" also means reverse or upside-down; so it's... kind of a pun, admittedly; may your luck be upside down/return this year. You avoid saying the number 4, which sounds like the word for death; you do not use knives, scissors or brooms, and do not wash your hair, as all of these could take away the luck of the new year.

One of the primary festivities is the Lantern Festival, held on the final day of the Chinese New Years celebration (a celebration that last fifteen days from beginning to end!). On the day of the Lantern Festival, there are a plethora of lanterns hung from every available surface, and children carry with them their own lanterns - either self-made or purchased fairly cheaply. Multiple dances are held all throughout the cities, and at night, firework displays are common and serve to accent the full moon in the sky.

On February 7, 2008, the Chinese New Year will be celebrated. It will be the year 4705 according to the Chinese calendar.

The Chinese calender is called a lunar calender. This means that the Chinese calendar relies on the phases of the moon to count the months, instead of assigning a certain number of days and nights to each month as our solar calender does. One problem this calendar has, from the Western point of view, is that it does not follow the seasons accurately; as the years go on, the day on which the New Year is celebrated would slowly get later and later in the year, eventually beginning in summer or even fall! To keep it constant, on some years an additional lunar month is added for the same reasons we add a leap day, so that the Chinese New Year is always in winter.

There is a larger cycle within which the Chinese calendar operates; each year is assigned a property (wood, fire, earth, metal/gold, water) and an animal (rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep/goat, monkey, dog, rooster, pig/boar). February 7, 2008 will be the beginning of the Earth Rat year. This year was the year of the Fire Pig. I was born in the year of the Wood Dragon (1988). It actually somewhat helps to know this if you're traveling China; many people, instead of asking your age directly, will instead ask what sign you were born under. Stating your age directly can get you some odd looks (fortunately, the Chinese also use our calendar, so it's not too confusing to state your age that way).

The order behind the animals has a story; one day, as the Chinese calendar was being created, there was a race to see which animal would get which year in the cycle. The story says that Rat tricked Cat by telling him the wrong time for the race, and then both Tiger and Rat hopped onto Ox as it ran. As the Ox was crossing the river right before the finish line, Rat pushed Tiger into the water, hopped off Ox and ran across himself. This is why he is the first year in the cycle, and Ox the second. Tiger quickly swam to shore and claimed the third year. Cat quickly figured out what had happened and ran to catch up; however, he was too late to claim a spot, as twelve animals had already finished the race. Cat always held a grudge against Rat for the trick. This is the reason cats always chase rats nowadays, according to the Chinese.

Rabbit was next; instead of swimming across the river, he jumped across on floating logs and rocks. After him came Dragon, Snake and Horse. Goat, Monkey and Rooster came in together on a boat, having worked together to get across the river on a raft. Dog came in eleventh, and the Boar came in last.

Next time, I'll talk about what actually goes on during the Chinese New Year Festival!

Some words:

nian (pronounced nyen) 年 - year

you (pronounced yo) 有 - have

mei (pronounced may) 没 - not; (negation)

lingqian (pronounced lee-ng chi-en) 零钱 - (money) change

ni you meiyou lingqian? (nee yo may yo lee-ng chi-en) 你有没有零钱？ - "Do you have any change?"

Zaijian!

-Tom