Weekend Whatnot

Last night included several fun and new experiences, beginning with a dinner banquet (at which my roommate helpfully and somewhat jokingly pulled a chicken head out of a large soup tureen Honggang was messing with and placed it in his bowl for him) with more kinds of dishes than I can remember (off the top of my head, a duck-skin mushu thing, bean sprouts with pork, fish, spicy tofu, cucumbers in soy sauce). Later, a bunch of people went to this really smoky dive bar outside the back gate of the school. My roommate actually came for a while and tried to learn how to play quarters, which was lots of fun, but she left when it got too loud. I had my first encounter with a gross bar bathroom, complete with squat toilet, with a rather good Karaoke rendition of “Layla” as background noise. The night ended at a gigantic nightclub, complete with professional dancers performing on a platform and a subwoofer so big it could function as a pacemaker. Early bird that I am, I held out until around 1:00 when, thankfully, three other people were willing to get in a cab with me and come back. Not a bad night considering I spent less than 50 yuan, about $6.

To give everyone an idea what exactly I’ll be doing for the next semester, I’ll fill you in on some of the activities we’ve had yesterday and today. Yesterday was our final orientation meeting (no more English allowed “in the air”), and then a meeting about our classes. I am taking two elective courses. One is called, vaguely, “Discussion and Debate” and is basically aimed at strengthening and broadening our spoken Chinese by discussing contemporary issues of society and culture in China. The other is called “Contemporary Literature”, and is just that, complete with 1000 character bi-weekly essays. In addition everyone is taking a one-on-two dialogue class, aimed at drilling pronunciation and speech patterns into our heads by running set dialogues with a speaking partner. My partner is not a Middlebury student, in fact she’s in China for over a year on a Fulbright grant.

My fourth class was discussed over lunch today. The one-on-one is basically an opportunity to study anything we want that has to do with China. We’ve all been paired up with graduate students or recent graduates who specialize in the field we requested, and we will work with them to develop a curriculum of research and prepare presentations on our topics. At lunch today we met our one-on-one teachers to discuss the proposals we wrote months ago and get to know each other a bit. My topic is Urbanization in China, and since that’s a really broad topic we spent some time today trying to figure out exactly what I’ll be studying. I think a lot will have to do with urban policies and housing rights, but also the effects of rapid urbanization on city infrastructure, rural economies and the like.

This afternoon we went on a hike (by we I mean almost all 58 students and roommates). The initial climb was a rather miserable rainy, sweaty, out-of-shape mess, but we had a chance to look around a very tranquil monastery most of the way up, and after that the rain let up a bit, and we had an easier up-and-down climb along a ridge overlooking Hangzhou’s famous tea fields (Hangzhou is the tea drinking capital of the world, and also apparently grows a lot of it). On the climb down, as we actually passed through one of the post-downpour fields, I realized how fragrant the bushes really are. Combined with the muggy atmosphere, the smell really made it seem as if I were walking through a pot of Jasmine tea. I’m sure there’s some sort of pun or metaphor that can be drawn from that, perhaps something about steeping oneself in a new culture?

We were surprised to find a large room with tables at the bottom of the mountain. We sat down, and when dinner arrived I laughed aloud: trays and trays of wraps and subs, brought from Hangzhou’s only Subway, chock full of every pickle, pepper and dressing available, plus boxes of cookies. I think everyone enjoyed the hint of home, and I spent the meal explaining why the sandwich is called a submarine and talking about American eating habits. I think the roommates were all pretty gracious about the food, which I’m not sure whether or not they liked.