from Mongolia was uneventful excepting some truly remarkable driving by our bus driver. The prejudice that Asians are incapable of driving is absolutely absurd. True, the drivers here don’t drive safely but their knowledge of the exact size of their vehicle (so that they can squeeze past another car and merge perfectly into a space exactly 1/189th of an inch more than the length of their vehicle) and their knowledge of their brake reaction time (so that they can stop so close to you after waiting so long to slow down that your entire life flashes before your eyes) leaves me in a constant state of awe (and fear.)Accommodations: We arrived at Tianjin sometime in the evening on Thursday. For those who don’t know Tianjin is about an hour drive makai (towards the sea) of Beijing. It is China’s fourth largest city and home to Nankai University, where Zhao Laoshi grew up and one of the best universities in China. It was rather demoralizing coming back from the wide rolling plains and blue sky of Inner Mongolia to the crowded frenetic energy of a city and to smog that obscures everything more than a block and a half away. (I thought it was so bad I couldn’t see the face of the person next to me but that was just because my contact fell out.) We are settled in a dorm called the “Yi Yuan Hotel” which is probably a better description than dorm. It is an on-campus hotel in all including name. The rooms are set up in the universal hotel layout twin beds facing TV’s and we have room service. Over all, the accommodations are wonderful. (It’s nice to have a full toilet again. The ingenuity and flexibility required to successfully use a squatter has been taxing my hamstrings and my brain. As a note, toilet paper here comes in the bring your own variety.) I will attempt to post the address here where packages can be sent.
Food: Nankai is really a very cool school. It is in a sense a world unto itself, it is connected to
elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools, it has its own gym, market, street venders, restaurants, liquor stores, residential neighborhoods, young children doing bizarre exercise routines on Saturdays, old men who play xiaqi (Chinese Chess,) libraries, lakes, statues, parks, it’s actually quite impressive. So far the highlight of the area is Xinan Cun (literally Southwest Village.) It is basically two streets of street vendors and small restaurants, hair cutting places, pirated dvd sales booths, and a small supermarket. Mostly though the food is cheap and delicious. Something that was new to me is called 包子 or Baozi. For .5 kuai (or about 7 cents) you can buy 1 steamed ball of dough filled with either meat or vegetable mixes. All of them are delicious if not necessarily easy on the stomach. There is fried rice 炒饭, steamed noodles, and a variety of red bean filled pastries. Meals average around a dollar.Academics: On Thursday we met our Chinese buddies (Nankai students who are majoring in
teaching Chinese as a foreign language) and had one hour of forced conversation. It is difficult to avoid issues like politics in a one-hour conversation about Chinese culture. I oscillate between depression at how little of the conversations I can understand and surprise at the amount of what I say that they seem to be able to understand. I’ve always considered speaking to be the biggest issue in my Chinese so I was both relieved and somewhat sad to find myself taking a completely written placement test on today. I studied about three hours too many for that test but… oh well. After that we had class for about an hour. The teachers seem nice and look like they might be 22…if that. (Then again, here I have a lot of trouble determining ages so they may very well be in their mid-sixties.) We’ll see how that goes. I’ll try to get this posted soon. Please send feedback for those who haven’t yet and for those who have thank you. 再见
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