another adventure in Beijing: pt 1

A friend of mine from Phoenix that I randomly party with or run into about once every six months, but always have a blast with, happens to be in China for a few weeks visiting his sister and brother in law, and we finally connected today after almost a week of trying to work something out. He brought me an American comfort package! Unfortunately, he had to leave the cheese in the States, or his luggage would have been overweight, but this was awesome regardless.

I went out to him and his sister in Beijing; took the bullet train (all by myself, yay!) out early this morning and met them at Tienanmen Square. Being a person that could care less about history I didn't really get into it, plus there really isn't much to see.

Across the street was the famous picture of Mao, hanging on the gate to Forbidden City. When I did Forbidden City last time in Beijing, we entered through a different gate so I missed it. I definitely expected it to be about 1,000x bigger than it actually was. Still cool; I would revisit Forbidden City over Tienanmen Square any day, but they are right across the street from each other and Tienanmen is free, so really if you're there you might as well do both.

After that, we went to lunch and then checked out one of the famous shopping streets in Beijing. As usual, there was some interesting things there...

 

I return to Beijing on Tuesday evening to spend a few days with my friend and his family. From there I will go to Busan, South Korea to visit a friend from college for a week, and from there I head back to Songyuan; my replacement teacher for TEDA has finally been hired! I'm very excited for my upcoming travel adventures... more to come :)

Italian Concession Area, Nankai & C-92

This is a big exploring week for me!

On Tuesday I decided to check out the Italian Concession Area in Nankai, Tainjin (a 40ish minute lightrail ride). The Concession Areas are leftover from the Opium War; they're areas that other countries kept control of so they were, theoretically, heavily influenced by these other cultures. That turned out to be a bit of a bust. There wasn't really a big central area of Italian anything and there wasn't much old art or architecture left. The one area that was clearly supposed to be the focus was completely new, only half built and only vaguely Italian in architecture.

 After check that I just wandered the city.

These kinds of alleys are my favorite to check out. They always make for good adventure.

I really, really wanted to go up to the top of the bridge, but apparently that is not allowed. Boo.

Abacus art!

There are random Eiffel Towers on top on tons of buildings in Nankai; I've seen at least 7.

This came out pretty dark, but it is an alley in a book market! Very cool.

Today I set out to see the one other thing I've been wanting to explore in Nankai, the C-92 Arts District. I was completely expecting something similar to 798 in Beijing, but on a smaller scale. Not so much. C-92 was at maybe 25% occupancy, but it was more of a place for arts businesses to office, like photography studios, ad agencies, etc. as opposed to galleries and vendors with public art. It did seem like it would be a cool place to work and there was a little bit of public art and a coffee shop and a bar, but overall not much to check out. Sad panda.

Ah well. Still good times, and tomorrow I head back to Beijing for adventures with a friend from Phoenix!

random pix: traveling

"don't hit your passengers while driving"

"let your wife/girlfriend drive, she's better"

recycled (past tense) and organism?!

no Thriller dance at the lightrail station?

Yep, that lightrail stop ends in "FA QU" (and "fuck you" is pronounced the same here...).

learning Chinese

I have been seriously slacking on learning Mandarin. I am committing myself to studying at least 30 minutes every day from now on. This seems like a manageable amount of time each day (not like I'm that busy anyway), but not so much that I will cover a ton of material and then never remember. I'm not great at remembering what I learn, kind of funny like the opposite of the Chinese, who like to memorize things but not really learn/comprehend.

The only downfall of my plan is that in August I move to Quanzhou, where they speak Taiwanese Hokkien. In China, each area has its own dialect and they are completely unintelligible to each other, not at all like accents in the US; they are basically different languages. So everything I learn here, will essentially be of no use to me for 12 months starting in August. Somewhat frustrating.

I am also stuck between two different learning approaches, slow with great accuracy versus faster with less accuracy. My TA has been teaching me to speak very slowly and get all the pronunciation and the tones completely accurate. She's not interested in teaching at all though, so I don't think that was really a strategic move. When I speak, Chinese usually have a hard time understanding me. After I repeat a time or two, they often understand and say I have good pronunciation, but I really speak too slowly to function.

Someone shared a link with me to the blog of a guy that learns languages in three months, and I was very interested to see the video of his progress after studying Mandarin for one and a half months. He choose the same slow approach to speech. There were TONS of comments on his video and approach to speaking, and they seemed to be split 50/50 about which is better, slow with great accuracy versus faster with less accuracy. I am inclined to say that faster with less accuracy is better at this point.

My mom is learning Mandarin as well back in that States (she's frickin' adorable, she asked if it was ok with me if she learned). She studies a lot more, has tried a bunch of different learning approaches (books, online courses, etc.) and is probably much better than me, which is somewhat embarrassing. But she told me about this program that libraries in the States have to teach languages, and you just need a library card to use it. I recently started using it and it takes the fast with less accuracy approach. It doesn't tell you the tones of each word outright, but there are hash marks above words that give the indication, the audio is good, and if needed you can record your voice and compare your voice pattern with that of the Chinese speaker. My biggest problem with this is that it is so far from what my TA has been teaching me that I have a hard time reconciling things she has taught me with the way the program teaches me. Also, thank goodness I've been here a while and I know what's useful and what isn't. The program was not written for someone looking to learn practical speech for daily life; there is a lot of extraneous speech that I don't need and don't bother to learn. I typically take one or two lines from each lesson. My favorite thing yet is this:

Super useful, lol.

With everything that I am learning, I am not studying pinyin at all. Pinyin basically takes Chinese and puts it into Latin characters so Westerns can read it. To read it you essentially learn a new written language. But not Chinese. It's definitely easier to learn and read than Chinese, and if you can read it you can pronounce things correctly, but I find that in daily life the only thing it would be useful for is reading street names. Most things have Chinese writing and English writing, not pinyin. I'm definitely open to being convinced otherwise, but at the moment I don't see it being an important focus for me.

random pix: around TEDA

Turns out construction scaffolding is made entirely from thing trees bound together with metal twine. Seems safe enough...

Why are all these trees wrapped in twine?

This hotel has been bugging me since I arrived and I finally figured out why.

 

Because it is trying so hard to be this building on the right, that I took a picture of in Venice, Italy last year.

Dying to know what goes on in here... maybe a rapper lives here?

What's up random aviary in the middle of the city?

  

Rooster's just checking out who's disturbing his afternoon nap.

Yay, random little sculpture garden.