days 68-69: xi'an

I ate dog, and it was delicious.

days 62-67: beijing

This was the last week of teaching and the end of Summer Camp. Wednesday was the final competition and my group won 3rd place (out of 3500!!!) for singing "Go West". I'm so glad I will never have to hear that song again. The Final Competition and Closing Ceremonies were fun. When the students were walking in, the teachers were on the stage dancing the Macarena and electric slide. It wasn't until dancing in front of everyone that I found out how long the Macarena actually is. It feels like 10 minutes when you're doing the same dance over and over ..go west Then after the opening public humiliation, we sat through 24 acts of a solo, small group, and chorus of all 8 provinces. Then at the end, we got on stage and sang a song to the tune of "Let It Be" but instead sang "In Beijing":

I tried to learn to speak some Chinese
And the only thing that I can speak
Tsinghua Daxsue
And that took three weeks
In Beijing, in Beijing, in Beijing, in Beijing
Wo-ai Tsinghua Daxsue - In Beijing
All 10.000 people eating in the canteen they do agree
Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine people use those green plastic chopsticks
Better than me
In Beijing, in Beijing, in Beijing, in Beijing
Eating pizza with my bare hands at Qing Qing
Wu Lun Ge Chang Bi Sai
Hshi Yan Jiang Bi Sai are so amazing
Qing Hua Xue Sheng De Chuang Ye
Zhen Niu B~

The last part made the crowd go crazy because "Zhen Niu B" means fucking amazing and something about the students at summer camp.

Then yesterday, we had our class party. The party committee bought the cake, chips, some Pepsi and a case of beer. I taught them how to shotgun beers. That entertained them more than anything else I've done for them. Not only that, but only a few people were drinking the beer but as soon as shotgunning caught on, we finished the case in about 10 minutes. The only thing is that my Chinese students hardly drink and all the sudden they were downing entire cans in a minute. Then I went out for pizza with 15 drunk Chinese boys. Oh, and it was 10 in the morning.

After all that fun, we had the teachers banquet...not too exciting. Everyone got dressed up and took pictures and ate a really good meal. We went out to some Huo Hua, the nightlife district of Beijing before going to another R&B club Mix and across the street was electric/trans club Vics.

days 56-62: beijing

To stop reading Harry Potter, I'm writing another entry. This week has been filled with disgusting foods. None of these I intentionally ate, but only after I gulped it down did I know what it was. Earlier this week, I went out to dinner with some teachers and a Tsinghua volunteer. The Tsinghua volunteer took us out to an authentic restaurant outside campus where they serve grilled kebabs and hot pot. Hot pot is just a pot of hot oil and spices and meat on skewers that you just pull out and eat. The first meat I tried tasted exactly like a fatty skin, but I just ate it like anything else. The second meat was kind of chewy and I couldn't really chew it properly. I asked the Tsinghua volunteer what it was and he told me to just swallow it, so I did. And he told me the first was the lining of a sheep's stomach and the second was the intestines of a pig.
Gross. Then, last night, I went to a Mongolian restaurant with a Mongolian and ate this black stuff. I asked him what it was and why it was black and it was sausage made from blood. I can't really decide which one is more disgusting.
This makes a good story, and now I feel warmed up for trying dog meat later.

I'm not sure what I would do without the help of the Tsinghua volunteers and my students. My Tsinghua volunteer got me 80 more hours of internet time and is making copies of my Monday's lesson. I took one of my students with me on Friday to help get a train ticket to Xi'an. My Lonely Planet says to get the hard sleeper for 300 RMB (~$40US) and if that's not available, pay the extra 200RMB (~$26US) for the first class sleeper. Unfortunately, the train was sold out of hard sleepers, soft sleepers, and soft seats, leaving me to ride on an 14 hour overnight train ride on a crowded hard bench. This should be a good story and it was cheap. I'll be able to travel to and back from Xi'an for the amount I was willing to spend on one ticket.
It rained the other day and the sky was blue! About every week, it rains and cools down the city. My favorite part of the rain is that the smog seems to go away for a day and you can actually see the sky and clouds. Usually in Beijing, the city is so polluted it's constantly hazy and gray, even when there are no clouds. This is the view from my room:

Classes this and last week were good. The highlight was on Friday we played "Cannibal Island." Each person had an occupation associated with their numbers. Like ones were doctors, twos were lawyers, threes were entertainers, fours hunters, fives construction workers, you get the point. They were split up into their own islands and then the big decision came: who will you eat first? Once they fought and argued for a while, they had to send someone up to the "dinner table" at the front. Then the meals had to first explain to the class why they were chosen to be eaten and then second, they had to argue between themselves who from the dinner table would be eaten first. Sadly, my two favorite students were eaten first in both situations :( This is Albert explaining why we shouldn't eat him first: (from left to right: Evan, Tony, Belinda (behind Tony),Mickey, Albert, Tomas)

Another thing about my class is we won our singing competition! We had to compete against 7 other teams in our province, and since we won first place there, we're going to nationals to compete in front of the entire 3,500 person camp! Our 50-person chorus is singing "Go West" by the Pet Shop Boys. Before the competition, I was looking forward to never hearing that song again, but since we won, we will practice every day until the final competition Wednesday. I wikipedia'ed "Go West" and actually it's about the gay movement in the United States moving west to San Fransisco and the spread of AIDS. And now my class is singing it, but I think they think it means go west to the USA...from the east...very literal. I'm including names because I worked very hard to learn them (from left to right, back row: Enya, Amily, Belinda, Tony, Faye, Julie; front: Connie, Candy, Misha)
(front: Jerry, Albert, Ivan, Elephant).
It's the final week of teaching and I finally got their names.

Today I went to the Temple of Heaven. If I knew more about temples, I'm sure it would be a lot more impressive and have more of an impact on me, but I was hot and tired and hungry so our group left early to eat and go shopping at the Pearl Market. By the way, let me know if you want any pearls. They are really cheap here. Like $25US for real pearls. I got Flo a shirt in exchange from the ones I stole from him. It's hilarious. He'll never wear it because of all the pandas on it, but I thought it was funny. He is going to post this now and Flo still hasn't seen the shirt :) muhahahahaha

days 47-56: beijing

I've finished my first week of teaching and have learned it's a lot harder than it looks. I feel like I have homework every night thinking of something to teach the next day. Tomorrow's lesson is an in-depth look at slang...like, whatever, so, stuff, and idioms are in the lecture tomorrow. Then I'm looking forward to Tuesday's lesson: speed dating! This other teacher with mostly girl art students is combining classes with my class of mostly boy engineers and they're going to speed date in English followed by a lesson of dating culture in America. We had our singing competition Friday and the small groups sang songs from the Backstreet Boys, Country Roads, and some other random pop songs I've never heard of. I'll upload my movies of it to YouTube later.

This weekend was kind of crazy. Thursday, some of my students and volunteers took me out to this beer garden where you could get "traditional German deer" in different flavors. My favorite was a Wheat Juice flavor that was green. Friday, I went out to celebrate the end of the week with some people and we got American pizza from this place down the street. The celebrating was fun until we left. It started pouring rain as soon as we got on our bikes and was just far enough away to not make it back soaked. And I almost got hit by a car.

Saturday was an early start. The buses left for the Great Wall at 8 and it took about 1.5 hours to get there. I had no idea how hard it is to climb the Great Wall. Not only do you have to hike up this hill to get to the thing, but once you're on it, it's so freaking steep!!! And they aren't kidding when they call it the Great Wall. It's really long. They call it the '10,000 Li Wall' here (one Li = 500 m). Even though it is so long, not all parts are accessible to tourists. My favorite part of the trip was stepping over the barricade where you're supposed to stop and walking on the closed part of the wall. It was overgrown with all these plants and there must have been a bee hive somewhere close by because there were bees everywhere and I'm still amazed I wasn't stung at all. I walked down maybe 300 m down the wall until I got to this really old tower, then walked back to the touristy part.

We got back to Tsinghua around 3 and I had a short nap before the Great Wall Beach Party. The party was a rave where the great wall meets the ocean. It didn't get off to a good start. The buses didn't leave the station until an hour after they were supposed to and instead of the 3 hour ride they advertised, it took 6 hours to get there because the driver got lost. I was in a pretty bad mood when I got there around 1:30 because of the long ride and puking on the bus, but vodka and red bull changed that. I met this German girl and we talked in English/Deutsch but mostly English, but she was from around Kassel and had heard of Edertal and Ulm. And then I found 20RMB (US$1 = 7.5RMB). Seriously. I found it in the sand. The Great Wall Beach Party was fun once I got there, but it doesn't compare to the Full Moon Party in Thailand. I didn't really want to go to the Great Wall party when I got on the bus, but I thought maybe I should start a tradition to hit up a rave every few international landmarks. The music was good, the food was expensive, I really liked that the bartenders would let you pour your own drinks, but the trip there took way too long from Beijing. This morning, everyone looked like they were up all night partying and I went with another girl from Tsinghua to eat an overpriced American breakfast. Now I have about 10 more hours to recover before week 2 of teaching starts again.

days 46-47: beijing

Today was my first day of teaching and I think it went pretty well. This morning was the opening ceremony that explained the outline of the camp and showed the creativity of previous years students. My ipod alarm didn't go off and thank you, Flo for letting me use your alarm clock because it saved me and gave me 15 minutes to run out the door with everything. I rushed to the building across campus with 5 minutes to spare only to find out that the class started 30 minutes after I thought...so I was 35 minutes early...Anyway, the opening ceremonies were kind of boring with cheesy inspirational music and definitely not worth being rushed that much, but I had to be there. My two classes afterwards were much better. We played a good warm up/get to know you snowball fight game and introduced myself and volunteers. One activity I did was each of 5 groups had to write any questions for me or the volunteers and every one wanted to know about our boyfriends. Like, how many we had, what is our ideal boyfriend, do we like Chinese boys, and my favorite, do you share a piece of love with your current BF? My other favorite answer was this one guy's favorite color. He said something like "#345674 (RGB)" when everyone else put down "blue" or "white". I hope tomorrow runs as smoothly as today. As far as first days go, today wasn't so bad.

This afternoon wasn't as smooth. An other teacher and I tried to coordinate the singing competition, but that will be better tomorrow. I really hope it's better tomorrow.

days 39 - 46: beijing

It has been quite a while since my last entry. My last days in Ulm were wonderful. My blog is blocked here and I can't remember the last entry I wrote, but I think it was the pizza. The day before I left, Flo and I went to the park and played a giant game of chess and then went to read under a tree. It was perfect weather and a good way to end my time in Ulm. That night, Flo, Stefan, Jonas and I went out to eat at a German steakhouse and got ice cream after. That Monday was kind of sad and I packed and got the last of my things together before going to the Frankfurt Airport. I said bye to Stefan and Flo at the airport and made my way to Dubai.

The trip to Dubai was uneventful, which I like on trips on airplanes. I got the entire row for myself and was pleasantly surprised with Emirates Airlines. My favorite part was by far the little stickers that went on the top of your seat that read "Wake Me Up For Meals" and "Do Not Disturb." The Dubai airport was very crowded and chaotic. All the women wore those clothes that covered their heads and faces and there were souvenir camels all over the place. On the plane to Beijing, I flew over the Himalayas and crossed a huge desert in China. I arrived in China and found a guy with a sign that read "Tsinghua University" and met the other two teachers on my flight. We came back to the University and after a long process of checking in, I finally went to bed. The next few days were full of going to seminars about teaching English as a second language and meetings with my province, and meeting with the other teachers and volunteers.

I bought a bike and named it Steve Irwin. The name has nothing to do with Steve Irwin, but it was the cheapest one I could find and another girl has a bike named "The Stingray" and we race. Unfortunately, and like in real life, The Stingray won. There's not much to write about Tienanmen Square except right after I bought a kite from a vendor, he was chased by the police and he got away. Going out here is kind of a blur. There are lots of clubs that are more than happy to welcome foreign tourists and give them free entry and drinks. As a foreign tourist, I like that a lot. A few nights ago, I went out to karaoke (or KTV as they call it here). That was like a really nice club and you sing in a private room instead of in a bar where everyone can laugh at you. Yesterday, I went to the Forbidden city with three other people in my group. My favorite part was the most random situation so far. Some lady handed me her child and I thought I was about to be mugged when she pulled out her camera and started taking pictures. Then a crowd formed and other people got into the picture and the people I was with came over and the crowd got even bigger. I took a picture of people taking pictures of us. Very random but funny. I guess that's my 15 seconds of fame. My favorite part of this picture is the guy in orange that's smiling for my picture.

We walked along the hutongs (narrow alleyways), the homes of 1/4 of the city. They're the poorest and oldest houses in Beijing. Last night, I had some Peking Duck. I really liked it. The skin kind of melts in your mouth. Our duck, Frodrick, was the 30,000 something duck cooked in that restaurant. You can even go out back and see the duck pin and choose the duck you want for dinner. If this is how restaurants work in Beijing, I can't wait to try dog. Only kidding...kind of. It's getting late and I have my first day of classes tomorrow!

-As dictated to Flo 8/7/07