After seemingly ages of class on Monday, many of us went to the travel ticket office on campus to make arrangements for our midterm break week. My travel group anticipated only a semi-complicated experience since we knew where we were going and we were flexible about our train time on our travel day. But as we stepped into that small warehouse building and saw the huge line to the tiny window behind which a rather crabby woman sat attempting to communicate with these foreigners, we quickly revised our assumptions.
The group at the front of the line was comprised of some of our program's most fluent speakers, so as all we could distinguish from our place in the line was argumentative chatter, that made us a little more zhaoji (worried). We ended up talking a little in Chinese with the girl behind us in line, who was actually an English major and a lifesaver. The ticket agent got so frustrated with the waiguoren (literal: outside country people) and asked the Chinese students if any one of them could speak English, so the girl helped all of us. That seemed to further annoy our better Chinese speakers because the communication was not the issue; what they needed was certainty about their tickets!
Thankfully, after playing a couple random hand counting games with a couple Chinese students also in line behind us, it became our turn, and our flexibility I think soothed the woman somewhat. We just wanted to hop on a huoche (fire car, aka train) to Tai'an on October 1st, and we ended up buying tickets we had a hard time believing were real! But all the locals we asked assured us that when the trains sell out of chairs, you can still buy tickets for the train. So we ended up forking over money under the premise that in a few days the woman would have paper tickets for us to board a train at about 7am to stand (or sit on our backpacks) for four hours. Luckily, a few days later we received a call from her that she was able to procure tickets that gave us seats on a later train for the same price! While the entire experience stole an hour and a half of our Monday afternoon, my group was in and out in only fifteen minutes!
Tuesday was our last Beijing opera class, and this time we got to learn some of the movements and some of the props! This is Max with our adorable, dramatic teacher learning about the common jingju ways to demonstrate riding a horse.
Jake volunteered to get up in front of the class to learn the jingju form of baton twirling.
And Emily snuck pictures of us attempting to draw elegant circles in the air with fairy-like hands on counts yi-er-san, and when our teacher exclaimed "si!" (4), we were to flick our wrists and freeze with a wide-eyed stare at the audience. Our class and our laoshi, Yer and I even got to don the old-style jingju outfits with enchantingly long sleeves:
Tuesday and Thursday we also had Taiji class in the afternoons, and you could tell our laoshi is a pro! Teaching completely in Chinese, we were basically able to follow along simply by watching him demonstrate and attempting to follow along. What I found really cool was that he did a good job explaining the martial arts influence for each move of Taiji we learned. Next week he'll teach us some wushu also, some actual Chinese martial arts!
After taiji class, Max, Kellianne, James, and I met up with our friend Zhangxun to hang out and go to dinner. He does some serious taiji too, so he asked us about our class and proceeded to demo a few of the forms he practices.
As we watched Zhangxun's taiji, a young kid was watching us in return as he bounced around picking flowers. I wish I could have picked the blossoms as well, but I was content to just photograph a couple.
Max, Zhangxun, and Kellianne going over some crazy jingju, not taiji, hands.
Wednesday and Thursday we were about the only kids in school because the Chinese have vacation for Zhongqiujie, Mid-Autumn Festival. Our poor laoshi had to forfeit those vacation days to come teach us so we could have our midterm break in one lump sum, but with random 8pm fireworks on Tuesday night and the sounds of celebration throughout the dorms, none of us really felt like doing homework...
But we definitely did get to celebrate Zhongqiujie in our own ways! All the students in the program met in one room do to skits related to Zhongqiujie, so many read poems, sang, and did other silly things to demonstrate the normal Chinese traditions of eating yuebing (mooncake - there are tons of varieties! some rather disgusting, akin to the American fruitcake, but others yummy filled with different jellies or fruit paste), spending time with family, and giving distant family members a call.
We were lucky that the rain cleared out the smog a couple days prior, because one of the typical Zhongqiujie activities is also shang yueliang, to go outside and admire the moon.
After an afternoon of parking lot tennis with Max (during which we made a couple new Chinese friends, including an old man who may or may not have tried to convince us to buy his violin, a shy guy who came and watched and said it was his first time speaking with foreigners, and a freshman from Sichuan who jumped in and played with us!), Zhao laoshi also instructed us to have our own Zhongqiujie celebration, so we had refreshments and many different kinds of Chinese snacks before we headed out to go admire the moon. Awaiting the food, Zhao laoshi and a few students practiced a silly little trick he taught us (that quite possibly could be something he made up because no other Chinese person we've talked to has ever seen it before!). You have to put on your best Beijing accent (yes, its sounds a bit like pirate speech with an "arrr" sound attached as a suffix of sorts to many words) "Lao tour, lao tour, ni qu nar? Wo qu shangdian mai yanjing!" In English, old man, old man, where are you going? I'm going to the store to buy glasses!
Here are a couple pictures from our small festivities. Yuebing, ramen, chuanr, and other little random pastries etc. arrived. Even koalas!
Then some broke off to go to a pretty spot by the train station while a big group of us took about a thirty minute walk to the TV tower, apparently one of the tallest in the world. The moonlight shone brightly and provided a lovely atmosphere for this concrete park surrounding the tower. I was entranced by a group of Chinese punk breakdancers but was too shy to approach them to ask them to teach me something... Many of our own students strapped on rented roller skates and blades like the locals and zoomed around attempting tricks and quickly learning the skates lacked brakes... 
Entertainment was also found in this enormous fuzzy dog owned by a Korean family!
Thursday afternoon's culture class was huihua: Chinese painting. I love Chinese-style paintings of elegant landscapes, cute cherry blossoms, and dynamic wildlife, and this time we got to try! We all experimented with different styles of paper and brushes to control the water as best we could, otherwise the thin line we attempted just devolved into a rapidly enlarging blob on our paper.
We got to grab a book of master paintings to match our interests and set about making our creation look somewhat like we saw on the page.
I grabbed a book of frogs to try to replicate, and here's my favorite two of my attempts:
Following huihua, a bunch of us set up a slackline to get in some balancing practice before taiji class, but yet again our highlight was not the slackline itself but who it attracted.
This time our most interested observer was a little three year old girl with ringlet curls who just stared us, entranced by giant foreigners throwing frisbees and waving about madly in attempts to stay on the line. She eventually became comfortable enough to toss the frisbee a little, but she really lit up and even started talking when she saw our cameras! She wanted her picture taken and then shown to her, and then Emily and I loaned her our cameras for a few as she snapped all our pictures. She also rather enjoyed my array of facial expressions and agreed with me that I'm weird. She even stuck around a little while when we had taiji class! What a cute xiao pengyou.
Max then received a phone call from our tennis friend we met the previous day who wanted to take us out for a traditional Chinese dining experience, hotpot! Kellianne, Max, Brian, and I met Yangyang by our parking lot tennis locale, and he first took us through his university, Tianjin Daxue. Nankai is cool and all, but it was fun to see the beauty of the adjoining, also reputable university. 
Kellianne was initially slightly apprehensive about going out to dinner with some random Chinese guy, but upon meeting him she realized he’s about the least threatening guy she’s ever met. He is a spunky freshman (but didn’t look older than 14) with pretty decent English about my height but beanpole width, but to top it off, his name means “sheep sheep.” After letting Yangyang guide us to an authentic Sichuan style restaurant in a village outside the universities, we foreigners, perhaps mistakenly, gave his enthusiasm and whim free reign in ordering food from the waitress who couldn’t have been a day older 12. How hot pot works: there were two halves of a yin-yang shaped pot of boiling oil; we asked for one spicy and one not. Then arrived small bags of frozen meat (we had chosen yangrou and niurou, lamb and beef) as well as an array of other plates. Your first task is to throw a bunch of the frozen meat strips into the pot, let those cook well, and eat those with your sauces of choice so as to avoid cross-contamination. The sauces were a various range of spiciness, from Yangyang’s preferred Sichuan hot to what Brian as “dipping your dinner in peanut butter” – a virtually spice-free peanut sauce!
Here came the even more interesting part: the foods we ended up trying. We wanted to know what we were getting ourselves into, so as we tried to make heads or tails of the dishes covering our table begging to be next thrown into the pot, we pointed to each and asked Yangyang, “Na shi shenme?!” What is that? Many were harmless vegetables like cucumber, lettuce, bean sprouts and bok choy. Others were slightly more worrisome to my texture-preferential tongue, mushrooms for one.
WARNING: For the faint of heart/stomach, you might want to skip down a bit…
A few foods that really wouldn’t be considered foods in the United States that we stomached (but definitely didn’t finish off the plates) were as follows: duck intestine, cow’s throat, and lamb brain. Kind of fun to say we’ve tried them, none of them I would try again, but we all survived by dunking them in our peanut sauces and sharing in the experience (and Kellianne and I ate some ginger once we got home to ward off any intestinal worries).
Thankfully we awoke with stomachs hai hao, alright. We partook in some classically Chinese customs this week, and Friday capped it off. We were to miss class to go to the parade celebrating Tianjin’s history. Which, strangely enough, involved us white people. A week prior, Zhao Laoshi was asked by some cultural ministry something or other for ten young white men to volunteer to dress up as Scottsmen to be in the parade! Tianjin celebrating its history? Its history is characterized by foreign influence (and partitioning), as evidenced by the architecture in the various European regions of this port city’s downtown.
We foreigners served as great entertainment. The rest of our majority Caucasian group on the sidelines captured the attention of many a photographer (who then expected Hera to have perfect Chinese to explain why we were all there, despite the fact that, albeit her Chinese is quite good, she is Korean), cheered hard for our boys as they had their two minutes of fame in this tiny parade, and then got ushered into carts headed through the parade route as well. We were introduced as “laowai pengyou,” foreign friends, from Nankai Daxue.
Our own little tour through the parade!
What an interesting experience. The violinists weren’t actually connected to a sound system, the girls who were announced as Brazilians dancing the samba were 1) Russian and 2) not all that great of dancers, our guys are just random white guys and perhaps the highest percentage of Scottish in their blood is about 3%, and the tiny, yet adorable, cartoon character costumes were in fact filled with small Chinese grandmothers!
To usher in the weekend, following the festivities, the guys made for quite a sight as, upon learning they got to keep their kilts, promptly left them on for lunch in Xinancun. Zhao Laoshi then generously invited us over to his home for some tea and Laozi (Lao Tzu) versus Kongzi (Confucius) discussion.
And apparently some of those photojournalists got the word out about us—check out the Chinese online news featuring cong Ka’erdun lai de Nankai liuxuesheng (study abroad students from Carleton)!
http:/news.022china.com/2010/09-25/341669_2.html
http://www.takungpao.com/roll/roll/1413648.html
http://news.022china.com/2010/09-25/341669_1.html
Until next time!
