Fall Term at BNU and MY BIRTHDAY!

School's back, and with a vengeance.

It's ridiculous thinking about how much work I've been doing in the last week, just to keep up in all my classes. I'm fixed with 20 hours of class a week, 4 classes: Ting Li (listening), Hui Hua (speaking), Du Xie (writing), Bao Kan (newspaper reading), not to mention trying to put on a class for Chinese Business. I'm dying. They placed me in a good level, based on my experience, but trying to keep up with the overachieving Korean international students, of whom make up the majority of study abroad students, is difficult. They each come prepared with at least a year's worth of Chinese learned in Korea, if not already in China, and their own little dandy electronic dictionary. As students from Meiguo, these electronic dictionaries equipped with a stylus for writing characters and a keypad for typing Chinese pinyin and English, are something that we weren't very familiar with. Therefore the capacity of our learning isn't as high as the Koreans. I won't discriminate, there are also a lot of Japanese (who share the same character system as China) and Indonesians. It also seems that all other students, aside from the Americans and Europeans are ridiculously overachieving.

In any case, class is hard, but managable. BUT NOW, that we spent two entire days going back and forth between shops in a bargaining electronic department (on a well known "electronics" street called 中关村), we TOO can compete with the rest of the crowd. The process was so completely overwhelming, it would be too hard to describe. Basically, we knew a guy from when we bought the flash drives, who gave us really good prices. We were sure that he would give us another good price this time as he told us he remembered us, but upon searching other little stands and inquiring about the same items, we found out that his products were FAKE! We knew they looked a little iffy and not as "official" quality as he said they were, but we never thought he would scam us like that. Not only that, but as soon as we heard this, we all became very paranoid and not wanting to trust anyone selling us anything at a discount. We ended up going to many different stores, making our final decision to go to an Authorized Lenovo Store, where we could STILL bargain for a price. The price for these hard drives that we bought ended up being REALLY good based on US standards, but still a huge buy for us. Well, in that trip we basically did the same for both the hard drives that we bought and the electronic dictionaries.

Our electronic dictionaries, that took 2 days to acquire and walking with a salesperson to the official company headquartiers, come with a stylus to draw characters, english to chinese and chinese to english, an sd card input for MOVIES and MP3s (not to mention 4 preloaded songs, including my favorite Jay Chou song 青花瓷, and a movie trailer for Kung Fu Panda with nice graphics). A study function, translation function, speakers to playback our typed english or chinese, and so many more functions that we still haven't fully gone through it in the 2 hours that we played with them. What now overachieving Koreans?! This is a weird statement but, I can't wait to get back to school and show them who the REAL "BEST" student is. HAHA. Don't laugh at me, laugh with me.

Staying on the overachieving topic, I've also developed a system in my room where I write down words on papers I've taped on the wall, this will help me visually memorize and put words down that aren't necesarilly in my text. Genius huh?

In other news, my birthday was coming up and I was hoping that I would go to Haerbin to go SKIING in China's Ice City, where they have a very bright and elaborate Winter Festival. Too bad even there the snow only starts to come down in November. Maybe we can go some other weekend to one closer in Beijing. I think skiing in Beijing would be a great experience, but it doesn't sound too convincing right now, with the conditions being precipitationless. Oh well, I can wait for that. I can't wait until I can go to see a snow laden Forbidden City, they say it's VERY picturesque.

Maybe for my birthday, I can go somewhere close for a short vacation, though I feel like I just got back and wouldn't want to do that much more travelling. Maybe something small locally...what do you guys think?

And aside from school I've been keeping busy doing homework, speaking to locals, and DOWNLOADING VIDEOS from Youtube and watching them in my spare time, usually Top Gear. Man, I forgot how funny those damn challenges they have are. I guess sometimes you have to be into cars to enjoy the show, but their challenges like "Man with the Van" and "Motorhome Races" are really funny to watch too. But other than that and spending the equivalent of $2 a day on good food, I haven't been doing much. I've been yearning to get out to the basketball court in the back of our housing complex, but it belongs to the sister high school to Beijing Normal University and I'm not sure if I'm allowed onto the courts. The next closests courts are filled with students and outsiders playing on 8 courts, which are constantly in use. Maybe if I go at a weird time, I will be able to get some free shooting time in, I really do need some physical exertion.

I've also decided that once I get home I want to pick up recreational cycling, so I'll look on craigslist for a cheap road bike. If anyone is interested in going on rides with me around Berkeley and maybe eventually Grizzley Peak, let me know.

I'm starting to miss being at home but at the same time I'm really getting used to living in Beijing and studying abroad. I'm also getting used to this weather, whose 50 degree F' windy weather this afternoon reminded me of the bay area. The weather is getting much more tolerable after our arrival from vacation, which makes me like Beijing a lot more. I think Beijing is great, but probably not a place that I'll choose to live in when I grow up and look for places to stay abroad, maybe Hong Kong or even Shanghai, who knows?