Yes, it's still great. . .

BLCU arranged a trip for us to go to the Great Wall. The wall is something that everyone who comes to China should see, but having seen it previously, I was not sure I wanted to go back. However, I did want to meet my new classmates, since we hadn’t had the opportunity to talk much yet. I’m glad I ended up going because it turned out to be a fun trip.

On the way up, I sat by Lee. Lee is a 53 year-old Korean man who is taking a month off from his business to come study Chinese. Twenty years ago, he founded a wall covering import business that was doing well until about 2 years ago. His company does business in seven countries. Interestingly enough, the company imports some of its wallpaper from New Hampshire. Apparently America does still export some manufactured goods.

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Holy Hanzi Batman! What'd she say?

Apparently, my Chinese placement test went pretty well. Either that, or the teacher who gave the test was playing a cruel joke on me. They put me in level C10, which is an intermediate level. Intermediate sounded about right to me. I imagined that the class would be hard but that I would understand what was going on.  I didn’t. Let’s just put it this way: the first class was hard. I don’t mean “run the Portland marathon” hard, I mean “run the Hood to Coast by yourself hard”. . . . .While carrying your sister on your back. . . . . . .Barefoot. . . . .Get the picture?

From the minute the teacher walked in , I knew I was in trouble. She began right away, welcoming everyone and asking us to introduce ourselves. That was no problem, since our teacher at PSU had drilled us on this a lot, but once we opened the textbook everything went to hell. I’ve spent quite of time studying characters (hanzi) on my own, but mostly without the context of a sentence or paragraph. When I started reading the text, I could not really understand the meaning. Reading the book out loud made my comprehension decrease even more. Our teacher would stop to explain terms to us (all in very fast Mandarin), often writing lots of characters on the chalkboard to make her point.

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Hoops in Hell

The second day I was on campus, I didn’t have anything to do except for a Chinese placement test so I decided to go play basketball at the courts in the center of campus. Basketball is very popular here. There are 7 blacktop courts right at the heart of school, and in the evenings, most or all of the hoops have someone playing on them. My first day there, I sat and watched people play for about an hour. While I was there I met Cheech and Tang.
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China can be Cheap (but might not be)

The other day I was wandering around (have you noticed I do that a lot?) and I came across a large shopping center. The best part of going to shopping centers is that they all seem to be air conditioned. In my past trips to Beijing, this hasn’t really mattered because it has usually been cool when I visited. This time, however, summer is raging. I talked to a Chinese guy yesterday and he told me that this year was hotter than usual.

I went inside and rode the escalators to the top (6th) floor. Inside were shops of all kinds. It looked about the same as many urban malls in America with clothing, appliance, sportswear and several Chinese versions of Victoria’s Secret. I spent some time looking at clothes  at Uniglo and eventually ended up in the stationery section of a department store looking at pens and notebooks. My pen had run out of ink and I was looking to replace it. I finally settled on a Pilot V5 Hi-Techpoint, an updated version of a pen of mine that recently ran out of ink. It has liquid black ink and a small point that allows me to write fairly quickly, something that is important with as many words as I write these days.

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