Settling into Life in Beijing

9/14/2014

I am now more than two weeks into my semester in China, and I am definitely settling into my routine. Over the past week and a half since my last post, I have spent most of my evenings doing homework, studying for quizzes (yep, I’ve already had a few of those), and most of all studying Mandarin. I take two different Mandarin classes, each for an hour a day, and in each class I have to learn about 25 characters every night, on top of some other Mandarin homework. The next day we have a quiz on writing, saying, and meaning of these characters in each class. Needless to say, it consumes a huge amount of my time learning these characters every night.
Every morning when I walk to school, I see this man sweeping the streets. It strikes me as yet another of Beijing’s contradictions. The broom he uses is made of twigs, yet he is surrounded by modern cars that fill the street.

Enough about schoolwork, though, since that’s the boring part of my experience! As I mentioned in my last post, last Wednesday we took a field trip to the Lama (Buddhist) and Confucius Temples, which was very cool because at the time we were learning about Confucianism in history and now we are learning about Buddhism. Both temples had really amazing ancient Chinese architecture. At the Confucius Temple, they also have 190 huge, ancient stones that contain Confucius’s Analects. At the Lama Temple, it was really cool to see Buddhists actually praying there, and to have a chance to pray with the incense ourselves.

Last weekend, in addition to doing lots of homework, I also had a chance to explore a little more of the city. On Saturday I explored my neighborhood with some SYA friends who also live near school. Then on Sunday, we went to the 798 Art District of Beijing, which has lots of modern-art galleries, coffee shops, and sculptures on the streets. The area was once full of German factories, and it is cool to see how the old factories have now been converted into studios.

Monday was the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) in China, which meant I got the day off from school. I mostly relaxed at my apartment and did some SAT prep and homework, but in the evening I went with Ma (Chinese word for mother - what I call my host mother) to Hohai, which is a lake and park about a 40 minute walk from my apartment. Because of an old Chinese legend, you are supposed to look at the moon on the Mid-Autumn Festival, so we were able to see the moon over the lake, which was really beautiful. I was glad that Ma suggested we go to the lake, because we have a lot of trouble communicating and she usually doesn’t like it when I suggest we do something together.

On Tuesday it was back to school. This is my school schedule:

On Wednesdays we are supposed to have some time off to do other activities, but last Wednesday we listened to some ancient Chinese instruments and had a chance to try them for ourselves and sign up for lessons if we want. I know I have no musical skills, so I signed up for calligraphy class instead!

This has been a very busy weekend for me. I have more school work here than I ever would have believed! I was able to take some time off yesterday to visit the Beijing Zoo, though. It was a fun outing, but it was actually very sad to see the conditions that the animals are housed in. Many of them looked very sick and unhappy. In the end we saw the pandas, though, which I was very exciting because I had never seen a panda before! They were very cute!