Green Beijing

Rickisha says that two years ago the pollution was so bad here in Beijing that within a week, you'd be hacking up black goo and succumb to an inevitable upper-respiratory-tract infection. But so-far, I'm in the clear. It probably has something to do with the government's promise for a green Olympics.

Today, we could actually see the western hills, which Rickisha and I didn't even know existed.

Anyway, Rickisha's here now and has been for about a week, which is probably the biggest reason I haven't written any e-mails recently, the others being that I'm lazy and in school. We've done all the tourist things through the program: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven. They are cool. They are Chinese. It's good to see them, but those big tourist sights aren't really why I am here. I've just started exploring some of the less-traveled neighborhoods around town. Those are the things I really enjoy: the jianbing (delicious pancake things), chuar (kabob), and fruit stands, the neighborhoods with houses older than the Qing Dynasty, old Chinese men playing chess in the park next to old Chinese women practicing fan dancing and assorted calisthenics. I miss the random sights and encounters that I got so much while I was traveling by myself are so hard to come by in a structured program like this one.

But actually, this program is anything but structured. Cai Laoshi (teacher Cai) pretty much arranges the weakly schedule to whatever best suites his needs and doesn't really ask as to whether it is good for anyone else. The recent changes have been an extra hour of class every day bringing the total up to five (I originally signed up for four), Saturday classes, and mid-week field trips. Last week's trip was on a Thursday and so we had Saturday classes (on the 5th of July). A couple of us decided that the 4th of July was more important so we went to a student hangout to celebrate on the night-of and decided to skip class the following. But at nine a.m. the next day, I woke up to Cai Laoshi banging on my door with, "It's 9 o'clock! Time to get up! We have class!" I didn't know this was summer camp. I don't think either of us were very happy about the whole thing.

A lot of us aren't very happy about the structure of the program, and there are no advisors, TAs or RAs to act as mediators, so we organized a meeting so that the students could discuss common grievances and provide some sort of coherent effort rather than just one person (me) complaining about doing work. I am used to a heavy workload (I do go to UChicago after all), but I think that the course could be better structured in order to provide a balance between independent activity and school. The meeting went well, and two of us talked to Cai Laoshi, but we will have to wait until next week to see whether any changes come through.

That's really the most excitement I've seen here so far. It's really good being here, and I do feel like my Chinese is improving, but I still have that itch to just hit the road and not really know where I am going. Just one month until this program ends; coincidentally, that's when the Olympics begin. So while everyone filters into Beijing, I will be trying to slip out the back, out of the big city, and into rural China. Actually I'm probably going to Shanghai, but o-well. That's an adventure too.