All Manner of Things

Very busy weekend. On Friday, we had our Language Culture Practicum. Every week I whine and drag my feet – I hate Language Culture Practicum, I hate talking to strangers, I’m tired – and almost every week it’s actually really interesting and fun. This week we had a scavenger hunt. We broke into teams of three and ran all over Chaoyang looking for people to answer questions and have their pictures taken with us, then to the various places where teachers were stationed, where we showed them our answers and had to sing a song or recite a tongue twister to get our next clue. We came in third, mere seconds behind.

Then we had Chinese lunch table, where we ate potato mountain, Japan tofu (I do not know why it’s called that), caramel bananas, and bok choy with mushrooms with Li laoshi. After lunch we returned to the dorms and then I embarked on a SOLO BEIJING ADVENTURE! I had just about finished all my books so I took the subway all by myself to Xidan, where Li laoshi said there was a huge foreign bookstore. This turned out to be untrue. Still, I figured I might as well look around while I was there. I looked at expensive, pretty clothing and expensive, ugly clothing in shops, and tried on a pair of pretty shoes. Why I bother I do not know. I asked the salesperson to bring me a pair to try on, and she asked what size, and I said I didn’t know, how about the biggest you have. So she brought me some shoes and they were maybe two sizes too small. They said, “So pretty!” I said, yes, they’re very pretty, but they’re too small, do you have any bigger ones? They said to wait a moment and came back presently with the ugliest shoes I have ever seen, all square-toed and covered with green rhinestones. (They love rhinestones not wisely but too well over here, it’s very irritating.) This is how shoe shopping always goes for me in China and I would give up, only the shoes are just so pretty, and hope springs eternal.

Presently I decided that I probably had time to take the subway to Wangfujing, where I knew there was a foreign bookstore, so I did. I didn’t find the bookstore I’d been to before, but I found another one that had some English books, so I bought Anna Karenina, What Maisie Knew, and The Scarlet Pimpernel, which ought to tide me over. Then I left the bookstore and got lost. I asked several people for directions but I didn’t understand their replies, so I just kind of wandered around until I found the subway station. I was back at the dorm in plenty of time for our Evening Cultural Event: Chinese Teahouse.

The teahouse – how to explain. We all sat at tables and drank tea, which the waiters poured in a very fancy manner from elaborate, long-nosed kettles (on one occasion, onto my lap) and ate xiao chi - little snacks including barbequed watermelon seeds, tiny cookielike objects, and rice porridge. As we ate, we watched performances of Chinese songs, dancing, juggling, conjuring, and utterly incomprehensible Beijing repartee. It was interesting, and I enjoyed the conjuring and juggling especially, but it was hard to see and hard to understand.

Afterwards I went out with some people to San Li Tuanr for pizza, which was exciting since it was my first time eating Western food since coming to Beijing, but the company left something to be desired. It was mainly second-year boys, and they were all speaking English, which made me deeply uncomfortable. It’s odd how since coming to Beijing my mother tongue has taken on this sense of taboo. I felt as though my companions were committing some horrendous sin. Also, one of them, a deeply deeply irritating chappie, was smoking a cigar and blowing smoke around in a pretentious, irritating manner, and it smelled horrid and who on earth did he think he was? So Lili, the only Chinese-speaking boy (kind of a wet blanket but compared to the rest of these boys stood out as a winner), and I left and went to Pure Girl Bar, where we met up with some friends and managed to speak Chinese for goodness’ sake, finally ending up in a little restaurant for more pizza and discussion of Sleater-Kinney with Liu Lei. So my evening out turned out to be far more fun than I had expected, and I’m glad I didn’t just go home as I had thought I would at first.

The following day (Saturday) I went with Shuhui to the electronics market, where I bought a microphone, so I can look into using some sort of program to chat with people back home. After lunch, I went with a group of people to the National Museum, where we saw many things made of jade. That evening I was very tired so I watched some Jeeves and Wooster and went to bed early. A week from now, I believe we shall be in Sichuan – provided we all live through the midterm.