Strangely the last two weeks have felt like the standard 'grind' of school, so I didn't feel like anything compelling had happened and thus I haven't posted recently. But, as I've been informed by my mom, I need to keep writing. And after getting the gears turning, there was alot to say:


AmCham
On July 3rd the American Chamber of Commerce held a big event celebrating Independence Day in Shanghai, for its local members (people doing business or working in China primarily) and anyone else who wanted to pay 350 Yuan to come. Students from the program were able to volunteer at this event, which meant free admission, and it turned out to be really fun. The event was held at the Cypress Hotel in the Hongqiao District, and I ended up being at the volunteer sign-in/ticket sales booth...which meant I was lucky enough be able to sit down for my entire three hour shift and talk to the three Chinese people working with me. This position also allowed me to keep track of some of our delinquent students who showed up to volunteer, got their free event ticket, and spent the rest of the afternoon drinking and eating. Oh well.

The event was put together really well. A local cover band played a whole bunch of 'classic' American/Western songs-Rolling Stones, CCR, U2, Led Zeppelin, etc-and did a surpisingly good job. Various Shanghainese western fast food places catered the event, so myself and a group of friends went around and ate: pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, kabobs, fish and chips, ice cream, and smoothies (yes, all of them). I was ridiculously full.

While we waited in the hour-long line for pizza, we started a conversation with a fellow American, who turned out to be an Alumni of the University of Washington Department of Mechanical Engineering. He did his PhD under Dr. Ashley Emery, who taught my thermodynamics course. Small world, eh? Now he is working in Shanghai for General Electric, apparently running the entire Research and Development operation in China consisting of about 1,100 PhDs and Masters Degree holders, all of who are Chinese. Of course our favorite question to ask Americans living in Shanghai is "Do you drive yourself in the city?"...his response (as with everyone else's) was "Are you crazy!".


Homestay
Last Saturday (10th) morning my "homestay brother" came home from school in Beijing. Originally I'd thought that he attended Peking University, but he actually goes to CUFE (Central University for Finance and Economics). His name is Sun Bingzuo- last name's are said first in China, so his 'name' as we know it is Bingzuo- and when he walked in the door he was wearing a University of Puget Sound T-shirt...where he has a friend studying. It was very similar to America, where the kid comes home from college and his parents cater to his every need- food, laundry, etc.

The first dinner with the entire family was definitely more lively than before with just myself and the parents. My mom (Huang Ming), who is considerably more quiet that my dad (Sun Li), evidently had a few things she wanted to know about me that she was waiting to ask 'through' Bingzuo. The first thing that came up was the oddity of me being left-handed (which also came up the night of my arrival in China in the Program Office when I signed some document...one of the other homestay moms commented that I must be very smart because I write with my left hand; I must be). Chinese children apparently are not allowed to write with their left hand, and Bingzuo told me that Huang Ming thinks I must be very clever. The next subject was my study habits, which apparently are good. Huang Ming thinks I study hard, I wanted to tell her that I would be out on the town everynight if their language wasn't so ridiculously hard to learn. I've also came to understand that my Chinese must sound horrible to native speakers, not only because of the new tones, but because sentences are constructed completely different. STPV for subject + time + place + verb (roughly). Talking like Yoda seems to be a good approximation.


Wild Animals!
On Sunday (11th) myself and four others went to the boonies east of Pudong to the Shanghai Wild Animal Park. We came across it in the Shanghai edition of Lonely Planet, which has been pretty much priceless on this trip. Getting to the park was kind of a trek, a subway ride to Shanghai Stadium and then a bus ride that turned out to be 2.5 hours long. We knew we were in for a long ride when, 30 minutes into the trip the bus driver told us that it was still 'early'. At least we didn't break down...well, really break down. Twice during the trip the engine stopped running, which was interesting. It must have been something easy to fix, because it only took the driver about 30 seconds to get it running again.

The park itself was in pretty good shape, and it had a ton of animals. Part was an animal sanctuary that we rode through in a tour bus and saw several (nearly) natural habitats. The rest of the park was an outdoor zoo. For the most part the animals were pretty active and had decent conditions (except the pandas, which were all inside sleeping on concrete).


Tiger Leaping Gorge
Next week we have no classes, and most of us are heading out to explore China in smaller groups. Most people are heading to Beijing, but some others have more adventuresome trips planned. Three friends are heading far west to Ulumuqi/Kashgar to explore the desert and see some the Silk Road ruins. I almost joined them, but it isn't a mandarin-speaking area and I didn't feel like spending a week looking up kazhak sentences in a phrasebook near the Afghanistan border. Another group is going to Tibet, which, in my opinion, will probably turn out to be one of the better trips for its scenery: they have planned a stay at the Tibetian Base Camp of Mt. Everest.

I am going with my friend Alec from Wake Forest to Yunnan Province, where we are planning to hike along the source of the Yanzi River through Tiger Leaping Gorge (there are lots of pictures online, and I will post my own when I return). The trail will take three to four days to go from Lijiang to Zhongtian, staying in hostels along the way. We have planned for nine days, but we have not figured out what we will be doing after the hike. Most likely we will just explore the old towns and surrounding areas. Lonely Planet has lots of ideas.

Deciding to go on this trip has created a conflict with something else that I really want to do while I am here, which is go to Hebei with a family friend-Lawrence Zhou-and visit his and my Uncle Florian's newest project. I originally planned on trying to make it up there (near Beijing) at the end of my program, but it looks like this probably won't work out anymore. It's hard to make decisions like this, when I obviously will never again be in this situation again, in China together with the friends I've made, and don't know exactly when I will be back to China to visit Hebei if I can't make it there in the last few weeks of the study program.


Time Winding Down
When I return from this trip to Yunnan, the clock is going to be ticking: only twenty days will be left in the program. I have a ton to do still, including buy a ton of things for the people back home. Also, I still need to go to campus on a Thursday evening for 'english corner' where chinese students studying english congregate around the enormous statue of Chairman Mao to speak with native english speakers. A friend of mine went recently, and said that 5 or 6 english speakers showed up and each was surrounded by two concetric rings of chinese students. Sounds fun, I can't wait to do it.

I already can't wait to come back to China. I will be looking into the study abroad options offered by the UW Business School to second year students, hopefully next year I will be able to come back. In the meantime I am going to attempt to continue studying Chinese at UW all of this coming school year.

Finally I've gotten around to putting up another post. The past week was pretty draining, starting Monday by getting off the train from Shaolin/Henan Province and going straight to the classroom, followed by a pretty intense week of school.

Shaolin

The entire group of students spent last weekend in Henan Province, seeing some historical/tourist places (The Shaolin Temple and its kungfu monks and the Longmen Grottos-thousands of hillside carvings of Buddha line both sides of the Yihe River). We left on Friday afternoon, taking a 14 hour train ride through the countryside to get to Zhenzhou ( a small town of 6 million people). The train ride was interesting, all 52 of us packed into a traincar full of bunkbeds, together with some local Chinese people. Watching out the window was pretty unreal, seeing trading posts where people bought food and sold their harvests, and seeing people in huge fields farming by hand, a few of which were still using mules as their main source of power.

The temple itself was pretty impressive some pictures are posted at students.washington.edu/matk/Shanghai), but it was very toursity. We went to a kung fu show, where about 20 aspiring monks performed their routine of acrobatics and pain tolerance-breaking things with various parts of their bodies. The temple complex itself was filled with many separate pagodas. The underside of all the roof overhangs were hand painted in bright blue and green. A few monks were milling around; but the 'real' monks don't practice kungfu anymore, because of the commercialization that has taken over. Our tour guide said that there are now some 50,000 kungfu students studying in Henan province, all of whose parents made the decision for them and enrolled them in school that will likely lead to a lifetime in kungfu...no free choice for those kids. We also took a stroll through the Pagoda Forest, where hundreds have been pagodas have been built honoring the past monks who have lived and died at Shaolin.

The best part of the whole trip was our trip up to the top of a mountain near the Temple. It took a little over an hour to get from bottom to top, most of us walked up (unfortunately we didn't keep track of how many stairs there were) and some took a gondola up. At the top was a nearly 360-degree view of the surrounding mountain range and the valleys below, but it was so hazy that the scenery just disappeared into the distance. The view made the hike more than worth the energy it took, it was actually kind of tough hiking weather-about 95 degrees and 80%humidity.


Last Week
It was the first full week of class, and it's going to turn out to be an intense program. Everyday there are two articles to read for the Shanghai History Course and about three hours of Language homework... Our professor is in the middle of writing a book about Shanghai nightlife in the 1930s, which is the time period our class is mainly going to focus on. It seems interesting enough, but I could never see myself focusing so intently on history. It seems more practical to get ready for what's going to happen in the future instead of what has already taken place. I guess that's why I didn't major in history.

The language homework is listening and character writing/memorization. I'm really glad I had a little head start on the language last quarter, it has helped a ton having seen so many characters and patterns before. I've started making a huge stack of flashcards, which reminds me of studying vocabulary words for the GRE and GMAT. Our first test was Friday, with an hour of oral exam and and hour of written. The orally is set up like an interrogation (which is probably normal in langauge courses, I just haven't taken a language class in so long that I've forgotten), with question-answer sections and dialogue readings from Chinese characters. The written was much simpler, and was written entirely in Chinese characters...good thing I've been studying and knew almost all of them.


Nighttime
This Friday and Saturday were the first times that I went out in the city, and it is definitely a little different than at home. Here, it just never stops. On friday night a big group of people from the program went to a club in the French Concession (an area of the city colonized by France, with big, gated buildings/homes and tree-lined streets). The club had an open bar for $99 kuai, and our group had a room/table reserved for the night. Inevitably the nights seem to break down into watching the World Cup, which is live in Shanghai at about midnight. The club was full of westerners, and as the Germany-Argentina match went into penalty kicks the people were well divided and yelling at each other. I left with a group of people at about 2am, which didn't seem to be approaching the club's closing time or last call. Most of Shanghai must still be awake at this time of night, as it took a little over an hour to hail a cab. The street was lined with annoyed people trying to stop cabs, all of which had people in them. An interest fact, supposedly Shanghai's taxi companies as a whole get about 10,000 calls an hour on average, and 200,000 calls an hour when it is raining. Wow.

Saturday I went with another group of people back to the French Concession to have some all-you-can-eat sushi. It was my second experience with sushi, and was a lot different than when I went with Nick in San Francisco. The place did not have seaweed/rice/fish rolls, just pieces of raw fish and some other meats. We ordered a lot of salmon, tuna, and macarel, a few dishes of eel, and raw beef, and to be adventuresome we tried a little raw horse meat. It was surprisingly good, and came in little frozen wafers of meat. We eventually wound up playing a game with Saki and beer, and then went to a bar on Nanjing Road to watch the World Cup. The bar didn't last too long, and I wound up going back home...where my homestay dad was watching the game too. I watched England lose to Portugal and tried to teach him the english words for the entire penalty kick situation, then went to sleep.

It was a good week.