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.