北京，明年见！

These last few days have been days of goodbyes - I said goodbye to
the teachers, the classmates, chinese friends, other friends, the
fruit shop lady and the DVD man. Some people I will see again, and
others, perhaps not. One of the things I have learnt during this time
in Beijing is how precious each moment is and how important it is to
appreciate everything and everyone- the time we have here is so short
and every opportunity that presents itself may never come again. No
point saying will do this thing next time, or talk to this person
next time, or that next time I will do this better...because we will
simply run out of time! ....and I still haven't found those famous
Chocolate fish in Wudaokou yet! Luckily I will come back in February
for a semester next year - the chocolate fish will just have to wait!

考试考完了！

Hmm I hope I wrote the title up correctly - tell me if I didn't! I've
learnt so much over the last 11 weeks I think everything is all mixed
up in my brain!

...So, you might have guessed that I have just had exams, so have
been pretty busy preparing for that. The 综合考试(Comprehension
class) turned out to be pretty easy. the 听力考试(listening) was
quite challenging - mainly because it was a multiple choice exam, all
written in Chinese! We not only have to listen, but quickly read the
answer choices in Chinese as well....a lot of it I can read (or
guess), but I am so slow at reading- not fast enough to comprehend
the meaning of the different choices and then listen to the next
question. 口试 (oral exam) was OK - we had several topics to
prepare, as well as answering the teacher's questions and read a
portion of a passage (with pinyin - pretty painless).

Anyway, 11 weeks have flown by very quickly. I only have 3 days of
lessons left. What will I do on my last week here? I have a lot of
friends to catch up with, may be need go shopping and buy stuff and
decide what to pack and what to leave in Beijing. I will be back in
February and don't really want to bring things back and forth.

I think one of the best thing about coming to Beijing is of course,
that my Chinese has improved a lot (from next to nothing) and I feel
more confident speaking it. I really enjoyed the course and the
teachers are really great. 谢谢老师们！ The other really
wonderful thing is that I am able to meet and make a lot of new
friends from all around the world. 认识你们我很高兴！The only
thing is that with a 12 week course is that by this time you're just
getting to know friends or form closer relationships then you
already have to say goodbye...but hopefully we will be able to meet
again at some point in the future!

By the way, "Vanto" left a comment on my blog - thanks for that! : )
I was going to leave a comment on "Vanto"'s blog but I couldn't
because blogspot is blocked in China. I could only view blogs through
a proxy server...anyway, looking forward to reading more of your
blog, Vanto.

加油！

Zhu 老师 just made a comment on Facebook to encourage me: "加油！"add oil" - a Chinese way of saying "Keep fighting, keep going, etc". 谢谢 Zhu 老师！

Actually, reading back on my previous entries, it seems like I'm feeling a bit negative about it all, it's only because I feel tired. I am actually really enjoying the course and the challenge - this is part of what I am here for and challenges can only make us grow. I really feel very happy and fortunate to be in Beijing. It has always been my dream to study and live in another country. I have made so many wonderful friends and I think we are all creating wonderful memories for ourselves. I don't want to go home, and get back into the real world just yet! : )

Today has been quite relaxing for me. Thanks to the class "汉字比赛" - chinese words writing competition yesterday (which was a lot of fun, by the way), we only have one homework. I studied in the morning, and had lunch and spent the afternoon and evening with friends - couldn't ask for a better way to have a good time! 

Getting sporty

It's 11.59pm Friday night and I don't feel like sleeping yet...but
I'm feeling so tired I probably should go to bed....so may be this
entry won't make much sense. I've been sleeping this late (and later)
this week studying, etc, but I won't go on about it again! he he! I
did also join the gym for my last month here. I have been
procrastinating for the last 2 months, telling myself that I can
exercise myself - may be by walking around the school or the football
field - well, got turned off that idea when I was hit by a stray
soccer ball, or since the heaters were not turned on till 1st
November, I had actually been exercising in my room - doing crunches,
squats, etc, trying to keep myself warm...well, that worked to a
certain extent until 1st November - I have no longer a reason to do
all those crunches! ...So no more excuses! Off to the gym I went with
Abby. Now that I have paid, I must get my money's worth! We've been
going pretty much every couple of days, mostly to the various classes
from latin to belly dancing to X-combat. I'm really enjoying X-combat
- a combination of moves from various boxing styles and funky music.
As for latin and other dances, I really enjoy those too, but am
feeling very un-co...ah well, it's good fun anyway.

Only 2 and a bit weeks to go!

Does time fly! Final exams are coming up end of next week and the
classes officially finish with a party on 5th December! At the moment
I'm torn between studying and trying to go out as much as I can on
the weekends - not that I go out that much, but it seems like there
are so many places I still want to go in Beijing, and there are so
little time left. The other thing is to try to catch up with as many
friends as possible - as I might not see some of them again!

In the end, I ended up balancing everything (of course!)- not that I
don't need to study more. 6 hours a day of classes (if I haven't
mentioned earlier), is hard work - usually after doing homework,
there is little time left to prepare for the next lesson, let alone
revise the previous lessons....so as a result, i find myself doing
remembering today's words, but forgetting previous days...so a lot of
revision to do!!!

At this point, I decided to come back to BLCU again next year for the
Spring semester. I was tossing up between coming back or to go to a
different city, but I thought Beijing is probably the best place to
study Mandarin and I really like BLCU's program, even if there are a
lot of English speakers, making it tempting to just speak English all
the time. I thought I might as well continue to study rather than
just leaving it here, otherwise I'll probably just forget everything.

Xi'an

Not sure why the rest of my entry didn't come up in the last entry, but anyway, here it is:

By the way, as I mentioned earlier, I went to Xi'an for the weekend. It was a bit of a whirlwind trip - leaving right after class at 4.30pm on Friday afternoon and arriving back in Beijing on Monday morning at 7.15am, just in time for the 8am start. I find Xi'an a really special city - so much history! I think, if I remember correctly, Xi'an is considered to be amongst the 4(?) ancient civilisations of the world. There, we visited the Banpo museum where the remains of a 6000 year old village was found. Unlike Beijing, a lot of the old historical buildings and the city wall has been preserved in Xi'an. We also visited a factory to learn how the Terracotta Warriors were made (using the traditional method, of course!) and have the opportunity to buy good quality but quite expensive reproductions of the Terracotta Warriors. Later we also visited the actual Terracotta Warriors. They were actually found in the tomb of the Emperor Qin, and were there to protect the Emperor in the afterlife - the tomb is very extensive and the Terracotta Warriors even have a their own command centre - really!

The other highlight for me was visiting the Xi'an Beilin Museum. As paper records are easily destroyed, a lot of China's historical records, Confucius teachings, Buddhist translations, important Poetry, etc, are carved on stone tablets. This museum contains a fantastic collection of these stone tablets. It's quite awesome (for me anyway), to look at a stone tablet (and even recognising some characters!) that was produced in the year 640AD. I would love to come back one day when my Chinese is a LOT better and be able to read and understand what is written on these tablets.

Other places we visited included the city wall, a dumpling restaurant - Xi'an is apparently famous for it's dumplings and we experienced a dumpling banquite - 16 different types in total - delicious! Afterwards, we also enjoyed a Tang Music and Dance Performance.

From Beijing to Xi'an

> 暖气开了！ 我很高兴！ I'm really happy that the central
> heating in my hotel has been turned on!! Yeah!! I went away to
> Xi'an for the weekend, and when I came back, I found that the
> weather has suddenly gone colder. Apparently it was around 1 degree
> around 8am in the morning! It's really cold in the room at night
> and I have been keeping myself warm by doing sit ups and exercising
> in my room and drinking warm water, and was really missing my
> electric blanket! Winter is just around the corner though,
> officially starting end of this month....and all I can say is that
> I'm glad I won't be here for winter- my course finishes on the 5th
> December. By the way, most buildings turn on their central heating
> around mid November, so I've been told, so I've been quite lucky to
> have heating today.
>
> Things have been quite busy (actually, really busy) for me. As the
> temperature drops in Beijing, my study load has increased. I only
> have around 4 weeks left of my course and the teachers are quite
> keen to get through as much as possible - which is a good thing,
> but means lotsand lots of newer and harder words to remember each
> day - 我记不住！- I can't remember!- I think my brain is full
> of new words, so is refusing to take any more in...he he! OK, it's
> not THAT bad, but can feel that way sometimes...Chinese is very
> interesting - a lot of words are made up of a combination of
> characters, so I find if I already know the characters, remembering
> the word is not very hard, but if it's a new word and totally new
> characters, then I have a lot of trouble. I have to be patient, I
> think, and just stick at it. One of the teachers told me that
> Chinese is quite hard when we first start to learn it, but as you
> get over the beginner's stage, things will get a lot easier...I
> think she is right. I'm really enjoying it all though.
>