Blue sky and vast grassland

I just came back this morning (5am!!) from a trip with the school to Inner Mongolia. The word Mongolia, to me, is shrouded in mystery - mainly because I didn't know anything about it!

It was a nice trip, though not terribly well organised. It would have been a lot more meaningful if the tour guide could explain more about the history of the area, as well as the cuture of the Inner Mongolia people and how they lived...the tour guide spoke quite good English, but then I guess it would be difficult to actually explain things deeply in a foreign language.

May be my expectation was too high, and may be this is China, where you have to be a little bit more independent eg. doing a bit of your own research. In the end though, it was an enjoyable trip and I met some really nice people. The landscape of Inner Mongolia is beautiful - the grassland and the desert were so vast, and the blue sky stretched as far as the horizon.

We left Beijing Sunday night, taking the hard-sleeper train, which turned out to be better than expected, and the toilets were actually OK!

On Monday we visited the Xilamuren Grassland, rode horses and visited a local family for traditional snacks, which were quite interesting. I would have liked to see how the family lived, what they do each day, etc - but then their "job" is most probably to entertain tourists like us. Horse riding was fantastic though. Here you can experience and appreciate the wonderful landscape of the grassland.

On the second day we went to the edge of the Kubuqi Desert and visited the Yinkenxiang Sand-Bay, which is a bit like an amusement park in the desert - you can do lots of activities like camel riding, 4-wheel driving, toboggan down the sand dunes, horse riding, etc. The camel riding was a lot of fun.

Day 3 we went to the Inner Mongolia Museum. The museum was a sparkling brand new structure. It was completed only 2-3 weeks ago. A very nice museum (and nice toilets too!) - quite interesting as well, and would be more so if I could read Chinese!

Day 4 we went to the Five Towers Lamasery. The Lamasary was fasinating and is one of the 5 Indian style temples in China. Then took a really long bus ride (I think 5 hours in total, including lunch!) to Datong and visited Yun'gang Caves. It was a bit of a miserable rainy day and we were all grumpy by yet another long bus ride (I guess China is so big it takes half a day to get to one location each day!). The caves were spectacular though. There were huge buddha images carved into the walls of the caves. Unfortunately I don't know much about it since the tour guide didn't say anything about it at all. I would have liked to know a bit about the history of the area - guess will have to google it!

Later we went to Datong city, arriving just after dark. The tour guide plonked us down at the "Nine-dragons wall" - again, no explanation while she disappeared (to get our train tickets, as she explained later). It was cold, dark, wet, and we were all hungry! : ( ....luckily we were in good company....and then I managed to step into a puddle, and so with one wet shoe and foot, I wasn't too happy! ...but I suppose I was lucky in that it was an old pair of shoes!

The Mongolian Hotpot dinner turned out to be quite good, even if the driver got us lost for quite a while and the tour guide had to get a taxi to show us the way! May be it was his first day on the job? Anyway, after dinner all is well again and we were all happy, especially the table that drank a little too much!

The train left Datong at 11pm, arriving in Beijing at 5am the next morning....and some of us were ready to go out for pizza tonight, having eaten only Chinese food over the past week.

Great Wall

It was the most beautiful Beiing day! Actually, the weather has been so nice over the last week, but yesterday it was perfect! ...and no smog! The sky was so blue...

We were on a school excursion! Haven't been on one of those in a while! We went to the Mutianyu section, which turned out to be fantastic! Mutianyu is not as popular a destination as Bedaling, being a bit further away. I think, though, that Mutianyu is much better, especially because there are a lot less people here and the wall is not as steep as at Bedaling. The scenery around the Mutianyu Great Wall was amazing, as I heard a French man exclaimed, "C'est manifique!" (hopefully I spelt that right!).

Although there was the option of taking the cable car, we decided to brave it and walk up. Some of us were already tired by the time we got to the entrance! It was pretty hard walking up all those stairs, but the views were more than worth it! ...and we tobogganed down the Great Wall - what a touristy thing to do - but a lot of fun!

The course begins (or rather, began)!

We are coming into the second week of our class. It's getting quite tiring, particularly in the afternoons! (I'm doing the intensive course - 6 hours per day.) Oh, by the way, after the placement test, I got into the A7 class, which I think, suit me quite well. The next class up is a lot more difficult, B6, I think, and the next class down is mainly for complete beginners, so they are going a lot slower.

In the first few days, we had pinyin review - practising different sounds and tones- very tiring and repetitive, but I think, very important. In the Chinese language, a different sound or tone can mean a different word. For example, the word for goldfish and whale (we were told), sounds very similar - jin and jing, so you could easily be asking for a whale if you mean to get a pet goldfish! Another example is, someone's name, Zhang (eg the actress Zhang Ziyi) and the word for "dirty" - "zang". If you mispronounce (I actually have a lot of trouble with the sounds z- and zh-), you, or rather, I, could be calling someone "Mr or Ms Dirty"!! Hmmm...I'd better keep practising!

We have three teachers - listening, speaking, and a comprehension teacher who teaches a combination of listening, speaking and writing. I find all the teachers quite good. The listening teacher is quite young, and a lot of fun, making the class interesting. The comprehension teacher is our "main teacher" looking after us - she is very nice and gives us her mobile number and tells us to call her if we have any problems. The speaking teacher is very professional and experienced, and doesn't take non-sense from some of the people in the class! Overall quite a good combination, I think.

As for the students in my class, there are 14 people from all around the world - from Hong Kong, England, Korea, Japan, Australia, Mauritius , Canada, South Africa, Thailand and the States - a mini-UN.

The couse also includes several excursions, or "field trips", as they call it. Last Friday we went to a nice Chinese Restaurant to eat (of course!) and learn how to order food. This coming Friday we are going to the Great Wall.

We have classes next weekend though, because of the one week National Holiday - called "golden week".

Friendship Store and Sino-Japan relationship

OK, the title is a bit misleading. About the only thing the above have in common is the word "friendship"! Anyway, this is about my weekend...

I’ve found my way to the famed “Friendship Store” on campus. I’ve heard about it several times, and one of the girls in my class was raving on about it. I had to find this place! It’s definitely very cool – almost a “godsend” to students living on campus. You can find almost everything here – it’s a little supermarket with lots of things a student living on campus would need - snacks to keep us going, instant noodles, cereals, water, wine, as well as little electrical things like plastic lamps, fans… There are also buckets, cleaning materials, stationery, computer supplies… There are of course other shops “near by”, off campus, at least they look close on the map, but in reality quite a long walk. There is also a very nice little fruit shop next door. How very convenient!

I spent this weekend with my parents. We attended a small get together of SGI members. Meetings are not allowed in China. However, every now and then, some SGI members get together for afternoon tea. It was great for me since I was able to make some new friends (and mum feels better since there are lots of very nice people to look after me!!). There is also a Singaporean girl starting a course at a nearby university not too far from where I am.

Mum, dad and I were also invited to a recital of Pres Ikeda’s poems at Beijing University next Saturday night. Apparently this year marks an important anniversary of Sino-Japan relationship (possibly 35th anniversary??). This recital is organised by the students of Beijing University, not by SGI.

I was quite surprised how much Pres Ikeda is respected in China. We watched a DVD of a documentary recently aired on TV in China about the friendship between Japan and China. The producers of the program initially interviewed someone from a non-profit organisation (not SGI) dedicated to the friendship between China and Japan. From there, they traced this relationship back to the Min-On Association, a cultural/arts exchange organisation originally set up by Pres Ikeda…and from there, the producers traced the China-Japan relationship back to Pres Ikeda’s meeting with Premier Zhou Enlai. I have heard about this meeting before, but had not realised the impact it had on the two countries’ relationship.

..So it was all very interesting, and all in mandarin. No, my mandarin is not that good yet! Perhaps I caught a few words! Fortunately, I had a very good translator. Hopefully I will get as good has her one day!

Ni Hao from Beijing

Beijing is a BIG city. I arrived on the 10th with my parents (aka my translators – how fortunate for me!). We stayed at a nice hotel in the city and I officially moved to the Conference Centre Hotel in BLCU yesterday.

In the mean time, I managed to get myself registered, paid for tuition, and got my student card. Fortunately it wasn’t too tricky. Everything was quite organised in a chaotic way! The queues were long though.

So far, the atmosphere has been great – so much energy about! There are so many people from different countries here – a lot of students from Korea and Japan, as well as Indonesia and Thailand. There are also lots of Americans, and it seems, Australians and other countries. Incidentally I have even met someone who came from Hurstville! (in case you don’t know, it’s very close to my home in Sydney) – imagine being half way around the world and meeting someone from the next suburb!

My room at the Conference Centre (CC) is small, but nice and clean. I’m happy with it. There’s even a window that I can open to let fresh air in. The bathroom, though, gets flooded during a shower, as there’s no shower recess, only a shower curtain…I was wondering what the carpet stain in front of the shower was, then I realised that after a longer shower (eg. After hair washing), some of the water overflowed out of the bathroom!...may be this is a strategy to reduce water usage…ie we can’t shower for too long? The only other thing is the hard bed (feels like sleeping on a wooden block), but I was reassured by one of the girls I met that the beds here at CC are the best in uni. The other nicer place is Dorm 17, which is apparently quite nice, but the beds there are even harder, she told me! OK, to be fair, even the beds at the nice 4 star Capital Hotel in the city were quite hard as well (but not as hard!!!).

Otherwise, CC is a great place – very convenient - only 2 minutes from the classrooms, and there are a couple of nice and cheap restaurants downstairs (Chinese and Japanese) and even a little convenient store. There’s also a laundry with dryer costing 3 yuan per wash and 6 yuan each time we use the dryer.

I had my placement test this morning too. It was a bit of a disaster! : ) The test itself was fairly simple and may be even painless, actually – a teacher comes to you and have a chat to gauge your level of mandarin. Well, this is when I realised how different it is to study phrases – how to go shopping, whatever, and to actually speak to an actual person! In reality, people don’t actually follow the scripts in textbooks! So I guess this is the value for me in being in China right now – I have to practise as much as possible in real situations, not just in the classroom. I find out which class I will go into tomorrow morning, and have till the 17th to change class if needed.

Roadtest

With a bit of time I have left, I've been perusing some discussions relating to living in China and learning mandarin forums. Quite a good forum is Chinese-forums. There's plenty of information there and people can ask questions and get lots of tips on a variety of topics. eg. people's experiences at various language schools, how to find accommodation, discussion on the actual mandarin language itself, etc.

It is on this forum that I found links to various online Chinese Study Tools, which I find very useful. In particular I have roadtested a couple of very cool Chinese-English dictionaries where you can also hear how the word should be pronounced, as well as how to write words. With this there is also a function to translate English names to Chinese names, and even put the names on a chinese painting and print it out - a lot of fun!

There is also a Pinyin Practice site which is very useful for beginners.

Definitely check out the above sites if you are interested in learning mandarin.

Vaccination

Ok, 10 days to go! I left it a bit late - should have done it a couple of weeks ago...actually, I should have done it before leaving Australia! Anyway, I decided to go get my vaccination for Hepatitis A. The doctor also suggested Typhoid vaccine...so I had that as well. 2 needles! Ouch! ...actually it wasn't too bad. The nurse was very skillful and didn't hurt at all...until now...the left arm is aching from the typhoid vaccine. : ( ...so I'm now covered...almost...my uncle, who is a doctor in Singapore, also suggested the Japanese Encephalitis vaccine. After reading more into it though, I've left it a bit late as 3 injections are required. I think the risk is a lot higher in rural areas. Japanese Encaphalitis is transmitted via mosquitos from infected pigs and wild birds. I guess the risk would be higher here in Chiang Mai than Beijing. Still, I'd better be careful with mosquitoes since they also transmit malaria and dengue fever (quite prevalent in Thailand).

Travel health information are available here if anyone is interested.
http://wwwn.cdc.gov/travel/destinationChina.aspx
http://www.mdtravelhealth.com/destinations/asia/china.html
They are quite detailed. I think it's worth being prepared than to have problems later.

Since I am a pharmacist, I can't help but prepare my "medicine kit"! I know I can probably get most things, especially basic stuff, in China...but I think when you are sick, the last thing you want to do is run around looking for a pharmacy and explaining to the pharmacist what you want, particularly if your language skill isn't that good!

..so this is what I'm taking (so far!):
Paracetamol
Stomach stuff - antacids
Insect repellent
Antihistamines - in case of allergy
Actifed - for colds
An antibiotic
Vitamin C
Imodium
Multivitamin

Should be enough! : )