Daily Life
Days start early now, it’s light out around 5 am and is dark by about 7 pm. I’m told it doesn’t rain very much here in Beijing during the summer but I was caught out one night and managed to soak my nice pair of shoes. Worse still, I found that one of the shoes has a hole in it!
Finally, it is hot outside now. Spring was short-lived as it went from warm outside and cool inside to hot outside and warm inside. I’m told Beijing gets pretty hot and muggy during the summer months and that has me thinking of where I’ll be when the semester ends. I’m told I’ll be back next year so that gives me two months to traipse around wherever I see fit before returning to Beijing in September.
Update on Learning Chinese
I haven’t discussed my Chinese learning much mostly because I haven’t been very motivated to do so. Unlike the time I spent in South Korea, during which I lived in a neighbourhood with few other English speakers (and my colleagues didn’t speak much English either), here in Beijing just about everybody speaks some level of English so it’s not hard to never use Chinese during the day, especially when I stay on campus.
Watching TV with Chinese subtitles (almost all TV programs are subtitled in China) and I can start matching some of the sounds with their characters. Xiǎo 小 (little) bú 不 (no/not) dàn shì 但是 (but) zhōng guó 中国 (that’s an easy one, it means “China”) rén 人 (people) si 四 (4) le了 (and an ending particle). There are a few more I can recognize but it’s still difficult to string them together into coherent sentences. Moreover, typing in Chinese isn’t all that difficult as both my cell phone and computer display the options available for the characters.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Chinese pinyin, pinyin is the latinized method of writing Chinese sounds but it requires not only the letters but the tonal aspects of the sound. There are four tones total, the first is up ú, the second is flat ō, the third goes down and then up ǎ, and the fourth goes down à. To be sure, the tones don’t have vowels associated with them, they simply mark how the syllable is stressed when you say it.
Other than that, remembering how to speak in real time remains a challenge and by no means can I sit down and even begin understanding many of the characters I see in front of me, but the door is slowly opening to this new language, despite my reluctance to even study it.
NHL Playoffs
And sadly so, the Winnipeg Jets were swept out of the NHL playoffs by the Anaheim Ducks. An old teammate, Teemu Selane, helped Anaheim beat the Jets 4-0 in the best-of-seven match up. Better luck next year. Nonetheless, from what I could see online, the brief playoff run sure revved up Winnipeg fans.
Beijing Film Festival
I’ll have to write more about this later on but I managed to escape campus for a few days and check out a few movies during the festival. I even required my students to go see a new movie for one of their written assignments (a film review). Most didn’t bother going. Anyway, the festival is still in its infancy since it only began 5 years ago. I managed to see quite a few movies over the 7 days that the festival was actually on. To be honest, most weren’t very good. A lot of “talkies”, that is, the characters just talked to each other and little happened by way of action. In any event, hopefully I’ll put together some sort of review and post that in short order.
“Freshmen Fifteen”
So I’ve gained a few pounds since I got here. This phenomenon is also known as the “freshmen fifteen” in which new university students gain weight their first term or two at university. Reasons often include work load, freedom from prying eyes, and, well, drinking. My excuses include:
- First, I’ve been rather sedentary and not entirely motivated to hit the gym. You might immediately cite that as the real cause but there are a couple of reasons for the lack of motivation.
- I have a lot of prep to do since this is my return to teaching, which means I basically have to start from scratch for a lot of my course lectures.
- Next, I teach two sections (about 62 students) of writing and that translates into a lot of reading and correcting homework for me.
- After motivation and workload, the next big change in my diet is Chinese food. There is a stereotype of Chinese food that you will be hungry again 30 minutes after you eat. Well, that’s not the case here. What I have found is that Chinese food, at least in Beijing, is full of salt and fat. Northern dishes are typically salty due to the historical factor that it was a relatively isolated region and so they had to preserve their food during transport and, moreover, during storage in between deliveries. In other words, I don’t think it’s the healthiest food in the world.
All that is to say, there have been quite a few changes that have seen me less active than before. I think especially about when I first when to South Korea when I lost 15 pounds within the first few months due to the food I was eating there. Here in Beijing, however, I’m gaining weight and it probably has something to do with the food.