There are a wide variety of celebrations that take place during the Chinese New Year, and multiple customs that are also observed along with it. Children are given hongbao (红包), little red bags with a small bit of money in them. Red represents fire, which is supposed to chase away bad luck (White is unlucky because it represents death in Chinese culture). Often, the character 福 (fu) is hung upside down on the doors of houses; this is related to 福倒了 (fu dao le), which means, in effect, "luck returns". However, this version of "dao" also means reverse or upside-down; so it's... kind of a pun, admittedly; may your luck be upside down/return this year. You avoid saying the number 4, which sounds like the word for death; you do not use knives, scissors or brooms, and do not wash your hair, as all of these could take away the luck of the new year.

One of the primary festivities is the Lantern Festival, held on the final day of the Chinese New Years celebration (a celebration that last fifteen days from beginning to end!). On the day of the Lantern Festival, there are a plethora of lanterns hung from every available surface, and children carry with them their own lanterns - either self-made or purchased fairly cheaply. Multiple dances are held all throughout the cities, and at night, firework displays are common and serve to accent the full moon in the sky.

On February 7, 2008, the Chinese New Year will be celebrated. It will be the year 4705 according to the Chinese calendar.

The Chinese calender is called a lunar calender. This means that the Chinese calendar relies on the phases of the moon to count the months, instead of assigning a certain number of days and nights to each month as our solar calender does. One problem this calendar has, from the Western point of view, is that it does not follow the seasons accurately; as the years go on, the day on which the New Year is celebrated would slowly get later and later in the year, eventually beginning in summer or even fall! To keep it constant, on some years an additional lunar month is added for the same reasons we add a leap day, so that the Chinese New Year is always in winter.

There is a larger cycle within which the Chinese calendar operates; each year is assigned a property (wood, fire, earth, metal/gold, water) and an animal (rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep/goat, monkey, dog, rooster, pig/boar). February 7, 2008 will be the beginning of the Earth Rat year. This year was the year of the Fire Pig. I was born in the year of the Wood Dragon (1988). It actually somewhat helps to know this if you're traveling China; many people, instead of asking your age directly, will instead ask what sign you were born under. Stating your age directly can get you some odd looks (fortunately, the Chinese also use our calendar, so it's not too confusing to state your age that way).

The order behind the animals has a story; one day, as the Chinese calendar was being created, there was a race to see which animal would get which year in the cycle. The story says that Rat tricked Cat by telling him the wrong time for the race, and then both Tiger and Rat hopped onto Ox as it ran. As the Ox was crossing the river right before the finish line, Rat pushed Tiger into the water, hopped off Ox and ran across himself. This is why he is the first year in the cycle, and Ox the second. Tiger quickly swam to shore and claimed the third year. Cat quickly figured out what had happened and ran to catch up; however, he was too late to claim a spot, as twelve animals had already finished the race. Cat always held a grudge against Rat for the trick. This is the reason cats always chase rats nowadays, according to the Chinese.

Rabbit was next; instead of swimming across the river, he jumped across on floating logs and rocks. After him came Dragon, Snake and Horse. Goat, Monkey and Rooster came in together on a boat, having worked together to get across the river on a raft. Dog came in eleventh, and the Boar came in last.

Next time, I'll talk about what actually goes on during the Chinese New Year Festival!

Some words:

nian (pronounced nyen) 年 - year

you (pronounced yo) 有 - have

mei (pronounced may) 没 - not; (negation)

lingqian (pronounced lee-ng chi-en) 零钱 - (money) change

ni you meiyou lingqian? (nee yo may yo lee-ng chi-en) 你有没有零钱？ - "Do you have any change?"

Zaijian!

-Tom

Hello!

Sorry for the lack of posting, I've had some very large computer problems over the last week or so. That's over now, though, so now that I've got the chance...

There's actually a lot to do in China in your free time, if you're so inclined. Shopping is big here - there's tons of stores with clothes, food, books, electronics, and almost everything you might want. If you're looking for video games or reliable computer software, however, that is something this place does not have in abundance. Malls and small stores are everywhere, and you can bargain for larger purchases fairly easily, if you can speak just a little Chinese; enough to say prices. There are very few places that you cannot bargain; supermarkets are one such place. This being said, the supermarkets are also usually cheaper than you can bargain a lot of places down to, if not by much. They are also harder to get to; it's a thirty-five minute walk to the nearest one from my dorm room, which, compared to the little places around the dorm room, almost make it not worth going to sometimes.

You can almost always find a basketball game to jump into within about three blocks of where you are. There are two kinds of parks - one that pretty much only has basic workout/stretching equipment (treadmills made of rollers are actually fairly cool to watch), and places for basketball/other sports. The second type is rarer, and usually within the confines of a set of buildings. The basketball courts are constantly in use, even after it gets dark out. Soccer is the other big sport here, but it's much harder to jump into a game here - usually the field is being used by the official school team.

Then there is the ever-present TV. Dramas and news are on almost constantly, and there's English, Korean and Japanese channels here as well. In addition, there are tons of movies for very cheap. They're sold everywhere and cost very little.

And then there's just the sights around town; huge buildings, construction for the Olympics, the local schools, from elementary school to graduate schools, locals flying kites, practising any of the myriad of martial arts they've learned or doing an impromptu showing of Beijing Opera. If you're at all motivated, it's really hard to get bored here, except perhaps late at night where there's not much of this going on.

Some new words!

电视剧: Dianshiju (pronounced Dee-en shee ju). Dianshi is "television, and "ju" is drama.

块钱：kuai qian (pronounced kwai chee-en). The effective shorthand for RMB. It's used differently, however; a bit hard to explain in this regard.

篮球：lanqiu (pronounced lahn cheeou). Basketball.

商店：shangdian (pronounced shahng dee-en). General store.

Zaijian!

-Tom

October 29, 2007

Well, I've had a lot of glowing things or at least fairly complimentary things to say about China lately. Of course, there have also been irritations, small and large. Today's post? Some things China/Beijing Language and Culture University need to improve on.

But before that... something I've neglected to say for a while.

I can't access my blog from here thanks to the Great Firewall of China. So I've been sending these posts to my Dad, and he's been posting them. He's the one who's made this even possible. So, Dad? Thank you so very much.

Back to the topic!

Firstly, the most recent irritation: Dryers.

It is not that hard to have a dryer that actually dries clothing, China. Even once you figure out that the hot air comes from behind the semi-difficult-to-clean lint trap, the dryer only -uses- hot air about 50% of the time (which is to say sometimes it just doesn't use hot air and just tumbles the clothes. Not the most helpful of methods). I'd be willing to dry my clothes naturally! But.

1) Beijing water -smells-. Seriously. It's really got a bad odor to it unless it's boiled. So letting it sit... yeah, the clothes reek after that.

2) There's no room to do it, really, especially with a roommate who has 3x the clothes I do (...I packed a full suitcase, how did he manage that?) and dryer racks in the laundry rooms that -never- have free space. Not ever.

So that tends to be an exercise in frustration, but one way or another I get dry clothes.

Second: Internet sites blocked.

Oddly enough, this is getting -worse- as Beijing gets closer and closer to the Olympics, which is slightly nonsensical. Sites blocked: blogspot (yo, Dad), YouTube (decently irritating), some American online newspapers (this varies on and off), anything related to sensitive political topics for China (including some stuff that isn't obvious). There's more, I'm sure. Google itself gets blocked half the time, although Gmail doesn't as often. It's just... uh, this is ineffective. I'm sorry, but it really really is, China. Quite frankly? I've found roundabout ways for all this except YouTube right now. I don't use any of them! But.

Third: Bureaucracy.

It took two or more weeks for my meds from America to get to me. And the post office system is really bizarre in that in theory, you should be notified of a package arriving for you. In practice? It was here for about a week, and I didn't hear about it. It's really hard to get them to let you check for your package if you don't have a notification slip, too. Plus, the package center where you have to go is only open on weekdays, 2:00-4:30 (although I think the sign said they'd start being open every day soon. Good).

Also, applying for anything here is a massive pain, even if you're fluent. It's a common joke for a lot of the foreigners that we're surprised we don't need to fill out a form in triplicate to order lunch.

Fourth: Friendliness.

Or rather, the lack thereof.

There are some Chinese who are willing to smile and talk to you if you want. Increasingly, however, especially in Beijing, you get either "scary American" vibes or even on occasion reactions bordering on hostile (those being rare, thankfully). Not much else to say about it. It's just unnerving.

Finally, not something about China, but rather a request for you all: Saturday morning, one of my fellow Western Michigan study abroad students learned that her father had just died of a heart attack. She is returning to America and will not be able to come back to finish the term. I would like to request for you all to keep Ashley Kloote and her father, Paul, in your prayers and/or thoughts. Thank you.

That's about it right now! A more cheerful update next time, I promise!

-Tom

Use your back button to go from picture back to blog

WARNING: This will be a mostly picture-based update. However, since I can't test for myself what sort of imagelinking works, I'm just going to provide the links to my Photobucket account, with the pictures in there. Also, all the pictures are quite large; my laptop doesn't have much in the way of resizing capability, either. Sorry I can't make this any more convenient.

A (very brief) background on Yiheyuan, also called the Summer Palace: built during the Jin dynasty (1115-1234), it was the summer residence of the Imperial family during the Qing dynasty, primarily made into the wonder it is today by the Empress Dowager Ci Xi (who, admittedly, embezzeled money from the nation's navy to do so, thus causing many problems for China later).

Words barely begin to describe this place, so I'll let the pictures I took do it instead:

1) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2067.jpg

This is the primary section of Yiheyuan, as seen from partway across the lake. This part of the Summer Palace is called Foxiang Ge, or "The Tower Of Buddhist Incense".

2) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2016.jpg

Here's a shot of that main tower, from decently close.

3) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2024-1.jpg

And even closer!

4) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2026-1.jpg

5) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2025-1.jpg

Two shots from around the inside courtyard of the tower.

6) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2027-1.jpg

I should say at this point that there's a lot more tourists than it looks - the area in this spot is under renovation, and thus not viewable by tourists. That plus my tendency to aim away from tourists may make Yiheyuan look rather deserted, but I had my back against the wall most of the time. This shot is back in the direction of picture 2, but a bit further down.

7) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2030.jpg

The sign on the wall of Foxiang Ge (again, visible from 1)

8) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2031.jpg

The wall. It's a bit dramatic. Fortunately, I got to go down the stairs; I didn't have to climb up them.

9) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2034.jpg

This was the kindest set of stairs there. I think you get the idea of why I'm glad I didn't have to climb up them.

10) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2033.jpg

11) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2032.jpg

Two shots of other parts of Foxiang Ge not available to tourists.

12) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2010.jpg

And a shot from Foxiang Ge to two of the other main parts of the Summer Palace, the 17 Arch Bridge and Penglai, the island in the middle of the lake Yiheyuan sits on. The lake's name is Beihai.

On the way there, some of the things I saw...

13) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2015.jpg Another shot of Beihai.

14) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2037.jpg

15) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2039.jpg

Statue of a dragon and a ... bird of some sort. Feng Huang? Unsure. In wire mesh since people kept wearing them down by touching them.

16) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2040.jpg A building near Foxiang Ge - one of the satellite buildings.

17) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2020.jpg A tower in the distance. I didn't have time that visit to go out to it. I plan to next time - I missed a few places, most notably Suzhou Market.

18) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2021.jpg

19) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2023.jpg

A building closer to the top of the hill that Foxiang Ge's on. I wanted to take pictures of the inside, but there's a lot of no-picture zones here. Mainly because they're trying to raise money by selling their own photos, which I didn't want to buy.

20) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2046.jpg

21) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2045.jpg

22) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2043.jpg

Shots of the Dragon Boat. They've got three of these for tourists. I didn't bring enough money to ride one, they're kinda expensive. Besides, seeing it was enough.

23) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2048.jpg

The Marble Boat. Used to be open to tourism, isn't any longer. Got this picture of it, though.

24) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2050.jpg

I don't know what this is, honestly, other than a monument on the north end of Beihai.

25) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2052.jpg

Another building around there.

26) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2018.jpg

27) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2006.jpg

28) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2004.jpg

Three other buildings. These were closer to the top of the hill, but I walked past all three of them twice so it fits well here.

29) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2009.jpg

30) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2008.jpg

31) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2007.jpg

And three sections of Beijing from the top of the hill.

32) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2063.jpg

Chang Lang, the Long Corridor. This thing was so crowded I didn't even bother trying to go into it. I just took a picture above the crowd and made a note to come back later.

33) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2068.jpg

Finally, at that bridge. Oddly enough, the island itself wasn't too impressive, though a large part was under construction; I plan on going back and rewalking it later.

34) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2073.jpg

35) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2072.jpg

Two shots of the pavillion right next to the bridge.

36) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2071.jpg

One of the 500-odd lions apparently on the bridge, according to the tourist notes lying around. All of them are rather cool, but I liked this guy the most.

37) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2061.jpg

38) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2060.jpg

39) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2059.jpg

Three places I don't remember the location of. I believe 37 and 38 were on the island, while 39 was somewhere else.

And thus ends the sloppily organized tour! There's one other thing of note...

40) http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g168/Taishyr/Set2074.jpg

This was a decoration off one of the roads leading away from the bridge. No, I don't get it either.

If you want to see a more organized tour (but with smaller pictures), a great site's here: http://www.kinabaloo.com/summer_palace.html

Five new words!

ge (pronounced guh) 阁 - Tower.

bei (pronounced bay) 北 - North.

nan (pronounced nahn) 南 - South.

dong (pronounced dong) 东 - East.

xi (pronounces cshee) 西 - West.

东西南北 - East West South North. This is how the Chinese refer to the four cardinal directions. Southeast is 南东 , while Northwest is 西北。

再见！

-Tom .

Written on Friday, October 12

Apologies for not updating any earlier. It had been my hope to get some pictures out with this update, but the camera seems to be having problems connecting to my laptop. I'll continue working on that.

This update's pretty much about my current class schedule. I have four hours of classes Monday to Friday from 8:00 AM to noon, and all classes are in Chinese. The first two hours on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and the last two hours on Tuesday and Thursday are the main class, General Chinese. This is the class that mainly focuses on grammar, diction and common usage. Primarily this is a lecture class, although it also has a fair amount of memorizing and reciting the lessons (a common practice in China, from elementary all the way to high school). The teacher for most of the classes is awesome - major poetry geek (like me), also greatly interested in history, especially ancient military history, which is part of what got me interested in learning Chinese initially (the books "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" are a realistic fiction version of the events after the fall of the Han Dynasty in China).

Monday and Wednesday are Listening Comprehension classes. These are tough. Imagine trying to listen to a conversation through a bad speaker. Now imagine that it's the recording that the flaw and not the people speaking or the machines you're using to listen to it, and that mishearing one syllable will cause you to miss the answer. That's Listening Comprehension. Fortunately, it's not a very fast-paced class despite this.

Tuesday and Thursday are Reading Comprehension, which is tough because it's fast-paced and taught by another teacher who I'm not as good as tracking, but it is quite interesting despite that. We cover about thirty characters every day in this in addition to what's covered in our daily class, and learn the stroke order for newer characters. Sometimes discussion starts on what we've been reading about; one of the assignments this weekend is to visit the Summer Palace, which I intend to do Saturday. The teacher for this class is a bit more serious-minded, but still very cool and quite understanding.

Fridays are Speaking classes. This is mainly just adlibbing a conversation, which I can usually manage to do even if I manage to mangle sentence structure a bit - if I don't remember how to format something, I revert to a basic Chinese sentence instead of an English format, so it's usually at least comprehendable. It would be nice to have this more than once a week, but not much I can do there.

All the classes also have a lot of homework assigned, so it tends to be more like six to eight hours a day of study, which is about the same as at home. The primary difference is that there tend to be practical exams every time I leave campus.

All in all, quite fun; I'll try and get pictures of the places I've seen up by next week!

-Tom

Ni hao！Finally I manage to get a post for this written; been having laptop problems, which I’ll go over in a second. However, aside from that and losing my debit card, everything has actually gone excellent!

The flight to Beijing was uneventful; I had forgotten that the entire trip over the North Pole would be during “the day”, since it’s summer there (and summer at each pole is pretty much constant sunlight；gogo tilted axis), so it was somewhat hard to sleep on the plane, despite my desire to.

The airport was quite painless to get through; two forms to give to two people, and then walking past the people offering taxi service for about 350 RMB to get one who ended up costing me 72 RMB (I think I overpaid just a bit, but that would primarily be because I failed to note how much the toll was on the way).

Of course, my pronunciation isn’t that great, Chinese or otherwise.

So it’s no real surprise that I managed to get myself delivered to Beijing Youdian Daxue instead of Beijing Yuyan Daxue (Beijing Postal Service University instead of Beijing Language University, loosely translated).

After getting that problem sorted out and getting a second taxi ride for 12 RMB across downtown to BLCU, I then managed to find my room and crash for the night.

Notable things that have happened since then:

1) Went to Tianyi Market. This is… probably best described as a huge indoor bazaar. Each of the two buildings has seven floors; each floor is dedicated to selling one or two types of things, and you can barter for anything there; no fixed prices. It’s awesome. Sadly, a bit too far away to walk to right now; tried to at one point, got lost.

2) Laptop stopped working. Fan shut down, RAM started making my computer freeze, all that. Fortunately there’s tons of internet cafes (wang ba), so it’s not too hard to get stuff done, but still…

3) Started classes. Today, in fact! They’re… boring. Then again, I asked to be placed a level below what the test recommended for me, so that I could have a listening class (as only the beginner level has one). However, if the listening class doesn’t help, I’m going to get moved up a level and get going there.

4) Visited three (4) Chinese restaurants, one (1) Japanese restaurant, one (1) French/European restaurant, and one (1) combo Korean/Japanese restaurant. Of these, my favorite was easily the French one, Tous Le Jours (…what? Cheap, excellent food). The Japanese restaurant, Isshin, and one of the Chinese restaurants, Langer Restaurant, are tied for second (both have excellent food, but they’re more expensive then Tous Le Jours).

5) Had a physical at a Chinese clinic. I can safely say that the conditions in such places are practically American (assuming you go to the right one; I’d imagine others are worse, as well). It was a perfectly fine experience, all in all. Nothing of note occurred to make it exceptionally irritating, the bus ride there aside (it takes one hour to get there by bus if you leave during a busy time on the road. Quite irritating).

There’s not much else to tell! I’ll try and keep you guys updated; stay well!

-Tom

Initial Post

Hello there!

My name's Thomas Brown, and I'm going to be traveling to China. This blog's meant to show you some of the sights over there.

China has a population of 1.3 billion (or so), and I'll be in Beijing, the capital of China. Beijing has about fifteen million people within the area it governs, and will be hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics.

It will take me a few weeks to get pictures up, so for now, I'll teach a few words of Chinese.

Ni hao! (Pronounced knee how) Written 你好 : This is a simple way to say hello to your classmates. If you're addressing a teacher, it's more polite to say:

Nin hao! (Pronounced neen how) Written 您好 : This is the way to say hello to older people in China.

Laoshi (Pronounced laowshee) Written 老师 : This is the word for "teacher" or "elder".

Xuesheng (Pronounced h-shue shung) Written 学生 : This one's tough to say; the pronunciation's the best I can think of. This is the word for student.

Zaijain (Pronounced zai jian) Written 再见 : This is how to say goodbye! So, until next time,

再见!