The Great Wall - people shots

Yesterday (Saturday) I went to the Great Wall with the rest of the foreign student population of Beishida (the university I attend). It doesn't cost a thing to go when you go with the school, which is a nice bonus. We spent six hours in the bus (3 there and 3 back) and three hours at the wall and it was exhausting.
Me and a new Korean friend I met on the wall. Although he's Korean, he's been studying Chinese for three years already in JAPAN, so he speaks Japanese as well. And his English is quite good.
A mother and child posing while the father (out of the pic) took a shot.
Me on the Great Wall!
Me holding a Beishida flag - Bei Jing Shi Fan Da Xue.
Two Japanese girls we climbed with - very picturesque!
Me and a Korean guy who lives in my dorm and with whom I had dinner on Friday (his roommate's Japanese). We climbed the Wall together.
Me and my classmate who I happened to meet on the Wall. She's Korean.

The Great Wall - scenery

Some views...

We went to Simatai, which is where I ended up last year when I walked the Great Wall with Jessie. With Jessie, if you remember (May 2006), we departed from Jinshaling and walked the 10-11km to Simatai. With my school, we continued further along Simatai, so I was covering new (although familiar) territory.

I think the pictures speak for themselves. I had forgotten how steep some parts are...
Up and down, up and down...lots of up at Simatai, which in the end means lots of down, I suppose.


Some areas are pretty scarily not safe. :-) Adds to the adventure.

For 30 yuan (just under $5), you can ride the zip cord to a place nearer to the parking lot. Looks like fun, but you should see the zip cord: it's old and rusty and looks pretty damn scary!!!

My lovely class

Last Wednesday I organised a class outing - we all ate lunch together. The Koreans knew of a good hotpot place just north of the university (we went by taxi, although I came back on foot, which took around half an hour). Hotpot is boiling water that you put different ingredients in and it cooks immediately (or near immediately). I like it, although it's better in the winter because it warms you from the inside out!
Me on the left, Tina the British woman, a Korean girl, a Korean guy (Hao Jun), two Korean girls, an Indonesian guy, Jonathan, an American, Roni, a Czech girl, and another Korean girl whose name I've forgotten but we playfully call her Mian bao - bread.
Hao Jun and two Korean girls (both are really nice! I just can't remember their Chinese names...). Hao Jun's 23. He did his military service and fought North Korea in the DMZ.
Korean girl, Indonesian guy, and Jonathan.
Roni and Mian bao. I'm glad I got the picture because they don't enjoy being taken in picture...I love Roni's top: green ladybugs and red clover leafs.
Me and Tina enjoying our hot pot.
The two lovely Korean girls. The whole class didn't make it. Some students wanted to go to the test that would allow them to change classes (go up a level), which was taking place that afternoon.

My sister's artwork

My sister in Paris sent me this beautiful drawing. I really like it.

Web Addiction

I'm always surprised at the huge numbers in China. Because of its humungous population, there are that many more people affected... I read this article in the September 2006 issue of BEIJING TODAY, an English newspaper published by the Beijing Youth Daily.

"Boot camp for young web addicts"
By Han Manman

China's first camp designed to help wean Internet addicts off their surfing addiction saw its graduates return home Wednesday from the center in Beijing's Daxing district.

Over 60 web addicted youths, selected from 900 applicants from across the country, completed the five day course of treatment, at a camp jointly organized by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China, Central Civilization Office, and the General Administration of Press and Publication of China.

Zhang Wei, from the Youth League, said only eight youths volunteered for the camp, with the rest coming only after being forced by their parents [that means over 50 were forced...]. The Internet addicts, ages ranging between 12 and 23 years old, were all 'typical problem youths' with experience of drug addiction, web love, suicide attempts or running away from home, Zhang said. Some suffered from depression, and most have dropped out from school.

Five days in healthy fresh air and sunshine is a world away from the average young Internet addict's darkened bedroom. Zhang said the youths were divided into nine teams of seven. Each team had a doctor, a military trainer and a volunteer care worker. The five days of therapy included military training, watching movies and psychological counseling. The trainees also played a real-world version of the popular online first-person shooting game Counter-Strike [I know some of you are thinking: how cool would that be??!!].

"Playing real-world Counter-Strike helps the young people distinguish between real and virtual worlds," said Zhang. "At least one of the youths' parents was asked to join the training camp and receive training with their child, because a lot of web addiction in the young is down to a lack of understanding between children and parents." [the sentence is grammatically incorrect in the newspaper]

Zhang said some positive results were already apparent after the five days of treatment. Some of the young people seemed more willing to make friends and to communicate with their parents. "We also created video and document records for each family to make it easy for us to follow up on trainees' progress in the future," added Zhang.

The total number of the Internet users across the country hit 120 million by the end of this June, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. The Internet's rising popularity is fueling concern that some surfers have become dangerously addicted to the Web.

According to Professor Tao Hongkai of Huazhong Normal University [I'm at Beijing Normal University!!!], who has conducted studies on Internet addiction, there are more than 10 million young Chinese people with problem surfing habits. In extreme cases, Internet addiction has been linked to psychological problems, violence against arents and crime. Many addicts drop out of school and become lost in a virtual world. Professor Tao said that online games have changed the fate of thousands of families and children.

*****

More than 10 MILLION with "problem surfing habits." Now, go figure what that actually means, but I can tell you that the internet bars around universities are packed in the evenings where I am at the moment. And so many of my male students last year spent entire nights at internet bars, playing internet games and then skipping class during the day. And this was a regular occurance. A Chinese friend and I were at a restaurant the other day and I remarked how bored a girl-sitting-at-another-table-with-two-guys looked. My friend told me the guys were talking about an online game, so of course she was bored....

I can totally understand how you can get lost in these kinds of games. When I was in high school my friends gave me a tetris-like computer game that I played for hours on end and even dreamed about the sequences I could make...and that's just a stupid tetris-like game!!! SimCity was pretty time-consuming too... I could see how people could get caught up in a game and not want to do anything else. It's like a good story that you keep wanting to get back to.

Oh well, glad I don't have that problem. :-)

Good night!

random

Last Friday I went to Beijing's one and only IKEA store with a classmate from England (her name is Tina). I would never have thought of going to IKEA but Tina's a great home-maker and she wanted to make her room look inviting and warm, so off we went. Oh right...that's not where I bought this bookshelf. I actually bought a closet organiser (very very useful, by the way!) at IKEA for a whole $5...Then on Sunday we went to Carrefour (big French supermarket chain) and that's where we both bought this very sturdy (I'm being sarcastic here...) bookshelf for around $15. Only thing is we had to build them ourselves and I'm not very patient with these kinds of things. Oh well, I built it Sunday and we're Wednesday evening and it's still holding out so I'm happy.

It really helps me. I was finally able to un-pack and put my clothes somewhere (the closet's too small to fit all my clothes). And now I can put my books somewhere other than on my desk (so I can actually use my desk!). All in all, it was a really good idea, and I never ever would have done it without Tina, so thank you Tina, for making my life easier.
Here's the birthday cake I bought for my roommate MinJi's and my Japanese friend Yosuke's birthdays. Both have their birthdays on September 11th!!! I dived right in and went to the bakery store myself to order the cake and everything...didn't realise the inside would hold pineapple stuff (which I didn't particularly like), but MinJi and Yosuke enjoyed it so that's the main thing, I suppose (at least they pretended to...).
Kenji and Yosuke on their last evening in Beijing. The evening started out all right with us just hanging out and taking pictures in my room...

Part II

So remember there was a group of Japanese students from the same university (in Tokyo) who all lived on my floor in my residence? They left last Saturday morning (early morning: 6:00 AM to be precise). I was sad to see them go. They were my first friends upon arriving in Beijing and it would've been fun to get to know them better and continue hanging out throughout the year. Oh well. There will be others. So Yosuke and Kenji came over to our room around 11 PM to say good-bye (others had come earlier) and they just stayed a while...and...we talked...and we talked...and suddenly it was 1 AM! And then everyone was hungry. So we decided to go for chuan (meat on a stick), but the small gates were closed so we had to go to the main west gate to get out of the university, and that was a big detour, so it took a while.

Here's us still on campus, maybe around 1:30 AM. Yosuke in green, Kenji in blue, and Min Ji (my Korean roommate - she's staying for the year) in pink.
Kenji in the middle of a deserted Beijing street (right outside West Gate of our university) - remember it's nearing 2 AM.
At the restaurant we took pictures of our tired faces...that's my lovely Korean roommate and me.

Yosuke and Kenji...can't wait to eat!!!
Yay!!! Nothing beats meat-on-a-stick at 2 AM!!! Can't get a better last-experience-in-China moment!
Back on campus we walked around one last time (for them), checking out the main building (which has the library) and not really doing anything very productive.
There's a famous bell-shaped looking thing on campus.
It's lit up with green lights, so we played with the lights a bit. From L-R: Kenji, MinJi, and Yosuke.


Kenji and I discovered we could purse our lips to look like fish...yeah...it was a pretty wacky night. We went back to my room and played cards (after racing Yosuke in a couple of sprints) - a Japanese game involving slapping other people's hands and Crazy 8s.

Friday Night - Part 1

I think the problem is blogger will only allow me to put up a certain number of pictures (not sure what that number is yet...), so here's part one of my Japanese friends' last night in Beijing (Friday, September 15th).
Yosuke and I had a race, and of course he was much faster than I was, so the picture only caught me...the slow poke...
Tried to get a picture of our shadows on the road...flash went off and ruined it.
We had fun killing each other...


Youske and Kenji played...In Beijing, when construction's going on, there often aren't really any protective measures to avoid the public from injuring themselves on site. This machine was just there, right by the road...
Yosuke, Min Ji, me and Kenji in the elevator on our way home to the 7th floor (maybe it's 3-ish?).
We played cards on my bed, and then kinda laid about...

And Min Ji cuddled up in her bed... It was a nice evening. Kenji and Yosuke left our room around 5:40 AM, and the Japanese group left our dorm at 6 AM.

Last Sunday

My first week of class! I started on Tuesday. Here's my schedule:


Not that many of you can read that... I remember my work giving me the equivalent last September (2005), and I couldn't understand a thing, mostly because I couldn't read a word of Chinese (I didn't even know 1, 2, 3 - on the left - stands for the days of the week) and I also wasn't used to having the times up top (usually it's the days of the week up top and the time on the left; in China it's the opposite). But now I know... I was put in class 101-06. 100 is complete beginner, so I'm semi-beginner, what in ESL I would call B2 (Beginner 2). It's really tough, but I'm so excited. I don't understand a lot, but I'm learning tons. I have three teachers and they're all really nice (all women) and I think I like my listening teacher the best even though I that's the class I understand the least.

I'm learning how to write, which is an awesome experience. I'm learning how to write such things as "Not long ago, the roads didn't have as many cars," and "studying Chinese at the same time as studying English" and "Beijing's deepest impression on me is: lots of people, lots of cars, traffic is very crowded." It seems like the running theme among all the classes (Listening, Speaking and Writing) is traffic and taxi drivers. Fun!

So remember I told you that this park was closed to the public? Well here are people enjoying the green space in the evening. Nice lighting...
So last Sunday afternoon (September 8th), I spent with Yosuke, a Japanese guy living on my floor. He's doing a project on the environment and he wanted to go to Beijing's Environment Centre so we left our residence around 1:30-2 PM and walked around a lot, and asked a lot of people how to get there, took the bus, and Yosuke forogot exactly where it was so we had to walk some more...and we finally got there around three hours later!!! And it wasn't even very far!!!
This is us in front of the building we were looking for - we're very happy!!! Yosuke can't have a beard while going to university in Japan so he decided to grow his beard in China. We talk in Chinese to each other, although when there's a breakdown in communication we use English words.
So...we finally find the place and then finally find the entrance (another adventure because in China it's not always easy to find the entrance to buildings)...and...the centre's closed! Nobody from the centre comes in on Sundays! So we chatted with the security guard and took some pictures with his cap (there are his comrades' caps on the windowsill behind us too).
I hate how my face is so much whiter than the rest of my body. :-P
Yosuke being a monkey in front of the Centre's entrance.
There are pedestrian bridges that go over huge (kuan le) streets. Yosuke and I wandered around and took some pictures...
This is the other side of the street. It was a beautiful warm day. It took us one bus ride and maybe a 20-minute walk to get back home...