November!

So its been a little over a month since I last wrote anything. I apologize for that. I think I probably said last time I would try to do better about keeping up with this, but looks like that didn't come true. Sorry! To anyone who cares. I have been fairly busy, not using that as an excuse, cuz its not like I haven't had any free time to sit down and write, I really just haven't felt like it till now. I really have to be in the mood to do this, and it really hasn't felt right until now. So with that being said, I will try and to my best to share with you what I have been up to for the past month.

For starters, It has been a lot of school. That remains my biggest time commitment here, and will most likely stay that way till I leave. I have gotten used to it though, at least having 20 hours of class a week, and I do kind of like it, it keeps me busy. Does its job. Teaches me a lot of Chinese, which I then get to turn around and immediately use in my surroundings. An incredibly good method for studying Chinese. This is really the only way to do it. Chinese is too hard of a language to just be able to pick up from taking language classes in school. As of right now I am actually pretty satisfied with where my Chinese is at. I mean I still have those up and down days where one day I will be super stoked about my Chinese, then the next day I run into someone who says like three things to me, none of which I can understand and then I feel really stupid and terrible about it. Its a never ending battle. But I would say in general I am stoked. I also had some midterms, which happened to be on the 10th and 11th of this month, pretty lame considering my birthday was the 10th. I ended up doing alright, the tests were as you could imagine pretty challenging, but the teachers were surprisingly somewhat forgiving on our scores. I got like a 77% for listening, 79.5% for newspaper, 85% for speaking, and 93% for reading/writing class. I think my class attendance and participation is really gonna come and rescue my grades for some of those haha.

But yes enough of the boring school stuff, outside of school I have managed to make a few more friends. One kid, 邓洪春 (deng hongchun), I play ping pong with a few times a week and go eat dinner and stuff like that. He's a funny kid. Pretty different from a lot of the other Chinese students I have met. Number one he doesn't mind breaking the rules, and number two he's pretty witty. Seemingly much sharper than a lot of the other Chinese I have met. He catches on to my sarcasm pretty well and can dish it right back. Good stuff. I am gonna miss this kid. It's so different having a friend like him where you literally come from like two different worlds, and yet can be so similar in so many ways, or just share like similar hobbies or stuff along that line. And Chinese people are just so genuinely nice most of the time, it just blows me away. I have never run into so many honest, hard working, and genuine people in my life. Respect.

Hmm lets see what else has happened here in November. Well it was my 23rd birthday on the 10th. Because of midterms I waited until the 11th to celebrate. Went out to dinner at a southern Chinese cuisine restaurant with about 8 other people, then went out to this placed called Houhai, which is a lake with a bunch of bars around it. Walked from a subway station there for like 45 minutes. Drinking along the way. One thing I don't know if I have mentioned before or not but China doesn't have any open container laws or anything like that so you can walk around with as many open bottles of alchohol as you wish. So yeah, never have i appreciated that so much as birthday night hah. A bottle of beer in one hand and a bottle of souju in the other makes long walks a lot easier and a lot more fun. But yeah eventually made it to a club called like uhh well i forgot hah, but it was a pretty sweet dance club that always plays a lot of house music and stuff like that, which I like quite a bit, so all in all it was a great night, finally ended up back home at like 5 am. Besides my birthday celebration, we, being the UCEAP kids, just celebrated Thanksgiving. It was a little late, Saturday the 26th instead of the 24th. This is because our wonderful program director decided to host all of us at his house for a Thanksgiving feast, which it was. We pretty much had everything that you would normally eat on Thanksgiving, including pies! It seems you really can find just about anything in Beijing. But what was really great about the whole thing was just getting a lot of us back together in one place. I have the best times here in Beijing when we are all together again, just hanging out. It's a really bizarre feeling. I think its just that I feel so connected to these people since number one, we are all from pretty much the same place, and probably also because we all did the summer program together. We have truly bonded i feel. Even if we are all completely different people, it always seems like whenever we all get together everyone has an awesome time. So it was nice having a Thanksgiving like that, even if I couldn't be with my family, at least I was with a lot of close friends, and I also couldn't have asked for a better host. Speaking of this program director, John Thomson, is amazing. He tooks us all on a little field trip in late October, just around a few temples in Beijing. But this guy is just a wealth of knowledge on all things China. He is like a living history book of China. Some of the stories he has told us about him living in China like 40 years ago, and about being one of the first foreigners being allowed back into Beijing in the 80s, are just amazing. Let alone all the factual history he also knows about China. He is also incredibly sharp still. One of my favorite things I have heard him say, which was said at a meeting a few days before we were gonna go tour these temples was something along the lines of "diplomatic privileges are worthless unless they are abused." Which I suppose taken out of context could sound bad but he was just referencing getting some sort of discount on tickets to these places and places to eat. But really funny nonetheless, and probably really true.

Anyways, thats pretty much all I got for now, at least all I feel like writing, I'm getting tired. Its Sunday night, I still got some studying and reviewing to do for next week. I am less than a month out now from coming home, I couldn't be happier about that. It's not that I hate it here, I really don't, I just miss home and everyone there. I also feel like I am accomplishing a lot of my goals I set for myself before I came here so it's a really really good feeling. So I know by the time December the 23rd roles around I will feel accomplished and proud and incredibly stoked to be back home and put this crazy life adventure under my belt. I will probably write one more of these before I head back home, probably the night before I leave, unless I either get the urge to write a new entry, which is unlikely, or something really ridiculously amazing/bizarre happens that I feel like sharing with everyone who reads these. Other than that you can expect another one in about 3 weeks or so!