Odds n Ends

So I haven’t been keeping up with my blogs so much recently, and for that I am sorry. I guess it’s a sign of how much I really am getting used to life here, as things that would have been so remarkable before I barely notice now. As I said before, since the trip through the northwest, Shanghai has felt much less foreign.

Last Saturday Professor Ferry took us to a school of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where one of the professors gave us an introductory lecture. TCM differs from western medicine in that it is much more aimed at solving the root problem of an ailment, rather than the symptoms. Because of this, it is not so fast-acting as western medicine, and requires patience. It was interesting to hear about the ways in which a patient could use both disciplines of medicine for their respective strengths to fight a sickness.

On Sunday, we went to the Shanghai Museum, where the curator, Professor Zhou (one of the guest lecturers of our culture course) gave us a personal tour. Besides being very friendly and hospitable, he was very knowledgeable about the exhibits. So instead of just walking through a room full of very old looking clay pots, Professor Zhou told us the where, when, why, and how of many of the pieces, which added a degree of significance to what would have been (to me, anyways) just a bunch of really old stuff. It was also nice to hear the inside stories about how the pieces were acquired by the museum. One of the more interesting acquisitions was a set of 11 ancient bells. Apparently, though they are thousands of years old, modern high-tech tuning equipment found the bells to be perfectly in tune. They come from a set of 14, found somewhere in the west of China, where a local museum holds the other three. Despite Professor Zhou’s best efforts to get these to complete the set, the curator of the other museum insists that it is fact the Shanghai Museum that should give up their bells, so that the full set can be together nearer to its original location.

On Wednesday afternoon, we met with a group of Fudan University students for a sort of cultural exchange discussion. We had given them questions beforehand, so they could prepare for them, but it ended up evolving into more of a give-and-take discussion. It was very interesting (and many times surprising) to see the ways in which our lives and experiences were different in some areas and similar in others. One of the Fudan students was Taiwanese, which added yet another facet to the conversation, as his views almost always differed from the mainland Chinese students.

Last week, we started a new textbook in the language class. Except for the new vocabulary words, it has no pinyin (transliteration) in it. The thing about Chinese characters is that if you don’t know it, you don’t know it. There’s no way to sound it out and pretend you know the meaning, and you would very seldom be able to tell by looking at the radicals in the character itself. So my new motivation for studying is to save myself from embarrassment when I’m called on to read in class. My favorite teacher is the listening/speaking teacher. She’s 24, which is about the average age of the people in my class, so it feels a lot less formal when she teaches. We almost always manage to get her off task, and talk about something entirely different and more interesting than whatever grammar technique we should be practicing. In my opinion, this is a far better way to learn Chinese, speaking about something that you are actually interested in and saying things that you want to say, instead of acting out some hypothetical situation. And when we have these casual conversations in Chinese, I find that I can communicate a lot more than I would have ever imagined. On Wednesday, the other American student and I invited the teacher out for KFC after explaining to her about the rumor that KFC chicken doesn’t actually come from live chickens. I could have never imagined explaining that in Chinese until I tried. I’ve gotten very good at talking my way around vocabulary that I don’t know.

Yesterday afternoon our Japanese friend Mai invited Nora and I to play a very international game of basketball. I’m not very good at basketball, and I usually don’t like it much, but it was a great time. It’s a co-rec group of students of varying ability that plays 5-on-5 three afternoons a week. It reminded me that I should try to get a lot more pickup games (of anything) going back at Union in the spring. It’s really the best way to get exercise. One of my teammates was a Chinese policeman who just graduated from Fudan and lives nearby. He offered to be my “language buddy”, to help me with my Chinese. My hope is that we can just hang out and speak Chinese, since that’s what I most need practice with.

Somebody must have found out that I loved Urumqi’s night market so much, because at some point in the last few weeks, a small piece of it started showing up at the Fudan University gate. Every night, the food vendors come with fresh fruit and stir fry, calling “Chaofan haishi chaomian!” (fried rice or fried noodles) at passing students. For three kuai, they will make it for you on the spot, offering a choice of rice or noodles, chicken or beef, and spicy or mild. Another kuai gets you a fresh apple, and it’s a meal. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the best food in China comes from a vendor’s cart on the side of a street.