Back to Beijing

The entire group of NSLI students - Fantastic Foreigners (singing)

Bird's Nest in the Beijing Olympic Park

Water Cube in Olympic Park

Some guys in our group were trying on the new monk robes they bought when they got locked out of their hotel room

My best friends from the trip having a dance party in our hotel room on the last night
[Maya (Philadelphia), me, Tatiana (Miami), Madeleine (Indianapolis), Nicole (Knox, IN)]

Goodbye Chengdu

It has just hit me that I am leaving Chengdu tomorrow, and China the day after that.  I am going to miss this city that I have become so familiar with that I can give directions and recommend restaurants. I will miss natives asking to take pictures with me daily, although I will not mind not having to guess whether all the staring strangers think of me as a national enemy or a celebrity.  I will have to readjust to people not offering me food incessantly and trying to feed me at every meal.  I wish I had more time to spend better getting to know my host sister, but even if I were to stay here longer her time is still constantly consumed by preparing for college.  I learn so much when I am with her, the most valuable first-hand culture and language.  I cannot wait until two years from now when we are both attending college in America.  I am going to miss learning a new character every time I look out the window at a poster or street sign.  It will be strange not hearing random Christmas music in shopping malls, being within walking distance of a bamboo park, and eating dumplings for breakfast.  I am not ready to switch back to American.

Giraffe translates literally as "long-necked deer" from Chinese, one of my favorite things about the language.

My host house as I leave it in the morning 

My host mother and I at the airport

China's Matching Clothes Obsession

Let the record show that I saw quadruplets all matching, but I could not get a subtle picture quickly enough (I need lessons from some of the people in this country; I bet at least 50 Asian strangers have a photo of a totally unaware me).  Lily and her English teacher also wore matching shirts one day but, alas, no picture.

Impaled Chicken

Only in China

I made my own fried rice for breakfast today!  What I could not finish I handed to the maid/aunt saying I wanted to save it to eat tomorrow.  She replied with "oh, okay, eat tomorrow" and dumped it all in the trash.  Sometimes I feel like my accent might be a little off.

My host sister is absolutely convinced that I am partly blind (and this is with my glasses on).  Because farsightedness happened to be mentioned on my application, she now believes that whenever I do not immediately understand a piece of text before me that I cannot see it, so she will read it aloud for my benefit.

I finished my first Chinese book today!  It was labeled for ages 5 and up, but those five-year-olds must have been on brain steroids.

My host family will always look at me strangely whenever I ask for a cup of water, as Chinese meals are never served with drinks.  Water itself (especially cold) is rarely the first choice anyway, probably because only bottled water is clean enough to drink, and soda is cheaper than bottled water.  Today at lunch I asked Lily why they do not drink with meals.  Her response, after thinking about it seriously, was that maybe the food was so "delicierous" that they could not stop eating to drink.  (Instead of replacing the L sound with the R sound, my host sister tends to simply add an extra R in any words containing an L.)

US map painted on the wall of a Chinese class room.  Can you spot the mistake?

Every single time I cough or sniffle, someone in my host family will exclaim, "You have a cold!"

Sitting in a restaurant with my host mother and sister this evening, a group of old men came up to our table and interrupted our dinner to demand what I (an obvious foreigner) was doing with a Chinese family.  I am perpetually shocked by the presumptuousness and lack of shame of some Chinese people when it comes to staring at and shouting at foreigners.

Today I thought my host sister was saying zebra when she really meant eraser ...and this was not even in Chinese.

Famous Chengdu dessert (like melted ice cream with fruit)

Weirdest thing I ate today: beans + rice = purple goo in a bamboo stalk

It is almost all gone in this picture

Stone Forest

The gaudy casino-style hotel where we stayed for the second half of the Kunming trip

At the Stone Forest in Kunming, a place belonging in a fantasy novel

Minority Villages

Mountain resort hosting the NSLI group for the first half of the Kunming trip.

Greenhouse where we ate breakfast.

Learning how to make paper

While in Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province, we visited an attraction that featured recreations of various minorities' villages.  Yunnan is famous for hosting 26 ethnic minorities, the most of any other province, and this park-like tourist stop showcased mini demonstrations of culture from each, accompanied by many vendors.  It was rather strange to see people's cultures transformed into an amusement park, like a living zoo, but it was a high-energy, unique place.  I was able to enter my first Buddhist temple and Christian church since being in China this summer, and the vendors of clothes, cloth, bags, jewelry, etc. offered a lot of styles that deviated from the standard Chinese patterns and colors, more similar to Indian or even South American.

London Olympics in Kunming

The train to Kunming provided the most amazing views of China's countryside when not in a tunnel.  Breath-taking glimpses of endless hills all terraced to more efficiently use the land, the massive Three Gorges Dam, and small villages gave us a radically different view of China than the city life.

Not a single Olympic sport is broadcasted on Chinese television that does not contain a competing Chinese athlete.  Unfortunately that means very few track events, which I usually quite enjoy.  If China gets a gold medal then the moment is sure to be replayed ad nauseaum.  It is such a new perspective that I now wonder if the US employs the same strategy to that same extent.  For example, ping pong and badminton (and female weight-lifting) are rarely on US channels but dominate Chinese stations. (Only Chinese played in both the women's and men's final ping pong matches.)  In the same manner that American commercials for the Olympics and its sponsors feature dramatic shots of basketball, swimming, or running perhaps, Chinese commercials pair the intense music with badminton and ping pong.

A Chinese Specialty