Dear friends and family,
Well, as I suspected, now that we've settled down to daily routine at university, our lives have become pretty predictable and as a result, I have less to write than usual. Life continues to be pleasurable, although the workload is pretty daunting.
Since so much of our time is spent either formally learning Chinese or trying to communicate with Chinese speakers, we are starting to see a pattern to how our brains are responding. Every night our dreams are filled with trying to recognize characters and have conversations in Chinese. Sometimes, we seem to regress and be unable to speak Chinese at all, and then a few days later, we squirt ahead much improved. It's neat.
After thirteen classroom days, we have learned 285 words, both speaking and writing. The writing is especially difficult for us, since we did not previously focus on learning the script at all and many of our classmates have had some previous training. For both of us, it's interesting to be in the situation of struggling to keep up.
As in Canada, our teacher here is very good. We have classes from 8 a.m.- noon, Monday - Friday. During classes we focus on learning pronunciation (we drill on sounds like "chou, che, chi, chang, cheng..." until they sound perfect), practicing the written characters, learning grammatical and pronunciation rules, learning new words and practicing tones. As most of you probably know, Chinese is a tonal language. This means that some words start on a low note (like in music) and end in a high note, some start on a high note and end on a low note, some words are said constantly on a high note, and some go down and up. A word that starts on a low note and ends high has a different meaning than a word that starts high and ends low. Many words have as many as five different meanings depending on how you "sing" it.
English speakers are accustomed to making sentences rise in tone to indicate uncertainty or a question. Someone might say "You want to go soon?" and we understand it's a question because the speaker raises the tone at the end of the statement. Unfortunately, when we try a new word in Chinese, our uncertainty means that we habitually raise the tone at the end, as if to ask the listener "Did I get that right?". Our uncertainty needs to be trained out of us and we need to learn to control the tone. Joe and I are only just starting to master this.
We usually get up at 6 a.m. and do about 45 minutes of memorization before class while our brains are fresh. Our walk to class takes about half an hour along a pretty busy street (all the streets are busy here) with bike lanes packed with bicyclists (we have not yet bought our bikes). I need to take some photos for you so you can see how many bicycles there are. I also need to take some photos of the university, which is pretty. After class we do about four to five hours of homework. After that, our brains are very tired. Some days, we have errands to do, so our homework sometimes ends at 9 or 10 p.m. We are usually in bed by 10:30 or so, to maximize dreaming time featuring such themes as "In Chinese How Do You Say "Hurry, I Need A Blood Transfusion"" and "Qing wen, My Swiffer Wet Jet huai. Wo yao yi ge Replacement!!".
Our classroom is very international. Our classmates are from Korea, Indonesia, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, and Algeria. We are the only North Americans in our class. We are also the most ... ahem... "mature" (i.e. OLD) folks in our classroom.
Our landlord speaks no English and he has a strong Beijing accent. When we first met him, we always needed an interpreter. Now we're starting to get by talking to him directly. Today he came by to collect the rent and we chatted for a few hours. It's still very frustrating and our conversation is limited, but he's very game to work with us on it. I was on the phone with my sister, Inge, when he arrived and so that led to showing him the photos of our families and explaining all the family relationships.
Other than the language stuff, I don't have much to report. Our social scene is getting very full. We had a housewarming Friday night and had 10 people over - all of these folks have lived in Canada or the US and are part of the expatriate community here. We found a store that sells western foods so we served baguette and cheese, and Irish stew. French bread and cheese are very hard to come by here in Beijing, so it was a nice treat for all of us. We love Chinese food but every few weeks we crave Western fare.
We have a nice friend here in Beijing named Wang Peng. He was introduced to Madeleine by her former co-worker and he's been extremely helpful. Last night we had dinner with his parents, who are academics (his father is a retired professor who specialized in India and his mother is an engineering professor who specializes in environmental monitoring). Wang Peng is a professor in environmental architecture. Conversation was far ranging and very interesting. They took us to a wonderful restaurant. It's great to have someone order the food for us since usually we're limited to pointing at pictures. They ordered cabbage sauteed with chestnuts, beef with bok choy, bean curd with pine nuts and little yellow fruity things, Peking duck, scallion pancakes, celery with garlic, and soup with egg and corn.
I really like Wang Peng and am hoping to give him lessons in western cooking in exchange for his help with my Chinese.
Joe went to the Linux Users Group meeting here in Beijing on a night when the president of the chapter happened to be doing an e-smith demonstration installation. It's very neat to see e-smith still thriving as a technology, if not as a business.
Our apartment is all set up. It looks like an IKEA showroom since most of our furniture came from there, but it's comfortable. I'll take some pictures although I suppose it's a bit boring for you. If you are planning on visiting, you can take a look at where you'll be staying. FYI, we have no bugs and lots of hot water -- it's the lap of luxury.
Other than that, the trees are budding. I saw a magnolia tree with the pink flowers getting ready to bloom. The weather is always sunny, although it can be very windy. So far, we've had none of the famous Beijing sand storms, so we count ourselves lucky. My sinuses are pretty good just now, although every week we get at least one bad day of pollution (where the weather forecast calls for "smoke").
And that's about it! As always, we look forward to hearing from you and we hope this note finds you all in good health and happy.
Love, Kim (and Joe)