party of polaroid friends

To bring everyone up to speed, this is basically a quick summary of all the important parts of January, now that we are in our final week of the month. I have less than six weeks left in China, so it is probably a pertinent sort of time to update about the last six weeks.

So I present to you: JANUARY. In no particular order!

EXAM WEEK AT JIAOTONG UNIVERSITY

There is the strangest phenomenon here at Jiaotong University Chinese Language Program, and that is that a large portion of students seem to attend the classes up until the time of the HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test), and then they start dropping off like flies. Personally, I had suffered a mid-semester/December lull period in my attendance, but it seems that everyone else managed to keep steady through that time because they weren't going to stay through January.

Which meant that I, having made a personal promise to myself to attend each and every class in January (which I kept!), was the only student in class at times. Especially for the first classes of the day, I was the only one there for the first hour, or two hours. Usually someone would turn up for the last two hour period of classes, but often I was there alone for an extended period of time, and it sort of ruined class for me because teaching to one student? Boring for both myself and the teacher, so we more often than not just ended up talking about random things. I found I'm best at talking about myself, which I suppose isn't surprising, but it's easier to talk about what I know rather than prescribed topics, which is what trips me up so much in class.

I learned lots of interesting vocabulary (science fiction, androgynous, political party - not all from the same conversation!), and had lots of interesting conversations (well, the vocab tells you the stories!), but it was all sort of useless for the exams. The exams weren't terribly pressing. I took two of them the week before the official Exam Week - for my Reading Comprehension class and my Writing class. I got an 80 and 88, respectively, but I haven't received my grades back from my other exams.

The thing about exams was that there was only one I could really study for, because Listening and Speaking weren't the sort of exams you could study for. Speaking we didn't even get our topic until that day, so we couldn't prepare, which was unfortunate because it was a topic I had no idea how to answer and found myself flailing and incredibly under the seven minutes we were supposed to discuss gender equality in our countries. Honestly, even if I were speaking in English I couldn't fill seven minutes on that topic! I have no experience with it, no examples to make, and it was sort of disappointing, but at least my teacher knew that I could actually talk about things. My listening exam went well enough - though it got harder and harder as the exam went on, which was unfortunate. There was also one part that talked about robots and I think the word for robot (which is particularly alliterative) will be stuck in my memory forever.

The other exam that I could study for went well, too. I didn't get everything, but there was a lot of material to study and it was difficult to shove it all back into my brain. It helped that we had been tested on each of the sections, though, because at least I had the experience of studying and preparing the lessons before, so it was more just refreshing my memory. Of course, it didn't work entirely well and I still forgot things (even things I knew I had studied - very frustrating!) but that's what happens in exams. Also, I had gotten a slight case of food poisoning the evening before and literally lost my lunch, so I lay some blame off onto that.

But otherwise, classes and exams were worthwhile and not too stressful, and now my semester is officially over! SCHOOL'S OUT, WOO!

CBA BASKETBALL GAME: SHAANXI VS. BEIJING

Ardan had always expressed a desire to go to a basketball game, but it was the other German on the fourth floor that finally propelled us to go. Sarah, Luca, Andreas and I went to dinner at the noodle place (of sheep-gutting fame) for dinner, and he suggested we catch a game. None of us could think of any reason not to, so we found out where the tickets were being sold and, for Y30 (AUD$5) we got a pretty good seat to watch the game!

The game started with standing for the national anthem. No hands over hearts or anything, and there were only a couple of people in the whole crowd mouthing or singing along, but I have to say it was very difficult for me not to join in. I learned the words to the Chinese national anthem last time I was in China, and the words and tune have stuck with me, so hearing it I just wanted to sing out loud, but I thought that might attract a bit of attention (not like nobody noticed the four white kids in the audience, but they weren't particularly bothered as long as we cheered for the home team), so I staved off the desire.

The match was Shaanxi vs. Beijing, and our team was not particularly proficient and lost by about ten points, but the experience was still lots of fun. The sponsors of the game (Hans beer and a Chinese sports clothes brand that is only defined by a Nike-like swoosh) handed out these inflatable sticks that everyone used to clap and make noise with, which helped with the clapping and whooping throughout the game. I didn't realize how fast a basketball game moves, because they have 24 seconds to get the ball in, which makes sure that everything moves really quickly and it was definitely action-packed! Or at least, felt like it was action-packed.

The best part of the game was, however, the cheerleaders. There were the typical pretty little girls in few clothing (the venue wasn't heated though so after half time they took to wearing big yellow coats, taking them off for the dancing bits), but there were also these fat dudes who also danced with the cheerleaders. It was definitely a funny sight, I guess the fat guys were the comic relief, the shout out to the common man in the audience, but it was hilarious, and we got plenty of photos which are up on Flickr now (after things finally decided they could be uploaded).

KARIM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY

Karim is one of the French guys in the large tapestry of foreigners here at Jiaotong University, and he's been at both of Niki's parties so we sort of used her invite to get into a party at Building 7 for his birthday. We brought plenty of alcohol and snacks, and he seemed to be very welcoming so it wasn't so much stealing her invite as just adding merriment to the party. (I say we used Niki's invite because she didn't turn up until about an hour later, but I usually have no way of gauging whether people will be welcoming or think we're crashing.)

It was a regular sort of party, though of course there was an interlude nearing midnight for present-giving and many renditions of Happy Birthday in different languages (English first, French, Chinese, I think someone tried for Spanish too...), which was more than amusing. Karim got a pair of Beijing masks from another French friend of his who had recently moved to Beijing from Xi'an, and he had lots of fun trying to scare people with the masks (I think he succeeded with a few people).

We adjourned after a while to a club in the city, which of course was yet another disaster of logistics, but we all made it there in the end, about twenty people or more, I'd say. We all put our coats in the same coat check, which was just about the most hilarious thing ever, both for the moment we handed them over and had to retrieve them. Handing them over just had the coat check window as a big pile of coats and bags, and retrieving them involved leaning through the window and directing the poor woman to the coats and bags we could see were ours.

The club was lots of fun, they played a good mix of Chinese and Western music, and at one point we made a foreigner's congo line around the bar. There were lots of people by that point (I figure we picked more up at the club), and we almost had it entirely circling the bar, but it dissolved after two rounds. Otherwise, it was just lots of fun dancing with everyone to great music! There was a little platform and everyone (except for me, of course) had a try up there, which was really funny, but after a while we all got sort of tired and just wandered out. The trouble with clubs is it's hard to say goodbye.

After retrieving our coats we found Felix and Basil outside eating soup and steamed buns, so we chatted to them for a bit before deciding that it was a good idea to get some soup and steamed buns for ourselves, so we did that, sat outside in the freezing cold and ate our late night food and drank bottles of water. Much better than kebabs, any day!

DINNER WITH TEACHERS

The teachers at the English school I teach at have been so friendly to me over the time I've been there, as they're all about the same age as me, and I have been out with one of the teachers twice in the last week. Her English name is Marbrain, and I have no clue where she got that name, but it's easier for her to use her English name at work because there is another teacher with almost her exact name (the second character is different but even the tones on that are the same).

So on the Friday of exam week, I went with her to one of her student's house to make dumplings and have dinner. The kids (Sunny, Sunny 2, and Fei - the latter of which is not an English name, obviously) were very enthusiastic, using all the English they knew to make me feel welcome and ask me all the questions they could think of - my favorite food, animal, sport, etc. I was shown around the house, made comment on the fact I had been watching kids' TV for the last week (and the TV stayed on the kids' channel all night), and managed to use my well-reviewed polite words to give a gift of fruit and nuts to the mother. I'm not sure where the father was, but he was not there for the evening.

It was really fun! Marbrain and I put together the dumplings and then the mother cooked them while we talked to the kids about the cartoons on the television (and of course, the one I don't really quite get came on and I had to admit I had no clue what it was about). Dinner was good, the kids ran off after a few dumplings and I talked with Marbrain and the mother in Chinese and English, alternating with what I wanted to say and how drunk I was getting.

See, the mother offered me some "alcohol", right? And I was like, yes of course I can drink alcohol! Not knowing that I was getting myself in for Baijiu, which is just about the most foul alcohol ever. The particular sample I got was 56% alcohol and we each drank a little shot glass of it (well, Marbrain gave me some of hers because she had to teach in the next hour), and of course I had to drink it, cheers and all, because it was the polite thing to do, but Biajiu is definitely not the sort of thing I'd choose to drink. Ever.

Then this week on Monday I went to Marbrain's house and we made hot pot together. We went for a walk around the city first - she wanted to show me somewhere I hadn't been before, which was nice but I just don't know the names of any of the places I have ever been! So it came to pass that I had been there before, a few times, but that was all right. We walked and talked and it was lots of fun. For the curious, I talk with her half in Chinese and half in English. Sometimes it's easier to say thing in one language as opposed to the other, so it can change easily, but it's good because she mostly speaks to me in Chinese but she knows how to translate if I don't quite get it.

Then we caught the bus to the supermarket near her house, took nearly an hour to buy all the ingredients for hot pot (lots of vegetables and thinly-sliced meat, basically) and some fruit and yoghurt for snacks. Making hot pot was lots of fun; mostly consisted of cleaning and chopping up all the vegetables, and of course the hot pot itself is really easy to make - just boil up some water and put whatever you want into it! I'll have to do it when I get back to Australia, because it's piss-easy! Just need some way to keep a pot of water boiling on the table....

ANDREAS' FAREWELL

Andreas' farewell proceeded much as Ardan's did, actually. We started out at the Korean restaurant (mainly because nobody had any better ideas and it was the only solid suggestion we had), our party comprised of myself, Andreas, Malcolm, Sarah, Luca, and a Japanese guy whose name I've forgotten but who used to be Malcolm's roommate and is a very sweet guy and remembers all of our names even if we can't remember his (Andreas was calling him Kyoto). After Korean food we walked to the bowling place (after the taxi fiasco last time, we figured it was better to go the way we knew), drinking large hot bubble milk teas and talking about random things (an amusing point: Malcolm, Andreas and I argued for a moment about the time difference between China and Japan before we realized... there was a Japanese guy with us; also we talked about aliens finding Earth).

Bowling was fun as usual, I had a spectacular second game with 127 points! I took a photo of the scorecard, just so that nobody would think I was just making it up. Then we proceeded to KTV, karaoke, where I started looking at the English music choices from the other direction so we had plenty of new music. I'm not really sure, of course, what we're going to do next time, because we may have used up all the good English songs, but I guess we'll see. I am really enthusiastic about karaoke, which is more than slightly embarrassing, and there are some videos that Luca took with my own camera to prove it: there are stirring duets of me with Sarah and Andreas singing NSync and Michael Jackson, respectively. But you are never seeing them.

From KTV we adjourned after getting really confused about how much we needed to pay (I think the dude was trying to tell us we needed to buy the room for the rest of the night, but if Malcolm couldn't tell and he was sober, I had no chance of knowing), went back into the cool night and caught taxis to the Jazz Club. I may not have mentioned the Jazz Club, but I went there once before with Niki, Ardan, Sarah, and Luca after going to the Indian place and we met up with lots of kids from the Languages University, including another Belgian and and Australian from Cronulla (which upped my ocker accent by about ten notches).

This time, we got there after any hope of a live band, and there were only a couple of groups left in the bar. We played darts for a while, which is always fun with really drunk people because their scores are only ever as good as their eyesight, but thankfully there were no injuries. We moved onto pool quickly, though, after I had determined that it was, indeed, pool and not billiards (there was some confusion), and my team (Andreas, Malcolm and I) got absolutely trounced, though somehow I managed to get two balls in the pockets, so I was very happy with that, given my alcohol levels. Throw in some popcorn and very bored looking staff after everyone had left but us, and you have our stint at the Jazz Club.

Then we went to our favorite late-night city drunk food place, 烤肉 (meat sticks) in the Muslim quarter. We walked there, taking our time and I took some random pictures, we got a timed-camera snap of us all with the Bell Tower lit up in the background, and it was definitely time for food by the time we got there. I don't know how many meat sticks there were, but we got bread and rice too.

I was up till 5AM digesting it all (and the Tim Tam Slam that Andreas made me teach him how to do once we got back to the dormitory).

OTHER STUFF

During this time frame:

1) Participated in teachers' meetings which included: introducing Australian money, talking about my childhood and where I live in Australia now, taking part in some Chinese word games and answering lots of difficult grammar questions (as per usual).

2) Discovered my favorite Chinese TV show, which is called "Home With Kids" (家有儿女), and it's really great! I mean, it's just a silly television show about a family and their kids, but I find it interesting on a societal level as well. The thing is that it is touted as "an ideal family", in the ads for it, but the family has three kids. Obviously, to have an interesting show you need more than just a typical one-child family, so this one is comprised of a perfectly legitimate three-child family. How is this possible, with the one-child policy? Both parents were married before and brought in one child, and then bore their own. One of the children gets to see his other father, but in my time of watching I haven't seen the other mother.
It's also interesting because the father seems to sometimes work at home, taking care of the kids while the mother is at work as a nurse. The other parts are just obvious Chinese customs making themselves known: the kids are left alone if nobody is at home, the grandparents are very involved in their lives, two of the children are boys with an older sister. But for the most part it's just a regular show, of course: the kids fight, try and get back at each other, the parents have trouble controlling them and knowing how to punish them, the grandparents think they know best of all.... I really like it and wish I could find it on DVD but they're only on episode 17, so I don't think I'll be successful.

3) Played a lot of Katamari on PS2, which Luca has set up in Sarah's room. So much fun!

And so that's up to today! A very condensed version, of course, there are way more details than I have put here, but I'm sure this is enough to digest for now.

That's all for now; I promise not to leave it so long next time!

So I have been putting off updating for a while because for about a week or so just after Christmas the internet went down due to an earthquake off the southern tip of Taiwan that just cut off China to most of the world. National websites and some other Asian websites were still accessible, but for the period between Christmas and New Years, I could only access Google, which handily has a station in China now. Thank god!

Anyway, then I got lazy and now it's nearly February, but here's my entry about Christmas and New Years, as summed up from my paper diary. Still to come: a basketball game, exam week, dinners with teachers from the English school, and another farewell to a German friend!

CHRISTMAS 2006!

We had a Christmas eve party at Niki's house, which was awesome loads of fun. I had been sick in bed the day before with food poisoning (my verdict on the culprit: dumplings from the night before, even though nobody else I ate with got sick), so it was a slow start for me, but I was feeling fine and the food was great and the company was even better, so it was all good! Twenty people turned up and I had orgnized some international Christmas music while Niki and Malcolm ordered a cake from Holliland cake shop (with the most massive dragon on it!) so it was all in all a great atmosphere.

The best part of the party was, however, the Secret Santa we put together! The way we organized it was that everyone would buy something random and non-gendered and at the party we brought them all together and then pulled names out of a hat. The name you pulled out was the person whose present you received and then that person got to pull a name out of the hat. It worked out really well, too! I'm sure most people thought about their presents like I did mine: that it was just something random and off-handed they didn't think too much about, but in the end it turns out that most people are really sweet and thoughtful and buy awesome presents even when they didn't know who it was going to!

There were some great gifts: Chinese "Monopoly" (in quotations because it was unofficial), cookies, chocolate, DVDs, incense, slippers and earmuffs, and metal puzzles. The metal puzzles were a big hit with everyone, and soon everyone was walking around trying to get metal puzzles apart and put them back together. Malcolm has some really funny photos I have yet to get from him (and his camera is broken for now so it'll be a while yet) of just about everyone at the party trying their hand at the puzzle. Somewhere after 10pm, once everyone had finally turned up and had some beer, we headed back out again to a club for some evening festivities.

It was a minor hassle getting 20+ people into taxis that would all end up at the same place, but we managed it, with a bit of a walk, and it was fun to see all the Chinese people celebrating as well. The city was absolutely buzzing with people, families and twenty-something partygoers alike, wearing Santa hats (some flashing, some with braids), waving neon things and noisemakers, firing off firecrackers, carrying sparklers. It was really interesting to note the difference between the way the Chinese celebrate and Westerners. I mean, we have out big parties with noise, but Christmas is... perhaps not a somber sort of holiday, but the idea is that you stay inside with your family and sing carols and keep to yourselves for the celebration. Chinese people get out there, walk around, and make lots of noise!

The club was your general nightclub fare, but it had a really amusing countdown to Christmas, sort of like at New Years. Nearing midnight, they had a singer up on a main platform near the dance floor, so Andreas dragged me down from our spot to watch his performance. Straight afterwards, the strangest thing happened. "Edelweiss" started playing over the loudspeakers, and about ten Chinese girls wearing long red dresses and carrying candles on their palms moved up onto the platform. They did a sort of slow dance to the song, waving the candles about, and then promptly stopped and a countdown from ten started. Firecrackers and sparklers went off at the end of the countdown, along with a loud techno version of Chinese "Jingle Bells" (which goes 'ding ding dang! ding ding dang!...' instead of jingle bells). It felt so much like New Years that Andreas decided a hug and a prompt "Happy Christmas" was in order.

Christmas day was great, I spent most of it on the phone with my parents, lounging around on the floor of my room (which I made more comfortable by spreading out my bed cover) and looking at my presents. One of them was the first season of the Jeeves and Wooster television series, which I promptly watched three of that evening. Other than a milk package unfortunately spilling all over my jeans, nothing else eventful happened on that day - definitely a nice, relaxing day after the Christmas eve party!

NEW YEARS

For New Years, we all gathered at Niki's place after coming from various things of our own for the evening. Niki had been stolen by her work for a mandatory celebration dinner (sounds like fun, no?), and Sarah and Luca were off doing their own thing, Andreas was spending the time in Xianyang county at a wedding party, and Malcolm and I went to the Indian restaurant near the Big Goose Pagoda (and ate way too much). With the exception of Andreas, of course, we all came together at Niki's house at around 10pm, along with a Kiwi friend of Niki's from work and her Chinese friend, and some beer, vodka, and a couple of hours later we rang in the New Year!

No resolutions, which was good, but at midnight we made New Years wishes. Mine were fairly tame: I wished to graduate, to travel around Australia more, and to continue with my Chinese studies even while I'm not at an institution studying it. Wishes sounded like a better idea than resolutions anyway, because there is always the chance that you'll break your resolutions, but it doesn't seem so bad if you just sort of don't get your wish, right? Maybe that's the wrong way of thinking about it, but resolutions always sounded so final to me, irreversible and sort of scary! Plus, whoever really keeps them? It's just upsetting in the end.

Niki headed out with her Kiwi friend after that, went to a club and the rest of our night at Niki's place was spent drinking and talking. Nothing in particular, of course, just random things and when there is enough alcohol you tend to forget things anyway; on New Years Day I tried to tell the a story about a cooking show I had watched earlier on New Years' Eve, but they stopped me halfway through and had to tell me I'd already told the story. This, of course, was the day after I had fallen asleep in the bathroom while the other were watching Queen of the Damned, after Niki had gotten back.

It was a fun evening though, despite being made fun of for falling asleep in the bathroom, and we all woke up after noon the next day as Malcolm cleaned up our mess (he is somewhat known for it, as he doesn't drink and always seems to be the one cleaning up drunk people's messes) and ate lunch at around three in the afternoon at the local North East cuisine restaurant - yum!

OTHER THINGS

During this time frame:

1) The first snow of the season came! I was attending class, and it lasted for about an hour in the morning. Nothing too spectacular, but it was the first (and only) snow I have seen in Xi'an, which is cause for happiness! I tried to take a video of it, but it was really so pathetic a snowfall that there doesn't seem to be anything on the screen!

2) We had a big party for all the foreigners at Jiaotong University, which really amounts for quite a few. We took up almost an entire hot pot restaurant, which was spectacular, and it was loads of fun! Not only were there the Chinese language students, but there is a big portion of foreigners studying regular undergraduate courses at the university - lots of courses are taught using English textbooks - so it was really an amazing turnout. Plus, who doesn't like to turn up for free hot pot and alcohol?

3) I saw a sheep being gutted on the side of the road one of the days as well, just after I'd eaten lunch with a Korean classmate of mine. It was lying on the ground, split open, and someone was just pulling bits out with his bare hands. Rather impressive! We stood around and watched for a while, and I have to admit to finding it quite fascinating, but it hasn't put me off my mutton so I'm thankful for that. It was being done just out front of our local noodle shop, and all I have to say is... well, at least we know the ingredients are fresh?

In the interest of not making each post too long, I will leave this one here and just continue on with the stories mentioned at the fore of this entry in another!