The Beginning

It's hard to believe a week has gone by since I arrived in China. Between jetlag, moving in, and all of the other various registrations and procedures, I haven't had much time to think. I'll try to put my thoughts down in an organized and concise fashion.

Qingdao hasn't changed much since last summer. The most noticeable differences are the advertisements and merchandise, which have (mercifully) reverted from full-on "Olympic propaganda" mode back to Engrish slogans and bizarre commercials. Some of the same faces from the same universities have appeared around campus again, but no one I know well. All in all, Qingdao is about the same.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest difference is in my studies. Last summer, we had a single textbook for our 4-hour-per-day class that covered topics such as how to order at a restaurant, how to navigate a hospital, how to bargain, basic Chinese opera, and all kinds of useful stuff. This summer, our 4-hour class has been divided into four 1-hour "mini classes," each with its own teacher and set of materials (class is still from 8am to noon, though). We have a literature class, where we read short stories and talk about the characters, themes, etc.; a movie class, where we talk about the movie we (supposedly) watched the night before; a media class, where we read articles about a bunch of different topics from newspapers and the internet; and a writing class, where we're given a simple topic and have an hour to write an essay on it. All of the classes are pretty interesting; the movie class is particularly neat because we usually pick one cultural thing from the movie and discuss it at length.

Last summer we got to go on bus rides all over the city and we saw all kinds of cool stuff, but this year we haven't done any afternoon activities at all so far. Our Chinese roommates have been delayed for a week just in case we have swine flu, so maybe we'll start doing stuff after that. I don't really know what the Chinese government says about swine flu over here, but there's some sort of quiet hysteria about it. The fact that our roommates have been delayed, us getting scanned for a fever before being allowed off of the plane, people on the bus changing seats away from you if you cough or sniffle, and a taxi driver even asking one of my roommates point-blank if he had swine flu, all point to some sort of weird phobia of the disease despite it having a really low mortality rate. Oh well. Chinese people are crazy.

Anyway, I'll try to update at least once a week, unless

The Suspense

Only a few days left until it's time to go. Of course, I haven't started packing... and I don't really have anything interesting to say. So. Have a comic.



Cheers,
Zhou Zhenning

Three days until I leave the US...

The Intro

My name is 周真宁(Zhou Zhenning). I'm a 白人，a 男人 and a rising junior at the University of Mississippi who is majoring in International Studies and Chinese. At the request of a 贵朋友 I'm starting this blog to chronicle my time in Qingdao and Shanghai. For those unfamiliar with what I'll be doing for the next year:

First, I will be studying for two months in Qingdao under the National Language Flagship Program's Qingdao program. From June 15 to August 14 I will be having class from 8-12 am each weekday, with one week off for a mid-term sightseeing trip (hopefully not Henan this time).

Second, starting around August 30, I will be in Shanghai until June 2010 at one of two programs. The first is a CIEE program in Shanghai, under which I will attend Shanghai Eastern Normal University and take classes with other Americans. The second is a CSC program which would have me studying at Fudan University with all kinds of international students, and under the financial auspicies of the Chinese government itself (scary). The second one seems like the better and more viable option at the moment, but stay tuned for updates.

So, here is my China blog. As with all China blogs, there will be posts about weird food, crazy customs, taxi drivers, ludicrous adventures while intoxicated or otherwise, nostalgia and
homesickness, and of course lots of pictures of pagodas, seas of people, and toothless old men.

There will also be a fair amount of Chinese peppered in these posts, probably, so if you have Firefox, which you should, you can get a neat little extension called Chinese Pera-kun, which will let you right-click to enable it and the get auto translations of Chinese words when hovering over them. (Incidentally, the name pera-kun comes from the Japanese "perapera" which is like "blah blah" or "gobbledegook" in English, and "-kun," a Japanese honorific for boys. The reason it's Japanese is because the creator first created Rikai-chan, which does the same thing for Japanese. Also, "-chan" is an honorific for girls, which is probably why "-kun" was chosen. The more you know!)


Cheers,
Zhou Zhenning

Nine days left until I leave the US...