Some initial Observations and Thoughts

The Duke program has been intense so far. My schedule for school is as follows:

8:00 am- Lecture class- 1 hour
9:10 am- 1st drill class
10:10 am: 2nd drill class
11:30: one on one with a teacher- 20 minutes
12:00 pm: one hour session with my language partner

HOMEWORK: as many as 90 new words/characters, plus pages and pages of grammar notes, writing exercises, and one weekends we have to write an essay.

It’s a lot so far, but I already feel like my Chinese has gotten a lot better. Last night, after a bunch of us went out and we took cabs home, our cab driver took us to the wrong location, we were able to get home safely because we could describe to the driver the area the campus is in and in general where it was. It felt really good to know that I can speak Chinese well enough that I don’t get stuck in really terrible situations like a cab getting lost when you are in a foreign country.

I am sitting here listening to Lou Reed and more or less enjoying the beautiful view of the city... well not terribly beautiful but incredibly urban. The city just seems so much newer-- not all that ascetically pleasing for the most part from an architectural standpoint. Nevertheless, there is this certain air of incredibly fast progress. Perhaps I only think that because I logically know that the city has developed quite rapidly so I am superimposing that knowledge onto what I see, but somehow it still seems incredibly futuristic. Rather than having normal playgrounds there are these outdoor exercise equipment of sorts in bright bob-the-builder colors,. Instead of people laying outside during the summertime to get bronzed, all the women walk around in long clothing and sun umbrellas to stay "like the moon." The differences seem to be from the minute-- such as the very different kinds of fruit in the produce section in the local Wu-Mart-- to the macro-- like the huge cloud of smog that encapsulates the entire city. To be fare, I am told that since on two days so far we have seen the sun and/or as blue sky, that it is actually not very bad.

I have also been told that since the Beijing Olympics, Chinese people are a lot more use to seeing foreigners, but if I am walking with a small group of white people I still feel like we are being constantly stared at. I am not sure if it is because of our skin, or more because we are a group of white people speaking Chinese to each other, I’m guessing its more of the latter.
Sometimes I forget that I am actually in China because I have spent a lot of time indoors studying. Then there are times like yesterday when we went to the Forbidden City. When we approached the outer wall, I saw the giant poster of Mao that hangs by the gate that faces Tian’an men Square, and it just hit me how far away from home and college I am.

Well I am off to write an essay, and I hope to be a little more diligent about my blog now that I have finally gotten my computer to be able to access Blogger.

-Camila