Friday

Today I had my first class. There are 15 people in my class, a
few are American. Most of them appear to be older than me. We are in
class 8-12 and 2-4. The teacher mostly speaks Chinese, but can speak
English. We introduced each other in Chinese. Most of the people have
a little bit of experience, but its very scattered, just like me. The
while the teacher would repeat something that someone said and
explain it, or give us new ways to say things. Then we learned about
pronunciation and did a worksheet where we had to get signatures of
other people in the class who could answer a question or fit a
description. For example whoever had the longest trip to get to
Beijing. So the guy from Brazil who traveled 36 hours was the man. So
its hard to say what I learned to say, a lot of the stuff I had heard
before or seemed fairly easy to me, but the most challenging part was
the listening and comprehension. That is why it is good that I am in
almost the beginners class. It will be great practice hearing the
language being repeated. After lunch we took a walking tour of the
campus. The teacher gave us a sheet with all of the landmarks written
in Chinese and English. So we walked around and talked about each.
Like this is a cafe, what do you do at a cafe? You eat a meal. Or,
this is a basketball court, here you play basketball. This is the
foreign student dormitory, that is the Chinese student dormitory. The
tour was very informative.
Later I tried to take money out of the ATM with my Bank of China
debit card, but the money in that account is in USD so the ATM gave
me errors. I also tried to put a SIM card in my cellphone so that I
can use it here, but it is locked to only Cingular and the phone
won't allow me to enter the code that Cingular gave me and said would
work. Frustrating. That night we watched a movie here, Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy. DVD's here are cheap, around $1, and they
usually have movies on DVD out very quickly. We also got Transporter
2, which I think is still in theaters.