Past week

Starting Tuesday.
I taught my language partner Lu Yan Xia / Lindsay how to throw the
frisbee. Her backhand is decent. I taught her the flick and it is
quite impressive. Most beginners have horrible flicks that wobble and
don't fly. Not the case. She throws a crisp laser, the only issue is
accuracy. Once we calibrate the weapon, she'll be good to go.

On Wednesday during lunch I was eating with 3 other white guys
in my class. We were approached by this Chinese student and asked to
be extras in a Chinese film, because we were white. The deal was to
leave the university at 6 am, travel 1 hour and be back by 5pm. So we
decided that this was a unique opportunity for a story so we said we
would do it. So the next morning we leave, in a van that holds about
15 people. There were 7 people from my university and one white guy
who is an actor. He claims to be the 2nd highest paid foreign actor
in China, and he speaks fluent Chinese. He said he'd been awake
filming and traveling for 3 days and was trying to sleep. We drove
about an hour and figured we had arrived. But we were just picking up
some random dude from the side of the road. So we drove another hour
and figured we had arrived. But we were just picking up some old
Chinese guys who were musicians. They had trombones, bass drums,
trumpets etc. So now the van was packed, the actor was ticked off
because he couldn't lay down to sleep.
We drove another 4 hours, which was horrible. Along the way, the
actor told us his advice on learning Chinese. Get away from the
university quickly and live with a chinese person or girlfriend. He
said the University was the place in Beijing where the most English
was spoken. And he says that lifestyle is just meeting other English
speakers and hanging out and partying with them. And its true, I
realized that I spoke Chinese in class and with my language partner
occasionally. In daily life I barely use it, or its extremely simple,
like how much does this cost? Whenever I run into a problem with
communication I just assume that I will learn more in class and in
the future I will be alright. However, I'm in Beijing but I mainly
speak in English and never have the need to communicate in Chinese.
His advice short of leaving the university was to get a tutor and
every day tell them about your day. Since it is applicable and
relevant, you will learn how to describe your day and since you
repeat it every day you will learn it and it is meaningful to you.
Everything that I know really well is stuff that is meaningful to me
and applicable. Anyway, it was a long drive.
We arrived at our destination, which was this field with a mock
train station and a real set of train tracks with 2 steam engines and
some cars. There were a bunch of Chinese people running around
filming something. We put on a coat and tie and were to act as French
people in 1911 building a railroad right before some Chinese
revolution. So we sat around for a while, ate one bit of a gross
lunch they gave us, sat in the rain and finally they had me and 2
girls stand on a train car and act excited to be arriving in China as
we pulled into the station where a crowd was applauding us. So yeah.
We were there from 12-7pm. I talked with some of the Chinese dudes, I
arm wrestled one, posed for pictures, etc. We left at 7pm and I fell
asleep then woke up as we are driving through some mountain pass that
we didnt go through earlier. This road was horrible and windy through
these villages. The potholes were like craters and our van was just
bouncing around. I thought we could break and axle. I was pretty
anxious at this time because I had no clue where we were, it was very
late, the van was very uncomfortable, I was tired, etc. My friends
and I were just like, this is China, this is crazy. The mountain pass
was to save us an hour of driving. 7 hours after leaving, we arrived
at the university and I went home and went to sleep. This was 2 am.
Well now I can say I was an extra in a chinese mini series. But I got
300 kuai ($38).
On Friday my class went out to lunch to learn to order things.
After that I slept and went to dinner with Worldlink at a Peking Duck
restaurant. When you have duck, the restaurant fills you up on many
dishes ahead of time and then serves slices of duck. The duck is more
for taste rather than a main course. It was good. After that I took a
cab over to this bar called Alfa where a guy who plays ultimate here
was having a birthday party. I got there about an hour early so I
talked to the waitress and the 2 bartenders, all who seemed to be
about 18 years old. So they are my homies now. Chinese people love
Americans who try to speak Chinese and are friendly. The party turned
out to be a lot of the birthday boy's friends, and a few ultimate
people.
My friends from my class came by, and we were talking and
considering the actors advice. We realized we were just living life
very similar to the states, for example we were at a club with almost
all English speakers. So we decided we would start to talk as much
Chinese as possible and that we would sound stupid doing it. I also
decided I would spend more time with my language and try to be more
productive and record more phrases. So I will carry around a small
notepad.
Today, Saturday, I really did nothing except try to go see a
Chinese movie with my friend Floyd from Mississippi. But it was sold
out so we came back and watched some of my roommate's DVD, a movie
that was in Mandarin and had characters for subtitles. We tried to
see what we could hear.
Tomorrow is ultimate all day. This week I have off from school,
I will try to travel around Beijing and have fun.