Home, Sweet Home?

Well, as you can see, I’ve done an excellent job in keeping up with blogging... Anyway, I was originally placed with a host family where the only English speaker was the 16 year old daughter. As you can imagine, having a 16 year old as my translator was pretty stressful, especially when factoring in her English level, which was classified as 'A Little' (but should have been 'Very Little'. After the first week of classes and realizing that I had about 4 hours of cultural or political reading a night, in addition to an accelerated Chinese class, I almost had a breakdown- and when I say almost, I mean that I did.

I spent an hour in the Residence Directors office crying and blubbering, but there was no way for him to change my living situation. However, we figured out a system where I would go ask him to text my host mother a question in Chinese, then she would respond and he would tell me what she was saying. It was definitely a way to create communication, but I would not call it a ‘better’ system.

But then an opportunity arose for me to switch homes. The other student who was interested in a switch explained that her host-grandfather was a 75-year-old man who was a semi-retired sociology professor. His live-in maid did not speak any English, but he was fluent. I was a little hesitant, but I wanted to meet him. I went over for the other student’s birthday celebration and a few minutes after I walked in, Julius (his ‘English Name’) handed me a long painted picture of Beijing in the 1940’s.

“This was the Beijing of my childhood,” he explained, and then went on to explain that now he mainly specialized in the urban development of Beijing. He and his Taiwanese friend then went on to talk about the PRC and government changes since the turn of the century. Basically, I had just come in and we were already talking history and politics. I was sold. To add to that, the third resident of the apartment is a fat cat named Bones who has one green eye and one blue eye.

We made the switch the next day, and I am really happy here.

The view from my window looks like this:

But according to Julius, when he moved into the apartment 25 years ago, the entire area was rural farmland.

Anyway, for the next two weeks I will be going on a trip to study in Tibet. We will be spending six days in Lhasa, six days hiking, and two days on a train ride back to Beijing. Basically, there is no way that the next two weeks are not going to be awesome.
Huí tóu jiàn!