Saturday January 15th, 2011

First and foremost, let me say that I apologize for delaying my writing of the past few days’ journals. As I told Morgan not too many hours ago, the program has upped the ante on us. You’ll see below.

Today, we got up and attending an orientation meeting with the program director of ACC, also known as teacher Zhang. She basically read the handbook from cover to cover, and I really wanted to shoot myself for having read the handbook before my arrival. It was a very long three hours sitting in a cold auditorium on campus, but at the end, I got 7 free bottles of water. That’s not too bad, I’d say.

At the end of the meeting, we signed the language pledge, which said that I would not use English over the next four months except when communicating with people who do not speak Chinese. Thus, my blog is excluded, along with talking to family and friends on the phone; however, Teacher Zhang says that I should limit my conversations with you and my exposure to “contamination.” This lady just might be more intense than my Chinese teacher at Ole Miss.

We got a two hour break for lunch, during which I called the homeland and went back to the congee restaurant from the day before. It was good, once again, and we all sat around awkwardly wishing we could speak English.

After lunch, we each had separate class meetings. There, we got to meet the teachers for each of our classes. We have 6 that will rotate for our classes: Teachers Sun, Zhu, Zhang, Zhao, Li, and Ding. Try saying that 5 times fast. They all talked inordinately slow during this class meeting, and it also made me want to shoot myself. I amazed all of the teachers by knowing how to say their names. They all think that I have “excellent character recognition.” Maybe I do, but I feel like I’m constantly messing up new words and how to pronounce them.

We then had a short break, which was followed by another meeting with the teachers. This meeting was designed to be a meet and greet with the teachers. I talked to teachers Zhu and Ding the entire time. Zhu is a positively enchanting woman. She was born in Hai’Er Bin, which is a town not far from the Russian Border, on the Pacific Coast. She has a very strange accent, and she is a giantess of a Chinese woman, at an impressive 5’ 10”. I talked to Ding about Chinese bai jiu [white alcohol: a pure grain alcohol made from rice] – for some strange reason – and also about Qingdao beer – which may very well be the only good tasting beer in this country.

Then, I got some food with some fellow classmates at a Uighur restaurant nearby. I recommend looking up Uighur on Wikipedia – The Free Encyclopedia – if you’d like to know more about the people from this highly contentious province. The food was good, but ordering it was incredibly complicated, as it was a Uighur restaurant. I sat by Joy at the restaurant. She is the only 5^th year student, and she spent the first few years of her life here. I really like talking to her.

Then, we walked around to some of the shops in the area – Christina, Joy, Shazeda, Alex and I. There are some interesting stationary shops in the hood, with some excellent Chinglish translations throughout the store. We all hung out in the Shazeda/Joy room, with Luke and Michael until about 12, when we all retired in preparation for an early morning.