The best remedy for not studying the night before a class is to wake up the morning of that class and study. Well, it may not be a very good method… Retrospective analysis reveals that it may be a fairly bad practice. This I know for sure: I did horribly on the quiz this morning, possibly setting an all-time record for quizzes in college.
After class, I was itching to take my wheels on a spin, and I rode over to the west side of 3rd ring road. This section of the city is much more residential and looks a lot better than our neighborhood. There are quite a few park areas and there is actually grass in some places. While riding around, I found a very cool farmer’s market, where you could purchase anything from your typical vegetables to eggs by the crate load, to every species of mushroom imaginable, to nuts to kimchi. I ate lunch in a quaint-looking residential district, eating a beef-cookie and some egg soup.
I had just enough time to ride back to my one-on-one class, park the bike and run upstairs for class. When I got there, Teacher Shi was milling about the room, “Do you want to take a smoke break?” I had no problem with that, but I let him keep his carcinogen-filled cigarettes.
After that, I set up a Zinch account and a LinkedIn profile, with the hope that they might help me find an internship for the summer, as well as when I look for a job in the future. We’ll have to see how that goes. If you get the chance, friend me!
At this point, I had a mad case of cabin fever, the only cure for which was a bike ride to the south of the university. I went on a search for a TV tower that I espied from atop the mountain at the New Summer Palace, and this led me on a twisting path through Beijing. I found myself, on more than one occasion, traveling down a one-way street filled with cars, and once invoked a near freak-out by the guards of a facility that I mistakenly took to be the entrance to the TV tower. The facility must have had something to do with the massive government apparatus of Beijing, but the purpose of the building remained a mystery to me. I also passed the Beijing Center for Water Purification. What does one do at the Beijing Water Purification Facility? I concluded that they must do very little.
I found the TV tower after having to ride my bike through some very sketchy-looking housing projects. It was interesting looking, but I was in no mood to pay the entrance fee to go inside the tower. I rode on and found where the writers of TV series for CCTV (Beijing’s – and China’s – premier TV station) work, and also a very interesting residential area that looked like a museum from the street.
I returned to the dorm on a winding path through the city, and I then proceed to Bally. After my workout, I got some food at Ma La Tang to alleviate my colossal hunger.
When I returned to the dorm, I was greeted by the sound of Teachers Shi and Wang at the end of our hall. Teacher Shi is perhaps the coolest teacher in the program, closely followed by Teacher Wan, who looks exactly like Jack White to me. When I got there, Jiang Lei – one of the other 4th year students was there, and we talked to the teachers about everything from Sherlock Holmes, to British Literature, to the nuances of Chinese. The teachers finished their tutoring session at 9:30 and left Jiang Lei and I with Joy. We chatted about the program and they got a kick out of my package story. Joy said that I would have been better off looking for the things in my package myself (coco butter, deodorant, peanut butter, earplugs etc), but Jiang Lei took my side and said that any search for something foreign was near futile.
Jiang Lei then told us about his shoes. He wears a size 13 shoe, and when he got here last semester, he realized that he needed another pair of running shoes. He went on a series of expeditions in search of suitable shoes, and after a few weeks, he gave up. Everyone seems to know someone else who sells shoes that “should fit,” but none of the vendors had a shoe that big – even in this city of 14 million people (or however many live here now; no one can keep track). He concluded that to find shoes, he would “need to find a cave in the remote hills north of Beijing and find the hermit who lives in a cave. If you can answer his three riddles, he’ll let you have your shoes.”
Then, there arose a party on the 6th floor, in which I did not participate. Instead, I went to do some homework for tomorrow. When I started, I realized the immensity of the homework but managed to put a dent in the workload before going to bed.
I didn’t get to sleep until well after 1:00, but I still went to bed before my roommate. When sleeping in my room, it is helpful to get a t-shirt and drape it over your eyes, so that you cannot see the grating fluorescent light emitting from his desk.
I’ll write soon!
Love,
Jamey
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