Life in Chiner

So it's been really busy here recently. Classes have gotten much tougher and require a lot more studying than they initially did. Now that we can read and write characters we have to start memorizing about 30 per lesson and we do two to three lessons a week. So that means we're learning up to 90 characters a week on top of learning the meaning, history, and pronunciation of those characters. But I'll try to catch up what's been going on these past couple of weeks in this short blog.
The bamboo raft was definitely well worth the 165 Yuan. We all woke up early the next morning to get ready because the bus to take us to the bamboo raft ride was supposed to pick us up at 8:20. We went down to the hotel's front desk to talk to them about booking our tickets back to Chongqing because we wanted to make sure that this time we got soft sleeper tickets. Well after a big long ordeal they ended up wanting to charge us somewhere around 430 Yuan which we knew was way too much cause when we looked it up online it should have been somewhere around 275 Yuan. So we decided to just go back to the train station later that day and do it ourselves, meaning the others in my group talk and I just encourage them since I'm not advanced enough to talk about anything like that in Chinese yet.
So the "bus" which ended up being a small van picked us up around 8:35 because they had a difficult time finding the hotel we were staying at. We get into the "bus" and there are two Irish people, two Germans, and two other Americans. At first it was kind of awkward because we were crammed into such a small space with people we didn't know but after a few minutes into the ride I started talking with the two other Americans and having a good conversation. I forgot to mention that Guilin is even deeper into the rain forest than Chongqing and it's still the rainy season. So it's pouring down rain and we're on our way to the bamboo raft ride down a large river. They take us down these small back roads that have entire sections wiped out by the rain and we're in this tiny bus. Needless to say we're all getting thrown around in the back and getting to know those we're sitting by very well from being thrown around onto each other. Well after a good 30-45 minutes of that we finally arrive at our "boat ramp." The rain was still coming down really hard so we weren't sure if we would actually get to go down the river. Well, the Chinese like their money and definitely did not want to have to return their money so they decided to go for it. They herded our group onto a rickety old bamboo raft with a small engine strapped onto the back with some bungee cords and tape and off we went. Two hours later, we arrived at we thought was the town, Yanshuo, that we were traveling to. But we weren't so lucky. They put us in these small van like vehicles with no sides other than a little bar to hold onto and then took us for a 30 minute treacherous ride along the river's cliff side. We finally arrived in Yanshuo two more bus rides later.
We then stayed in Yanshuo and walked around for a few hours. It was actually a rather disappointing city other than the magnificent mountains all around it. Not to mention it was still raining and we were soaked from our raft ride because the "cover" over our heads had holes all over it. So we decided to go ahead and grab our bus back to Guilin and go out and chill that night. It was about an hour bus ride back that I was only awake for 5 minutes of which was the very beginning and then I woke up and we were back in Guilin.
That night we were all really tired so we decided to just go out to the night market, grab some food and then head back to rest up. The night market was surprisingly nice. It was about half a mile long row of tents set up on a sectioned off road that had all kinds of trinkets and souvenirs. After that we just went back to the hotel, watched some volleyball and soccer on TV then hit the hay. The next day, Tuesday, we didn't do all that much because we had to catch our train back to Chongqing. This time we made sure we had soft sleepers. So after going back to a restaurant we really liked we packed our stuff up and headed to the train station. This time without much trouble and only a little staring we got onto the train and found our compartment. Wow, what a difference from the hard sleepers. Here we had four beds, with about four inch thick mattresses, feather comforters, two feather pillows, a door that closed off our compartment, and air conditioning. It was amazing! We left around one thirty in the afternoon so that we wouldn't have to spend the night and then a whole day on the train. This way we got most of the ride over with in the beginning and then when we woke up we were back in Chongqing. We played cards, napped, ate some train food and made a video of our Guilin experience. So overall, we now know that for any long train ride a soft sleeper is very much needed if you want to arrive to your destination well rested.
So that was basically two weeks ago now. I haven't blogged as much as I wanted to so I can't remember everything we've done since then, because it feels like it has been more than two weeks. After we got back to Guilin a bunch of us contracted some form of stomach bug whether it was from the food, water or something else we're not really sure but it wiped us out for a couple days and made it very difficult to focus in classes.
The next weekend (June 18-20) we didn't really do all that much. We went out to a nice area of the city called Jeifengbei Friday night and walked around to see the city at night because it's lit up all along the river. The rest of the weekend we basically stayed around the dorm and caught up on sleep and tried to let our stomachs get back to normal. A couple of us went on a big cooking spree that way we could control what we ate more carefully. We found a place that had really trustworthy chicken breasts so we've been cooking all sorts of chicken dishes.
Then last week we didn't really do anything other than classes. On Friday our group leaders took us to the art show at Chongqing Fine Arts School. There were some crazy sculptures and paintings that showed the more modern culture of China. Friday night about six of us went to KTV (karaoke) and sang for about 4-5 hours. It was so much fun. We just picked any English song we could find and sang at the top of our lungs. We had our own room with our own bathroom and we could be as loud as we wanted all night long. It was definitely a nice relaxer after a long week of classes. Saturday night we all stayed up till 2:30 A.M. which is when the American soccer team played in the World Cup. I think we kept people in our hall up late due to all of our cheering and booing.
This Sunday was probably the best day of the past weekend though. One night when a bunch of us went out we met a group of Chinese college students who study at the Fine Arts School here in Chongqing. They insisted that we come see the student's art show at the old campus so Sunday that's just what we did. We met up with them in the afternoon and went and looked around the campus which had art work all over. It was a really cool campus and a much more modern feel than the school we are at. They then took us to a cafe where we had some coffee and snacks. They were so interested just to talk. We all went around and introduced ourselves. Us Americans introduced ourselves in Chinese and the Chinese introduced themselves in English which was a really neat experience. I couldn't always understand them but they were very patient and had a couple fairly good English speakers in their group.
Then they insisted on taking us to hotpot which is a Sichuan Province specialty. Basically there is a big burner in the middle of the table which they put a big pot on. This pot was divided into two sections, a crazy spicy mixture and a not so spicy mixture. They then heat up the pot and bring out all the food we ordered....raw. We then can put into whichever side of the bowl we want and cook it. It's actually a really cool idea and gives you a lot of flavor and truly freshly cooked food. The only downside is that the Chinese eat some very different food than we are used to. To add to my list of strange foods I had cow stomach, some sorts of fungus, possibly dog (we're not sure), and other meats that we don't know. But because they bought all of this food for us it would be extremely rude to turn it down. The only thing I turned down was a little fish that looked like it should have been swimming still. Although the cow stomach was not very pleasing, the rest of the food was actually really good. I've now eaten lots of different types of fungus, horse ear, cow stomach, duck, duck tongue, chicken tongue, chicken foot, chicken innards, possibly dog and I'm sure there has been some other stuff that I just don't want to know what it was. So I'll leave you with that until next time. :)