Today is pizza day at Vineyard so I’m going there for dinner. Also, the midterm exams are happening on Thu/Fri/Sat covering everything between chapters 1 through 19. I still do not remember all characters. I’m getting better at reading though.

Found a study tip online:

Now I’m off for some pizza.

-t

I wanted to see the Great Wall so I went on a weekend trip to Beijing. I got to fly with China Eastern Airlines (MU) and that was a great experience. Red carpet at the airport for checkin, red carpet at the lounge entrance, etc… I even got slippers to take home! The Chinese are holding the APEC meeting in Beijing and thus had closed all nearby factories and cut traffic in half. As a result the air was clear and breathable!

In Beijing I took this organised bus tour to the wall. It was a typical tourist trap tour with visits to interesting museums (shops) like the jade museum (shop) and the silk museum (shop). I did not buy any ridiculously expensive jade and especially not any silk as we all well know that Hangzhou, not Beijing, is the silk capital of China…

The Great Wall was great. The tourist bit was well maintained but I walked to the off-limits section that isn’t maintained and saw what a thousand years does to stone walls.

There was no need to walk up to the wall:

The well maintained section:

The real wall:

Jade shop:

The next day I went for a stroll around Tiananmen(天安门) square. The east is red:

Flew back with Air China. No red carpet.

-t

I realised that I haven’t written anything about the real reason I’m here so here’s a little something on my actual studies. The midterm exam is on Nov 20th so that’s gonna be a nice birthday gift. Amazingly our class has managed to stay on schedule and we have gone through everything in the first book; all 15 chapters and about 300 characters. I recognise about 80% of them but can only write around 50% so that leaves quite a bit of room for improvement. Now that we’ve moved on to the second book the complexity of the language has gone up a notch. Also, there’s way more new characters to be learned in each chapter; 30 instead of 15 like in the beginning.

I have learned to speak way better than I expected and I can have simple conversations with the locals. That I’m very proud of.

Here’s a snapshot of the book as well as one of my notebook:

Today there’s a 50 word essay about “How did I spend my weekend” for homework so I’ll start working on that now.