I opened my last post with an image of a lovely bag of Yunnan Arabica coffee. I learnt a valuable lesson yesterday - don't make assumptions if you can't read the label.
The one on the left, that I bought earlier this afternoon, has pretty damn good ground coffee beans. The one on the right, that I bought two of yesterday, has a mix of instant coffee, milk powder and sugar. You can imagine my disgust when I got up this morning for my morning brew! It was clearly marked on the pink/red labels what was in there, if, of course, you can read Chinese. Alas, a week has not been enough to get me to that point yet :-).
With Monday's classes not till the afternoon, I decided to have another go at opening a bank account on Monday morning. I walked the half-hour or so back to the main branch of the Bank of China and managed to get myself in front of a teller who spoke reasonable English. I was a bit uncomfortable about the fact that the teller was actually serving an elderly woman at the time, who just had to wait while they spent about 20 minutes trying to establish whether or not I could open a bank account. I was eventually told to go and sit down while they sorted things out. About 20 minutes later I was called back up and was asked for my phone number - they would have to get back to me as they had no idea how to open a bank account for a foreigner... And it wouldn't be today. I briefly thought about trying at the China Construction Bank just across the road but then had a thought - maybe the branch closest to the uni would have done it before? So I headed there, now with pretty low expectations of a positive outcome, to give it one last try for the day. This branch was empty and when they had established who had the best English of the available tellers, I was sat down and started handing over documents and explaining what I wanted to do. There was again much discussion and pouring over my passport and uni acceptance letter and I was sure that they would tell me that I wasn't going to be able to open a bank account until I had been given my residence permit, which is not going to happen for at least another couple of weeks. But the scrutinising continued and I was eventually handed a Tax Residency declaration form. Progress! I hadn't been given a form before! I didn't have all the details so suggested I go back to uni and collect them and return with the form filled in, which I promptly did. As I couldn't get the "proper" address of the flat/dormitory from the Admin office, I fell back to good ol' trusty Google maps... I thought would give it a go anyway :-). After returning and then sitting for another hour or so I left the bank again, this time proudly in possession of my Great Wall debit card. Success!
The weather from last Sunday until today mid-afternoon has been absolute rubbish. There might have been half an hour of sun but with all the grey and rain that just meant it got hot as well as being very humid. I was expecting thunderstorms and downpours, which we've had, but also quite a bit of sun in between. Not so! It has been actually pretty cold during the night and I have definitely been needing the duvet. I did get a decent walk around the campus and direct surrounds on Tuesday after dinner though, and I finally found the Red Spaceship that I can see from my kitchen window! Turns out the campus is right next to a pretty big park, where the red protrusion resides. There is some quite dense bush around, and some tracks into it, so when the ground gets a little less wet I'll definitely have an explore.
So after lunch on Monday, with a first success under my belt, I started my first class in high spirits. My Monday class is listening comprehension, but in reality pretty much all of my classes for the first week were dedicated to pronunciation and distinguishing the various sounds and tones. Both my two teachers were very impressed by my pronunciation and ability to distinguish sounds and tones, at least until they heard me try and put more than one syllable together, or listen to sentences rather than single words. With my linguistics background and a few languages already under my belt, I am able to hear and produce individual sounds pretty well. There were a few sounds I was not doing correctly but with a little correction I was making them "perfectly". Alas, one doesn't speak a language one syllable at a time with breaks in between, and when several of them need to be put together then things quickly break down for me. Having to think of both what one is saying and how one is saying it is pretty complicated, and when you have to change tones depending on what the following tone is (regexp forward-lookup!!!), then it quickly gets too much for my withering old brain. I have a year though, so I'm not getting worried yet :-).
I have two (young) teachers, both of whom are excellent teachers and very nice. He Laoshi ("teacher He") seems like a bit of a language nerd - she is teaching a super-interesting sounding course on the evolution of Chinese characters - and I may try and sit in on some of the cool stuff she is teaching in the second half of the year. I have listening on Monday afternoons, "comprehensive Chinese" (I haven't quite worked out how it's different from the rest yet...) on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, reading on Thursday morning and spoken Chinese on Friday morning. Due to Monday's Dragon Boat Festival day being a bank holiday, Guo Laoshi asked if we could move this coming Monday's class to Saturday morning, which we duly did. By the end of the week both teachers were pushing me to start watching television - I really, really need to be hearing lots of spoken Chinese and tv/films are a great way to do that.
For the moment I can't watch the actual television, as there is something wrong with the antenna (or more likely antenna socket/cable) - no matter how much playing around I did I never got further than a bright blue screen... China has plenty of websites where you can watch tv and movies online for free, so thanks to my unlimited data mobile connection (40GB at full 4G speeds, then 3mb/s to 100GB, then 256kb/s above that, for around 13€/mth), I started watching some Chinese movies. There are actually plenty of free Western movies but I'm not here to learn English or French! Most of the big sites are actually completely legal - many of the more recent both Chinese and Western movies require a subscription (about 21€ per year), and you get a minute of ads at the beginning on the free movies (if you don't have a subscription). I'll probably get a subscription but will not need it for a while. China is pumping *massive* amounts of money and energy into developing their film industry and the results are starting to get pretty good. I read about a $250M USD budget for a pure Chinese movie (so not a partnership with a Hollywood studio) recently.
I have a different book for each of the 4 classes, though there is a considerable amount of overlap in vocabulary and progression (all 4 deal with pronunciation for the first few chapters, even the reading book!). I have been spending quite a lot of time setting up my Spaced Repetition (flashcards++) software with the vocabulary for the first 15 or so book chapter lessons (I'll probably be doing 1-3 lessons per day over the two-hour classes). I must admit I'm a little surprised/annoyed (frightened?) at how I was able to completely forget so much after only the few months since I stopped working on my Chinese in early March. I went from knowing around 500-600 characters well (you give me the English word, I'll give you the Chinese character(s) and pronunciation) to knowing maybe 100. I definitely don't have to re-learn everything from scratch but it is taking considerably more than just seeing the characters again and associating them with the English words. I would be totally lost with the Anki programme though - even if I forgot lots of stuff after using it, without it I would probably only be learning a fifth of the number of characters/words. Only time will tell how many characters I can durably learn over the long term though!
It lightened up today a little after lunch and just as I was going down the stairs to go for a walk to the big park on the east edge of town, it started raining again! The rain only lasted half an hour or so, so I grabbed my umbrella and set off. By the time I had left the campus the sun was already shining fully and I immediately started to regret not taking a hat. Yuxi is over 1600m up, and the sun is most unforgiving at that altitude. Many women (and a few men) carry sun umbrellas and I can now see why. I don't know whether I'll ever wander around town with a sun umbrella but there will definitely be some slip, slop, slapping going on (in-joke for Kiwis...)! The walk to the park is around 45 minutes and I was able to keep mostly out of the sun. There are trees lining most of the larger streets (does that make them avenues?) which is great for when it just starts raining or the sun is out.
The park is very large on the map but a lot of it is made up of lakes and big concrete squares. It is a "music square" according to Google, and I suppose they organise meetings/concerts there. When the sun is shining it definitely gets hot quick though, so I found some shade and chilled out for a while. As I continued on I stumbled across what I suppose is the local "tourist lookout tower".
After the fiasco with the coffee this morning I decided to head back to Walmart and work out how I had had such an epic fail. I came across a local supermarket and decided to head in to see whether they had any coffee. Turns out Walmart is maybe 5-10% more expensive (judging from the vinegar I bought at Walmart on Saturday :-)) but it's only about 20 mins walk away vs the 45 minutes to that supermarket, so unless I can find one closer, I'll probably stick to Walmart for the moment. Particularly as the local supermarket didn't appear to even have instant coffee!
I took the long way home and walked quite a bit of the "CBD". The streets are lined with clean looking shops selling everything you might expect to find in Europe, though the number of branded mobile phone shops does seem a bit excessive, particularly as a truly massive proportion of consumption happens online here. I did walk down a pedestrian street that felt a little more "Asian" in terms of the shop fronts and street vendors but it was all very clean and well-to-do - nothing like what it was 20 years ago in Fuzhou or what it was like in Cambodia when I visited there a couple of years ago. Even "poor and backwater" Yuxi (Yunnan is the 2nd poorest province in China) is charging forth into the 21st century with no looking back. Now obviously the countryside is quite a different matter but I suppose even all small Chinese cities have plenty of money for infrastructure and an influx of people (7-10% population growth *per year*) meaning strong economic growth is a foregone conclusion.
I have also started to realise a few of the detractors of living on campus in a dormitory/flat (and I overstated the size - it is probably only around 35m2). It's not that there are loud parties all the time, there aren't (though one of the Thai students spent quite some time emptying his stomach loudly on his balcony last night :-)). As most of the foreigners here are Thai, and I am living in the "foreigners'" dorm, things are pretty quiet. What isn't quiet is the music school that directly faces my balcony! I *hope* they are only practicing from 20h to 22h30 because exams are almost upon them. I am already utterly sick of hearing badly played Kosturica-style music on the accordion and I probably have at least another 3 weeks of it!!!
Otherwise I am slowly starting to get into a rhythm and have most of the administrative (bank, registration, etc.) stuff sorted or planned, so can settle in and really start studying. All good so far.
I'll leave talking about the food till next time! ;)
What is the difference between these two bags of coffee?
The one on the left, that I bought earlier this afternoon, has pretty damn good ground coffee beans. The one on the right, that I bought two of yesterday, has a mix of instant coffee, milk powder and sugar. You can imagine my disgust when I got up this morning for my morning brew! It was clearly marked on the pink/red labels what was in there, if, of course, you can read Chinese. Alas, a week has not been enough to get me to that point yet :-).
With Monday's classes not till the afternoon, I decided to have another go at opening a bank account on Monday morning. I walked the half-hour or so back to the main branch of the Bank of China and managed to get myself in front of a teller who spoke reasonable English. I was a bit uncomfortable about the fact that the teller was actually serving an elderly woman at the time, who just had to wait while they spent about 20 minutes trying to establish whether or not I could open a bank account. I was eventually told to go and sit down while they sorted things out. About 20 minutes later I was called back up and was asked for my phone number - they would have to get back to me as they had no idea how to open a bank account for a foreigner... And it wouldn't be today. I briefly thought about trying at the China Construction Bank just across the road but then had a thought - maybe the branch closest to the uni would have done it before? So I headed there, now with pretty low expectations of a positive outcome, to give it one last try for the day. This branch was empty and when they had established who had the best English of the available tellers, I was sat down and started handing over documents and explaining what I wanted to do. There was again much discussion and pouring over my passport and uni acceptance letter and I was sure that they would tell me that I wasn't going to be able to open a bank account until I had been given my residence permit, which is not going to happen for at least another couple of weeks. But the scrutinising continued and I was eventually handed a Tax Residency declaration form. Progress! I hadn't been given a form before! I didn't have all the details so suggested I go back to uni and collect them and return with the form filled in, which I promptly did. As I couldn't get the "proper" address of the flat/dormitory from the Admin office, I fell back to good ol' trusty Google maps... I thought would give it a go anyway :-). After returning and then sitting for another hour or so I left the bank again, this time proudly in possession of my Great Wall debit card. Success!
The weather from last Sunday until today mid-afternoon has been absolute rubbish. There might have been half an hour of sun but with all the grey and rain that just meant it got hot as well as being very humid. I was expecting thunderstorms and downpours, which we've had, but also quite a bit of sun in between. Not so! It has been actually pretty cold during the night and I have definitely been needing the duvet. I did get a decent walk around the campus and direct surrounds on Tuesday after dinner though, and I finally found the Red Spaceship that I can see from my kitchen window! Turns out the campus is right next to a pretty big park, where the red protrusion resides. There is some quite dense bush around, and some tracks into it, so when the ground gets a little less wet I'll definitely have an explore.
They recycle everything here!
Campus steps
Wellington Botanic Gardens anyone? :)
The Red Spaceship
There is some serious construction going on on campus
View from the eastern boundary of the campus
I have two (young) teachers, both of whom are excellent teachers and very nice. He Laoshi ("teacher He") seems like a bit of a language nerd - she is teaching a super-interesting sounding course on the evolution of Chinese characters - and I may try and sit in on some of the cool stuff she is teaching in the second half of the year. I have listening on Monday afternoons, "comprehensive Chinese" (I haven't quite worked out how it's different from the rest yet...) on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, reading on Thursday morning and spoken Chinese on Friday morning. Due to Monday's Dragon Boat Festival day being a bank holiday, Guo Laoshi asked if we could move this coming Monday's class to Saturday morning, which we duly did. By the end of the week both teachers were pushing me to start watching television - I really, really need to be hearing lots of spoken Chinese and tv/films are a great way to do that.
For the moment I can't watch the actual television, as there is something wrong with the antenna (or more likely antenna socket/cable) - no matter how much playing around I did I never got further than a bright blue screen... China has plenty of websites where you can watch tv and movies online for free, so thanks to my unlimited data mobile connection (40GB at full 4G speeds, then 3mb/s to 100GB, then 256kb/s above that, for around 13€/mth), I started watching some Chinese movies. There are actually plenty of free Western movies but I'm not here to learn English or French! Most of the big sites are actually completely legal - many of the more recent both Chinese and Western movies require a subscription (about 21€ per year), and you get a minute of ads at the beginning on the free movies (if you don't have a subscription). I'll probably get a subscription but will not need it for a while. China is pumping *massive* amounts of money and energy into developing their film industry and the results are starting to get pretty good. I read about a $250M USD budget for a pure Chinese movie (so not a partnership with a Hollywood studio) recently.
I have a different book for each of the 4 classes, though there is a considerable amount of overlap in vocabulary and progression (all 4 deal with pronunciation for the first few chapters, even the reading book!). I have been spending quite a lot of time setting up my Spaced Repetition (flashcards++) software with the vocabulary for the first 15 or so book chapter lessons (I'll probably be doing 1-3 lessons per day over the two-hour classes). I must admit I'm a little surprised/annoyed (frightened?) at how I was able to completely forget so much after only the few months since I stopped working on my Chinese in early March. I went from knowing around 500-600 characters well (you give me the English word, I'll give you the Chinese character(s) and pronunciation) to knowing maybe 100. I definitely don't have to re-learn everything from scratch but it is taking considerably more than just seeing the characters again and associating them with the English words. I would be totally lost with the Anki programme though - even if I forgot lots of stuff after using it, without it I would probably only be learning a fifth of the number of characters/words. Only time will tell how many characters I can durably learn over the long term though!
It lightened up today a little after lunch and just as I was going down the stairs to go for a walk to the big park on the east edge of town, it started raining again! The rain only lasted half an hour or so, so I grabbed my umbrella and set off. By the time I had left the campus the sun was already shining fully and I immediately started to regret not taking a hat. Yuxi is over 1600m up, and the sun is most unforgiving at that altitude. Many women (and a few men) carry sun umbrellas and I can now see why. I don't know whether I'll ever wander around town with a sun umbrella but there will definitely be some slip, slop, slapping going on (in-joke for Kiwis...)! The walk to the park is around 45 minutes and I was able to keep mostly out of the sun. There are trees lining most of the larger streets (does that make them avenues?) which is great for when it just starts raining or the sun is out.
The park is very large on the map but a lot of it is made up of lakes and big concrete squares. It is a "music square" according to Google, and I suppose they organise meetings/concerts there. When the sun is shining it definitely gets hot quick though, so I found some shade and chilled out for a while. As I continued on I stumbled across what I suppose is the local "tourist lookout tower".
The campus is pretty much straight ahead from here I think (though not really visible)
After the fiasco with the coffee this morning I decided to head back to Walmart and work out how I had had such an epic fail. I came across a local supermarket and decided to head in to see whether they had any coffee. Turns out Walmart is maybe 5-10% more expensive (judging from the vinegar I bought at Walmart on Saturday :-)) but it's only about 20 mins walk away vs the 45 minutes to that supermarket, so unless I can find one closer, I'll probably stick to Walmart for the moment. Particularly as the local supermarket didn't appear to even have instant coffee!
I took the long way home and walked quite a bit of the "CBD". The streets are lined with clean looking shops selling everything you might expect to find in Europe, though the number of branded mobile phone shops does seem a bit excessive, particularly as a truly massive proportion of consumption happens online here. I did walk down a pedestrian street that felt a little more "Asian" in terms of the shop fronts and street vendors but it was all very clean and well-to-do - nothing like what it was 20 years ago in Fuzhou or what it was like in Cambodia when I visited there a couple of years ago. Even "poor and backwater" Yuxi (Yunnan is the 2nd poorest province in China) is charging forth into the 21st century with no looking back. Now obviously the countryside is quite a different matter but I suppose even all small Chinese cities have plenty of money for infrastructure and an influx of people (7-10% population growth *per year*) meaning strong economic growth is a foregone conclusion.
The "slightly Asian" looking street
No comment?
I have also started to realise a few of the detractors of living on campus in a dormitory/flat (and I overstated the size - it is probably only around 35m2). It's not that there are loud parties all the time, there aren't (though one of the Thai students spent quite some time emptying his stomach loudly on his balcony last night :-)). As most of the foreigners here are Thai, and I am living in the "foreigners'" dorm, things are pretty quiet. What isn't quiet is the music school that directly faces my balcony! I *hope* they are only practicing from 20h to 22h30 because exams are almost upon them. I am already utterly sick of hearing badly played Kosturica-style music on the accordion and I probably have at least another 3 weeks of it!!!
Otherwise I am slowly starting to get into a rhythm and have most of the administrative (bank, registration, etc.) stuff sorted or planned, so can settle in and really start studying. All good so far.
I'll leave talking about the food till next time! ;)
Ton blog va me permettre de réviser l'anglais.. ;-)
ReplyDeleteCela semble très jolie, mélange d'ancien et de moderne.
Pour les achats, tu feras d'autres erreurs, même quand tu commencera à lire un peu le chinois..
Je lis avec plaisir que tu as la capacité à reproduire des sons particuliers d'une nouvelle langue. c'est ta connaissance de plusieurs langues et tes voyages qui font que tu as la bonne oreille et cette capacité.
à Bientôt
Jean-Marc
I help you with a chinese word.
ReplyDeleteMini-Jupe = Yakamaté Oraduku
Cheers