Finally able to post

So I've already broken my once-a-week posting rule. But I have a lot of reasons, mostly they can be summed up as connecting to the internet in China=Tai Mafan (too much trouble). But I am posting this from my dorm room where I finally got my new little macbook connected. Hopefully I can continue to do this throughout the summer. So the post written below is from earlier this week. More to come soon.....

After meeting up with my language study group for the summer in Beijing, we took an overnight train to Harbin last Thursday evening. There are 20 American students participating in this program. Most are undergraduates, but there are a few graduate students as well. We are living and studying at Harbin Institute of Technology, staying in dorm rooms with Chinese roomates. We each had to take a language pledge, indicating that while we are in the dorms, interacting with one another, we must speak in Chinese. No English allowed to be spoken in the dorms and with our peers throughout the summer.

One of the reasons I chose this language program is because the program caters to our individual interests through a one-on-one language tutorial. When I applied for the program, I outlined my interests in northeast rice. Throughout the summer, I hope to gather, read, and analyze factual data in the form of news stories, statistics, policies, and other forms of written material about japonica rice. Well only once I got here did I discover that my request to do an independent study on rice was taken seriously. I have been assigned to a rice expert at the provincial agricultural academy to guide my one-on-one study. This means that I will be learning the vocabulary, accessing up-to-date information, and making connections in the field through him. He has been very responsive to my project so far, and has promised to connect me to people in the provincial agricultural university. This would be a big plus to my research.

Another great thing about Harbin is that it is so far north that the summers are cool. Unfortunately it appears I arrived at the hottest time of the year. Its been hot, but then it rained and cooled things off a bit. Also, all of China is on one time zone. I’ve known this and been familiar with it before, but I am just realizing now that Harbin is east and it gets light here in the morning and it gets dark at night early. Being close to the summer solstice, it is dark here by 8 pm and light by 3:30 am. This has not made getting over jet lag easy.

But after classes began, I feel better about the time change and am settling into a routine. Classes are tough; they are mentally exhausting. Most classes are two hours and the teachers are intense. Classes are 2-5 students with one teacher and we have to pay attention to everything that is said, of course. And, after classes are done, we can’t even sit back and decompress in English. So I’ve been coming back to my dorm room, resting and running while listening to my i-pod (which-gulp-is filled with English songs). And after a run, a shower and dinner at my new favorite dumpling restaurant sitting outside watching the street life appear around food, I can go back to my dorm and continue studying.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve been comparing Harbin to Sichuan (where I lived for two years and got to know fairly well). I don’t think I was prepared to do this. I’ve been back to China several times since living in Sichuan and have traveled all around the country. However, I think because I know I am about to live in this city for a year, I am prepared to know it and the local customs in the same way I think about Sichuan. I don’t think the thought that I was living-actually living-in a place crossed my mind in the same way until I got here. Its pretty exciting to have a whole new city to get to explore. I already know where some of the local markets are and have talked to people about northeast rice (which they are all proud of). But I am holding off on any responses until a later date when I have a better sense of what is happening here…