Brrr, it’s gotten a lot colder here in Beijing. Highs are around the mid 60s and it gets
pretty chilly at night. A couple nights
ago, it was 39 degree F. Even though I’m
from Minnesota, I do not like being cold so I have been bundling up like
crazy. Good thing I brought a lot of
long sleeve clothes. The weather changed
so fast. A couple weeks ago it was still
shorts weather.
Onto what’s been going on in my life! This past weekend a friend
of my performed in a cultural festival at Tsinghua University. The school had organized the event as a way
for Chinese students and International students to learn about each other’s
culture, traditions, and cuisine. My
friend is from Myanmar and I got to see her perform a Burmese dance, which was
pretty cool. It always intrigues me how
different cultures use intricate hand movement a lot in dancing versus their
body. I know especially in Indian
dancing, a wrong hand sign can mean completely different things. The Korean association on campus also
performed Gangnam Style at the festival and I was blown away. They had a guy dressed up to look exactly like
in the video, and everyone performing knew all the dance moves. It was crazy! I wish I was able to get a good
picture, but I wasn’t in the front and we all know I’m vertically challenged so
I didn’t get a good shot :P I got to
walk around to see the different booths representing different countries. It felt like I was back in the US for a bit,
especially because each booth had free food!
Even Chinese students know that free food brings in college students
haha. There was an American booth, but
it was a little sad looking. They had
peanut butter sandwiches to showcase American cuisine which I found really
amusing. Peanut butter is expensive here
though. A small jar of pb can easily be
$5-6.
 |
| Free Korean food! |
 |
| American booth with our pb sandwiches |
 |
| Burmese dancing |
Another interesting thing I’ve noticed here is that milk is
unrefrigerated. When I first got here, I
didn’t drink milk at all because I was worried I’d get really sick from
it. But after talking to a couple
people, they have told me that milk is treated differently here. They do some flash heating thing that makes
it so that milk doesn’t necessarily need to be refrigerated and can even last
six months (isn’t that crazy?!). Apparently this is done in other countries as
well, who knew? I tried unrefrigerated
milk a couple days ago, and even though it tasted a littleeee bit odd, overall
it was still good. And I’m still here
and not sick, so I guess it’s not bad to drink!
This past week has been the most relaxed for me by far. Because there is so much to do in Beijing,
any free day I had, I usually had plans to go somewhere and see something. Now I’ve been able to do a lot of the things
in Beijing (although I’m sure there’s a ton more to see) so the focus is a bit
more on school. What has surprised me
being here is that even Chinese students at Tsinghua University can be
slackers! Who would have known?? I thought all Chinese students here would be
pretty good about not procrastinating and doing quality work. However, in my Financial Management class, I
had a group project with a couple other local Chinese students. The deadline for them to send me all the
information so I could compile it by Monday for class was 12am on Sunday
(between sat and sun). I still hadn’t
received all the parts by Sunday night!
It was beyond frustrating trying to go around getting everyone’s part
and it reminded me of being back in Carlson :P.
Lesson learned, all college students are somewhat the same. There are some good students and some bad
students everywhere haha. Another
surprising thing is that they don’t require citations here at Tsinghua! When I was compiling the paper, the parts
that people were sending me were clearly taken directly off a website
and copy pasted into the paper. Some of
my group members hadn’t even bothered to change the font to match the rest of
the paper so it was even more obvious.
It made it really difficult to compile everything because it would be
hard to make sense of things they were trying to say because they had just
pulled it out-of-context from a scholarly article. But I guess its ok at Tsinghua because no citations
are necessary? I found it very odd that
plagiarism is not looked down upon here.
I had sushi in Beijing!
I had heard some people warning me not to eat fish in Beijing because of
bad chemicals in the fish and whatnot (although looking back I’m not sure that’s
true), but I had a really bad sushi craving recently so my friend Sara and I
went to get our sushi fix! It was really
yummy! And really cheap! We got three
rolls and a piece of sashimi and it only cost us 52 RMB (approx $9)! That’s about the same cost as one roll back
in MN or even less than a roll! Mmm mmm mm.
My tummy and wallet were both satisfied =)
No comments:
Post a Comment