so the the end of the old and beginning of the new year was for sure something worth celebrating – and so we did – according to chinese tradition with family here in beijing. that included a lot of food (such as gungbaojiding, malatang, kaoya, kaoyu, lots of veggies and spicy frog), drinks, the yearly ‘new year tv show’, fireworks and midnight dumplings.

after riding a nostalgic black (illegal – for the lack of legal ones) cab home and watching some really hard working guys getting rid of the huge mess the fireworks left all over town, today – on the first day of the new year – we accompanied a close friend to a buddhis temple to pray for the new year’s blessings. bejing might be (almost scarily) empty during spring festival (as everyone leaves for their hometowns) but the temple on new years day was for sure one of the most crowded places i have ever experienced – what kinda killed the spirit and magic of a buddhist temple.

tomorrow it’s time to visit a temple fair and i am very curious about it already. the only thing i know about it is that it involves food (which is always a good guess here anyway ;).

all that just leaves me hoping for the year of the rabbit to be just as good as the tiger’s was: my applications to extend my scholarship and studies here in china are prepared and mostly handed in, beijing’s university of international business and economics has already accepted me as a future student and thanks to last semester’s proper performance i am getting ready to jump levels in my chinese language studies with the coming semester at beiwai.

so again (just like about 10 months ago) i am ending a blog post with ‘wish me luck everyone’ and – of course – i wish you all just the very best for the new year of the rabbit as well: may it be a healthy, happy and successful one!

happy new year of the rabbit 2011

it was not easy to find a place which actually met our expectations (which were not that high after all): weird landladies who changed their minds after already agreeing on a deal, as ‘clean and bright’ advertised apartments which turned out as dirty basement apartments, an accident with our real estate agent’s motor bike and landlords with an absurdly bad taste in furniture were some of our major obstacles; but we were lucky in the end:

beijing apartment - living room

it took us almost 3 weeks to get the apartment ready (LOTS of cleaning, adding furniture, moving our stuff) since we could only use evenings and weekends to do all that. finally we are here and it is starting to feel like a cosy home.

beijing apartment - study

we basically have over 100 square meters all to ourselves now (well we share it with the turtles and fish ;) with very large living room (+ study), bedroom and spacious bathroom and kitchen (+ storage).

beijing apartment - plants

x-mas eve was our first occasion to have some guests over and we had a really good time! from now on, we welcome (and expect) visitors at any time :)

and now it’s time to get back to my books – the semester’s final exams are coming up… hope you all had a good x-mas! enjoy the holidays and what’s left of 2010…

i will go with my good old system for another while, supporting it with some online flash card program. also i will try a different approach at the same time which follows the idea of memorizing characters along with a story each for the components, meaning (and pronunciation and tone).

to motivate myself again i took a look into how complex characters can actually become and doing that i remembered the name sign of a noodle place i had recently seen on a short trip to xiamen: it’s the character ‘biáng’ which stands for a certain kind of noodle…

with 48 strokes the character 龘 (tà) is the most complex one computer systems can input at the moment. it means ‘appearance of a dragon walking’ and is not exactly every day speech material. still, chinese characters’ complexity doesn’t end where computers give up entering them – so the above mentioned character ‘biáng’ – consisting of 57 strokes – is said to be the most complex one in use. there is even a mnemonic poem to help people remember the strokes they need to put together this amazing character:

traditional character 'biáng'

trying to write this character i have decided to move back to my ‘intermediate’ chinese workbook and to be happy about all the characters with less than 20 strokes.

for all those who want to try to memorize ‘biáng’ (in case of travelling to shanxi province and wanting to order those famous noodles in written) here is the poem for the right strokes:

一点上了天  [ yì diǎn shàng le tiān ]
黄河两道弯 [ huáng hé liǎng dào wān ]
八字大张口 [ bā zì dà zhāng kǒu ]
言字往进走 [ yán zì wǎng jìn zǒu ]
你一扭 我一扭 [ nǐ yī niǔ, wǒ yī niǔ ]
你一长 我一长 [ nǐ yī zhǎng, wǒ yī zhǎng ]
当中加个马大王 [ dāng zhōng jiā ge mǎ dà wáng ]
心字底 [ xīn zì dǐ ]
月字旁 [ yuè zì páng ]
留个钓搭挂麻糖 [ liú ge diào dā guà má táng ]
坐着车车逛咸阳 [ zuò zhe chē chē guàng xián yáng ]

a dot rises up to heaven,
and the yellow river has two bends.
the character ‘eight’ (八) opens its mouth,
and the character ‘speak’ (言) walks in.
you make a twist, i make a twist,
you grow, i grow,
and we add a horse king in between.
the character ‘heart’ (心) forms the base,
the character ‘moon’ (月) stands at the side,
a hook at the right to hang sesame candies,
and we ride a carriage to tour the streets of xianyang.

good luck & have fun with chinese characters :)

update [january 2011]

i just found out there is a simplified version… makes it A LOT easier of course ;)

simplified character 'biáng'

a 2.5 hour flight from beijing brought us and two friends right to xiamen (厦门), china’s ‘southern gate’. a nice small city which is partly on china mainland, partly on an island called gulangyu (鼓浪屿).

Museum Garden @ Gulangyu Island

we spent 2 very nice days on the mainland part doing some sightseeing and shopping and spending almost a whole day in one of the nicest and largest spas i have ever been to – and we barely got to see the whole area within a day. as there were no cameras allowed in there is no proof, but sitting in a pool full of little kiss-kiss-fish who are ‘kiss-kiss-ing’ off all your dead skin cells is really nice.

after 2 days in xiamen’s mainland part we moved over to gulangyu, an adorable island just a couple of minutes off the coast which is famous for being very clean, very quiet and very beautiful – all of it is true! best thing: there are no cars on gulangyu island, so we did all our exploring (which took up almost all the time we spent there) on foot – a good way to earn the delicious (sea-)food and the many cups of milk tea we had there every day.

apart from sightseeing we spent a lot of time checking the many little stores on the island in each of which tourists can get a stamp as proof of their visit – we got our whole stamp booklet filled to the last page :)

enjoyed most:

• seing dried shark-fins being sold for over 300 euros each
• finding the most complex chinese character ever in the name of a noodle restaurant
• discovering the local version of burger king
• visiting xiamen university’s beautiful campus
• eating shark-fishball soup
• having liters of milk tea
• watching fish and seafood being dried on the streets
• flirting with a scary but/and cute guard dog at a former prison
• visiting a bird zoo
• lots of museums, viewpoints, temples and very nice food

to get an idea of what one of china’s most beautiful and cleanest cities look like, here are some pictures:

so here i am spending a beautiful sunny autumn day at chinas number one tourist attraction: the forbidden city [故宫].

after being rushed through this wonderful sight twice during summer schools in 2007 and 2008 it was the nicest thing to just walk through all those halls and rooms and squares and gates without a having to be at a certain meeting point at a certain time.

what impressed me most is the progress the renovation project has made. the most important halls and gates were polished, recolored and had their gold leaf patterns added to by 2008′s olympics. now there are only a few buildings (within the tourists’ main stream through the complex) yet to be renovated. soon the old, faded but still somehow charming look of the buildings before renovation will only be found off the main track , in the side buildings which are definitely worth a visit…

take a look at some impressions of the emperor’s palace in beijing:

with small groups of students per class our teachers can move one pretty fast – and they do: about one lesson in the books can be done within two days – that is in each of the two classes i am taking. this speed is very good as it means we are working hard on our level, but it also means the count of new chinese characters to memorize grows just as fast.

so here i am, having my first couple of days (3) off for the chinese mid autumn festival (moon cakes, yaaaaay). i allowed myself the actual holiday as a really lazy day without opening any book.

Moon Cakes for Mid-Autumn Festival

but since we got two days off in addition to the actual holiday , we have to go back to school on weekends to make up for them again. so coming saturday is exam day – and i am spending my extra 2 days off memorizing our first few lessons’ new characters…

a few days ago i went through the whole process of registering as a foreign student at beiwai university and it took more than half the day.

Bei Wai - Beijing Foreign Studies University

there are 7 stations to pass…

• 08:30: lining up to register and to get a lady to look at my admission letter and print out for scan-able stickers with my name and number on them > 2 hours waiting (partly in the rain) + 2 minutes to get the stickers.
• 10:30: lining up to hand in my 8 (?!?) passport pictures and to get another pic taken – just to be safe i guess… > 20 minutes waiting + 1 minute to get the pic taken.
• 10:50: lining up to be told that i can skip this step as i am a scholarship student and insurance is covered by the government for me > 10 minutes waiting + 30 seconds conversation.
• 11:00: lining up to be assigned a room in the dorm > 15 minutes waiting + 30 seconds conversation.
• 11:15: lining up to have my visa checked and changed into a student residence permit > 15 minutes waiting + 2 minutes conversation.
• 11:30: lining up to be told to go to the bank and open a bank account first before being able to complete this step > 10 minutes waiting + 30 seconds conversation.
• 11:40: walking to the bank and lining up to open a bank account > 1 hour waiting + 5 minutes to open the bank account.
• 13:15: back at university lining up to hand in my bank account’s information > 20 minutes waiting + 1 minute to make a copy of my bank card.
• 13:35: lining up at the dorm’s reception to get the room they assigned me before > no waiting + 25 minutes for them to coordinate with the people who assigned the room before (which meant waiting for me after all…)
• 14:00: going to my room to finally relax a bit after waiting another 10 minutes for my part of the room to be prepared.

thank god i am here on a scholarship so i could skip the step of paying tuition (that’s one of the slower steps as your money is being counted SO many times…).

what’s interesting: all the people working there getting the students’ information, assigning rooms, taking pics, booking insurances, checking your visa (…) they all don’t really speak english (or at least refuse to use it) and you have to try to get through this with as much (or little) chinese as you know – i find that a bit strange for ‘international students’ affairs office’ staff.

anyway, it all went fine, even with my special visa situation, and i have a friendly japanese roomie who speaks no english but who already studied chinese there for half a year :)

2 days later i am back at uni to take my entrance exam:

Bei Wai Chinese Language Center

this is to put me into the right level of chinese class and the exam starts punctually (yaaay) at 8:30. the first part is a computerized test of chinese character recognition. the second part of the exam is an oral one where you have to show off your pronunciation, your reading and your speaking skills.

in the end my two results were two levels apart from one another so i have to go to the higher level first and see how it goes… i guess i’ll end up being capable of doing all the tasks fine, but not being able to read them in the first place – how nice.

well at least one thing is for sure: i am now officially a student at beijing waiguoyu daxue:

Bei Wai Foreign Student's ID

being super-enthusiastic about the new place we already got some new flatmates to move in with us when the time has come. they don’t have names yet, so if you have any suggestions for proper turtle names, please let us know :)

there are websites where people (mostly agents) publish classifieds ads presenting their apartments for rent. the descriptions are usually more than nice and most of them also show a bunch of very beautiful pictures. that’s inspiring, so of course we picked some and went to see those places.

once there, what you find might vary a bit form what you have seen on the pictures and read in the ads before…

‘close to the subway’ takes a 20 minutes walk and and the ‘nicely decorated and clean’ bathroom hasn’t met a mop in 10 years.

for the pictures we were told, that those agencies just use some random nice pictures off the internet – how nice.

we spent quite some time with those lame agents in bad apartments and because they all try to rent out the same places, using different, nicely describing classifieds ads, we even ended up visiting the same apartment twice! after this has happened 3 times we have decided to change our strategy: we are now the ones posting ads looking for apartments, and we are not meeting any agent or visiting any apartment unless we have seen some real pictures first.

thank god we are not in a hurry to rent. :) please, wish us luck everyone…

the good thing about beijing housing agents: they offer a lot more than just nice apartments:

probably one of the best traditional chinese dishes – especially if home made. have a look…

and stefi: yes, we were thinking of you ;)