Beer here is very cheap and coffee is very expensive. This sucks in the morning but rocks at night. For the record, you can get the local Tsingtao beer here for usually 15 kuai (=yuan) and a nice American beer like Coors Light for 25 kuai, whereas a medium Dark Mocha Frappucino brings up 33 kuai at the register. About 6.8 kuai = 1 dollar so you do the math, or get a math major to do it for you. The bargain-value bar time may not mesh well with some of my more degenerate traits, but let the record show, if I do end up in AA, I will point back to this blog entry as marking a seminal moment in my alcoholic history.
Work has been going well at times. So we developed an English teaching program which involves 1 on 1 sessions with a ton of different employees and a 2 hour "course" on something twice a week. Considering I've had no training and am really not used to being a teacher there have been some awkward moments. The courses are the worst, where I'm expected to give a lecture on some really odd topic related to English and America, and try to engage as many people as I can. The first one was about making small talk, the second about telecommunication and tomorrow's is on emailing. The problem is that I feel like I'm making some very simple points - for example, during the small talk I told them that Americans small talk as opposed to sitting in silence....well duh, but I need to say this to effectively make my presentation because I don't know how wide the cultural gap is. Some things that have seemed obvious to me are difficult for a Chinese to grasp; for example, my boss asked me to explain how to spell on a phone, you know, E as in Edward. Its pretty basic, you pick a word that starts with that letter. But its a little more complicated than that, for example if you saying P as in Pan, it could be heard as D as in Dan or B as in Ban. This is intuitive for me but not so for a non-native speaker. During the one on one sessions, we mostly make small talk and those have mostly gone fine. They seem juvenile since the idea of these sessions is to get them practicing speaking, and so we just engage in rather unintellectual conversation. I have noticed how diverse China linguistically. Obviously I know a bit about speaking a different dialect, but I had thought that everyone in mainland China spoke Mandarin fluently since they all learn it from elementary school. To an extent, but regional dialects are still widely spoken and while everyone seems to communicate fine in Mandarin, some people struggle with some of the sounds of Mandarin. For example, one of my coworkers from Central China cannot say "Neng" 能. He says "Leng" and cannot tell the different. These regional phonetic differences manifest themselves in English as you would expect. Thus my friend struggles with the n sound in English. Some people struggle with the v sound, others l and r, and some can't pronounce th properly (neither could I when I was growing up). This has brought out the inner linguist in me and I'm mildly fascinated.
I was going to talk about Tsinghua University, the campus I just went through. I'll edit this post tomorrow on that topic.
So after the basketball game I played, I really did feel Beijing's notorious bad air supply. Btw, tsing (really qing in pinyin) means fresh, clear and can apply to air, thus the title of this post. I hadn't really noticed the air as being bad here at all, but after hustling around on a basketball court for the first time in months I was coughing out my lungs. It was painful, I felt like I had some intangible substance blocking my throat and I needed to cough it out, but it never came out. It makes me wonder how I can exercise here. Should I restrict myself to a treadmill indoors, although I absolutely hate treadmills? Am I just going to be fucked for ultimate in the spring? Does running outside here actually make me less fit or is it kinda like training in the thin mountain air?
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