Bowling in the Countryside

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, but I couldn’t really partake in it. There were a few places in Beijing that had a real Thanksgiving dinner, such as the Sheraton hotel, but we didn’t really feel like going somewhere far away. CET was also giving us 100 kuai to go eat anywhere we wanted. We decided to eat Beijing Duck at a place that specializes in it very close to campus. I’ve had Beijing duck three times now and I really don’t like it very much. Anyway we went with 11 people total, 8 CET students and 3 roommates, so we had 890 kuai to spend (each roommate allowed for 30 more). Usually this would allow you to eat forever, but this duck place was expensive because it was next to a hotel, so we ended up going over a little without knowing.

On Saturday the 25th, we had our Language Immersion Weekend Trip. That morning we took a bus about two hours north to the Beijing countryside/a suburb. We got to stay in a nice hotel, but the plan was to go out and see how many people live in China. After arriving at the hotel, they gave us some time to relax and eat lunch. Afterwards, we had to start preparing for the performance we would be putting on that night. Our class already had an idea do some improv like “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” but people started going their own ways. I wanted to go with that so I got two other people who wanted to do the Stand, Sit, Kneel skit from the show. We changed it to Stand, Sit, Lay because we had a basic idea of what we wanted to do anyway. Pure improv in Chinese was going to be too hard, so we planned out a basic idea that we were going to be at a hospital and one of us was going to be injured.

After planning for a little while, we all went to a local high school to speak Chinese with some students. When we got there almost all of them started talking to us in English, which our teachers quickly squashed. We asked them questions about how they liked living in the country (which it really wasn’t at all), what they liked to do (if they even had any free time at all), what they thought about their education, etc. The guy I was talking with told me that my mohawk was cool and that if someone had that in his school, the teacher would personally cut it off. After talking to them for about an hour and a half we were went on our way.

Back at the hotel we had an awesome time because they had a big activity center. They had a swimming pool (which you needed a swim cap for), ping pong, pool tables, shuffleboard, KTV (karaoke), and freaking bowling. We played some pool first and then hit the lanes. It was hard to draw ourselves away to go eat dinner, but after eating we had another three hours before the performances started, so we went straight back to bowling. We started bowling 4 on 4 matches using two lanes and my team dominated each time. I think most of us ended up bowling about 6 games, which was the most any of us had ever played at one time. Our hands and arms were pretty sore afterwards.

The performances that night were all pretty funny. Some were very long and had a lot of planning go into them and then there were others like ours, which relied more on physical humor. A great part about the shows were that some kids played completely different roles than their actual lives and some played the exact same. We’ll be getting a DVD of these, so when I’m home I can show them to whoever wants to see them (which will require my translation). After the shows we just hung out for a little while before going to bed.

The next morning we got up to go the countryside. This little village was up in the hills and was centered around the road that went through it. Our groups were each assigned a family to go visit and we went on our way. The house we went to kind of strange. It had four walls with an open courtyard like most, but the rooms were only on three of the walls like a big U. In the middle was a plot of land where they grew crops. The house had about 7 rooms, but most of them only had one thing in it. For example, one room was a very normal looking room with electrical outlets, tiled floors, windows, etc., but the only thing in it was a huge mound of lettuce. Also, only a man, his wife, and their son lived there. While they were making us lunch we had time to ask them questions about their lives. Some of their neighbors also came over and they were interesting to talk to. One thing that I thought was funny was that they had a TV with a satellite dish and the guy said sometimes he would stay up until 4am watching TV. Their lunch was pretty good and they showed their Chinese customs by bringing new dishes throughout the whole meal. After eating we headed back to the bus and ended our trip.

Oh and to stay on topic. Whenever I have conversations with Chinese people, Yao Ming always comes up, you know, because I’m tall and stuff.