Day 4

I never thought that brushing teeth would be so difficult.  We have to boil all of the water that we use if we want to drink it.  Marshall and I are boiling all water that goes anywhere near our mouths just to be safe.  So any time I want to brush my teeth I have to blow on my toothbrush to cool it down, because we almost never remember to boil water ahead of time.

This morning we attended a church service at Gangwashi church.  We were given headsets that received a real-time translation of the service by one of the members.  Our songbooks were Chinese and English, but it was still hard to sing along, because the tunes were a bit different, and nearly everyone else was singing in Chinese.  We met Professor Ten Harmsel there (he is the semester in China sponsor).  The church was very welcoming of us, and made us feel right at home.

After church we had the rest of the day until our dinner.  Ten of us guys decided to go on our own to a nice Chinese restaurant and order food for ourselves.  It went surprisingly well, because the waitress knew some English.  One of the plates we ordered was a chicken, which had been cut up and reassembled in full.  It was quite tasty.  I don't think anyone ate the head though.

For the rest of the day, we decided to go back to the Pearl Market and revisit some of the vendors now that we knew the layout better.  I did my first bartering there somewhat successfully.  I made a few mistakes, but that's learning I suppose.  After the Pearl Market, I tagged along with some guys who were headed to an antiques market.  Unfortunately we had very rudimentary instructions from hotel literature.  We ended up taking the subway to various places and walking around on the streets of Beijing looking for whatever we thought an antique market might look like.  Needless to say we were unsuccessful.  It was still fun though.  I wish I had been able to take more pictures of where we walked, but I was carrying a bag of things from the Pearl Market still, and didn't really have a free appendage to work with.

We came back to the Hotel for a bit before dinner.  Most of us read the book we are discussing because most of us are behind in the chapter readings (why read a book when you can explore a foreign city?).  Dinner was at a restaurant which used to be the home of a wealthy person.  It was one of the coolest restaurants I've been in.  We actually had to cross a street to get from the front of the place to our room.  The meal was exquisite, as all the group dinners have been, and we enjoyed some good discussion afterwards.  Amanda's mother came to eat with us as well as Prof. Ten Harmsel and his wife.  At the Beijing University Press, Amanda's mother works as an editor for Chinese and English books primarily.  It was very nice to meet her. 

The discussion following dinner went quite long, but it was enjoyable nonetheless.  We talked about cultures and their differences.  Some cultures put emphasis on context with respect to events and structured time for things, others are more formal.  Authority and power structures were addressed by contrasting an egalitarian culture to a hierarchical one.  Finally, we discussed being and doing cultures: cultures that focus more on relationship building and nurturing compared to cultures that are more results oriented and have concrete goals.

On the way back there was a little boy on the subway who was pretty well round as an apple due to the amount of coats his mother had on him.  He was a little rambunctious, and his mother eventually picked him up.  He kept looking around at everyone on the subway.  I caught his eyes for a bit and said hello in the Chinese formal fashion to see what he would say, but he was a little shy despite a prodding from his mother to say "hallo."  Apparently, what is pronounced "knee how" is a very formal greeting not to be bandied about necessarily.  "Hallo" is much more common for greetings on the street and talking on phones and whatnot.  That doesn't stop a number of our group to say "knee how" to everyone they meet though.

Well, it was another beautiful day in Beijing, goodnight.