The End of the Adventure Begins!

As promised I'm telling about my month in Beijing to teach a course in Business Writing in reverse. And so I arrived.

In fact, my airplane arrived a full hour early. Tell your grandchildren about this strange phenomena. Because of that, I missed my contact who was supposed to meet me at the airport. Fortunately, I had been to Beijing twice before and did not panic. After waiting a respectable amount of time, I took a taxi into the city and found my hotel, provided by my summer employer.

Then the fun began. My first class. The first welcome reception. The first case of Mao's revenge. The first sightseeing.

I found my way to the correct building at the appointed hour (8 a.m.) and was happy to see a tall floor model air conditioning unit. My assigned assistant met me there, had the room ready, the a/c on. Then the students arrived--all 58 of them packed into the one small classroom. I spoke slowly and carefully, unsure that first day how well they understood English. The class, like all of them at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), was intended to be taught in English. All went well and we developed a good rapport that lasted through the final exam.

The first evening, we foreign instructors for the summer were invited to the formal welcome reception in a lavish venue just off campus. Students from the university entertained us with song and dance. The food was delicious, as expected at a formal dinner. What was served was supposedly representative dishes from several provinces around China. What was especially delicious was a mushroom soup which featured about a dozen different kinds of mushrooms. In the hours to come, it proved to be my undoing, forcing me to battle a case of Mao's Revenge for more than a week.

Since I had already seen the major tourist sites, I went to a few lesser ones. First up was a tourist enclave south of the Forbidden City (aka The Imperial Palace) called Qianmen. Men means gate and the gate there, obviously built just for me, was rather impressive. Something I might like to see in my neighborhood back home, just to show everyone where I live. Knowing I had plenty of time to gather souvenirs, I only looked at the many shops along this pedestrian mall. I did stop to enjoy roast duck once more--because you really can never enough of "Beijing Duck"!

Qianmen gate (one side of the street)

Gate at entrance to Qianmen pedestrian shopping street.

Me at the duck restaurant with the Duck Meister slicing it up.

Then I was off to another "minor" site: Beihai Park and its famous Bell Tower. To the west side of the Forbidden City are a string a lakes, intended for the Emperor's pleasure, all strung together with canals. This is the north lake ("Bei" means north; the subway station there is Beihai Bei: the north end of the north lake). The day was oppressively humid--as almost all of the days there, as I was to discover. 

However, once you totally sweat out your clothes, then you just go on for the rest of the day, moisture and all. Just part of the experience. I saw a lot but I sure didn't look good enough for photos. The crossing of the lake and the hike up the hill to the tower made me feel like I was really back in Beijing. The lotus-filled lake further convinced me I was no longer in Oklahoma. 

Beihai Lake and the Bell Tower.

The Nine Dragons Wall. Same design on the reverse side.

The most famous thing at this park is the "Nine Dragons Wall" so I took a few pictures of it. Everybody was taking photos of it, too. It was difficult to catch a moment without anyone in front of it, especially when I posed there. (Any of you who may write fantasy stories involving dragons, now you know: There are only nine of them!)

Another wall (gate?) with a lion. The wall is only about a meter thick.

View from top of the hill where the Bell Tower is, looking down at Beihai lake.

To get over the Mao's Revenge, I sought out cheese, the tried and true remedy. It might be easier to find a palm tree in Greenland than it is to find a chunk of cheese in Beijing. Milk, yes. Yogurt, now trendy, yes. Ice cream, for kids, of course yes. But actual cheese? Nope. So I concocted a plan to find a McDonald's and just eat a big cheeseburger, knowing full well that the cheese would not be real cheese but a fake version. I walked around in the heat of the day and subsequently dined at the first McDonald's I found. 

Your typical street Mickey's.

Strangely, the cashier woman couldn't understand me even when I pointed to the menu, so the young man standing in line behind me helped me. The dining room was crowded with students studying or "studying" on their laptops, tablets, and cell phones, so I invited him to sit with me. He was back home for summer vacation from studying at a university in Wisconsin. This is what we call irony. 

I was beginning to realize that I, a German-English hybrid genetically constructed from the dairy regions of Europe required cheese like Chinese people required rice. I searched online for Mexican restaurants in Beijing, craving tacos. None were convenient to my location, the best choice requiring 4 subway line changes. I gave up on that idea. Instead, I did find a good ol' KFC. I also found a Subway franchise a few blocks down from my hotel, right across from the campus. In fact, one of my own students worked there! An Italian Combo footlong did the trick. Those deli meats and layers of cheese got my insides back on track. I would return to that Subway several more times during my month-long visit. Because, yes, you can have too much Chinese food! 

Nevertheless, I visited the Yonghe King Chinese BBQ restaurant around the corner from my hotel multiple times for my dinners. I could get a bowl of barbecued meat, a bowl of rice, a couple sides of veggies, and a tall glass of iced coffee with tapioca beads in it for around 35 Yuan--about $6, best deal in the neighborhood. I visited twice a week, often enough the girls knew me by name: "that weird foreign guy with the wicked grin." They jostled with each other for the right to take my order. Probably they did the same for the right to deliver the tray containing my meal to my table. I can only imagine.

Next time: Writing about Greenland in a Beijing Hotel


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(C) Copyright 2010-2015 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

How I Ruined my Summer Vacation

In my previous blog post I ranted and complained about one very long, very stressful 36-hour superday flying back home from Beijing, China. It was a genuine rant. I meant every word. However, I don't wish to give anyone the idea that the whole trip was so angst-filled and absurd. It wasn't. The four weeks I lived large and sorta worked in Beijing was an experience that I cannot adequately describe--yet I shall try my best.

Once upon a time I was invited by a university in Beijing to teach a course for four weeks in July. I had mixed feelings about the opportunity. First, I would be teaching--and if you know a teacher then you know the summer vacation is quite sacred; there is to be no teaching during that time. But it seemed it would not inconvenience me too much. I thought it would be four days a week, a couple hours per day, like we do at my university here. I planned accordingly with regard to my flight schedule and my visa. By the time I was flying there, I had learned that I would only be teaching the course three hours a day on Monday and Wednesday mornings.

So I desperately wondered what I would do with a four-day weekend. I had visited Beijing twice before so I had already done the tourist thing with the major sites like the Forbidden City (aka Imperial Palace [aka Palace Museum]), the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, and so on. I had visited the new sights, too, all the "weird" modern architecture in the central business district. I had hit the well-known shopping avenues, as well. So I decided there must be some smaller sites to see. I could make it work. I refused to let myself be bored. (More on that later.)

View from my hotel window on first morning; sun trying to shine through pollution haze.
The buildings are dormitories of the university, across the street from hotel.

The university put me up in a decent hotel across the boulevard from the campus. I only had a 10 minute walk between my room on the fourth floor of the hotel near the west gate of the campus and the first-floor classroom in the building at the far southeast corner of the campus. As a "typical" Chinese hotel (that is, not intended for Western guests), it was clean and comfortable. I really had no complaints although other guests were often a problem and there were a few "minor" incidences with the housekeeping staff. (More on that later.)

Usually it was a pleasant walk to school, trying to get there a little before the 8 am start. It was not so hot or humid at that early hour. I dressed professionally but without coat and tie yet the 10 minute walk in the often oppressive humidity, locked in under a lid of brown haze, produced a flood of perspiration which began about the time I arrived in the air conditioned classroom and continued for much of the next hour. Luck of the genes. 

In four weeks, I failed to scientifically explain the phenomena. The cold of the a/c unit in the classroom caused a reaction to my overly heated skin and with so many pores opening condensation resulted. Any meteorologists here? I tried different shirts; some breathed and some did not. Same result: an unsightly mess for much of the class period. Fortunately, my students did not seem to mind. I should mention that I employed proper hygiene every day so, while perhaps unsightly, I was not unpleasant to be beside.

The Bird's Nest at the start of my visit.

The course was business writing. While a seemingly innocuous set of lessons in the obvious, I slanted the course (in my proposal to the university) to teaching the way American business likes writing to be done. I covered the usual business documents, American style and grammar issues, and things to consider when writing for business such as biased language and cross-cultural considerations. The cross-cultural lesson is designed to acquaint American students with the other ways people around the world think, see, and argue differently than Americans do. For my Chinese students, I flipped it over so they were learning how Americans typically think, see, and argue. 

The Bird's Nest an hour later when the haze left.

Did I mention that all classes at the university were taught in English? Except, well, the foreign language courses. That was my first concern: how well did the students understand English? I found most of my 58 students (only 6 were boys) to be quite proficient, especially in their writing. I began each lesson slowly, enunciating my words, choosing more basic vocabulary to help them ease into an English environment after a weekend "back in China." I had my five years of teaching English in Japan to help me with how I conducted the course. After the class ended each day, a few students always gathered to chat with me or ask questions. I also was given an assistant who made copies of handouts, collected papers, and served as a go-between for the students. He was quite helpful. I felt spoiled there.

Me at Lama Temple. No alpacas!

This blog post is only intended as an overview of my month in Beijing. I'll expand and complain further--or explain, as the case may be--various aspects and events in coming blog posts. Yet, I will leave you with two thoughts today: I spent many strangely hypnotic sessions alone in my hotel room, intrusive housekeepers be damned, writing on my newest novel. The new book had nothing whatsoever to do with China. I started it in April and did not want to set it aside for a month. I brought materials with me that were part of my research as well as stimulation for writing a story which is set in Greenland. As it was, I wrote about 50,000 words just while I was in Beijing. (More on that later.)

Inside is the big Buddha carved from a single huge tree trunk.

I also shall continue the theme of a reverse vacation by showing you pictures from my last week in Beijing--just before I boarded my flight and had that awful experience I previously wrote about. 

On the Monday of the last week, I presented the final lesson and collected final projects. On the Tuesday, I went out sightseeing and souvenir shopping. On Wednesday was the final exam. After that Wednesday class, I again went out sightseeing. I went to the 2008 Olympic facilities which were only under construction during my previous visit in December 2007. I then visited the famous Lama Temple, home to a really huge Buddha carved from a single huge tree trunk (no photography allowed). So I saw the modern and the ancient, the new and the old in the same day. I also got some ice cream.

Next time: More on that later.


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(C) Copyright 2010-2015 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.