Make sure to visit this at night for a stunning light show every hour on the hourIf you can afford it, the views from the tower are breath-taking
I’ve been lucky enough to have visited Europe before. I saw some cities in Spain, France, and Italy, and loved them all enough to come back. Recently, I returned from a trip to Paris, which I saw last time I was in Europe.
I thought I wouldn’t have much to do, since I’d been to the Eiffel Tower, seen inside the Louvre, and entered the Notre Dame, but I didn’t have enough time to visit half of what I wanted to.
As preparation for this semester abroad, I hunted down works of fiction that took place in Europe as inspiration on where to visit during my stay, and I had a few new ideas on what to see in Paris. This trip was so fun because it was like a scavenger hunt, I was either viewing the touristic attractions in a new light or visiting places a tourist would normally walk by.
Be sure to look for the cat if you don’t have the time to read part of a book in thereA complicated, beautiful work of art. If you think it’s pretty on the outside, wait until you walk in
I highly recommend reading a couple books that take place in the countries you’d like to visit, because that way you’ll learn about new places to visit, or gain more knowledge on places you already know of.
Thanks to the books I have read, I was able to visit the church of St. Etienne du Mont, Shakespeare & Company, and learn more about Point Zero.
I learned Point Zero is where all distances in France are measured. Apparently if you make a wish on it, it’ll come true, and if you don’t make a wish, you’re bound to return to Paris again one day.
Don’t worry, I made sure to stop at Point Zero before I left Paris, but I can’t tell you what I wished for, or it won’t come true!
It’s worn away from the tourists walking past, to Notre Dame
Time is running out, and finals are fast approaching. Earlier in the semester a couple of friends and I decided to book a trip for the long weekend before finals week to the island of Palma, Mallorca.
I’m not sure if it was because I know my days are numbered now, but this trip was by far my favorite. I arrived with only two expectations: laying on the beach every day for the whole trip, and leaving with a heavy tan.
Not only were my expectations met, but they were surpassed. I made friends with other guests at my hostel and we tanned on the beach and went on adventures for the three days there. I went cliff diving for the first time, visited a palace, took a picturesque train ride to the other side of the island, and partied with people I just met! It seems like a dream, how perfect the trip was. It made me realize that talking to people who didn’t come on the trip can add to your plans, not take away from them.
Of course, I was afraid to do a lot of what I’ve done, but I’ve also conquered a lot of those fears now. I’m terrified of heights, so cliff diving seemed ridiculous to me, but I went anyways. I still have no idea how I mustered up the courage to jump, but I did, and even though I landed wrong I’d do it again any day. You don’t have to do anything as extreme as cliff diving, but you should do things that push you out of your comfort zone.
The last night I was there I got to see the sun set over the mountains and the ocean, while thinking about my study abroad experience. As often as it is repeated, I really do believe you have to go into all of it with zero expectations, ready to change plans again and again, and be open to new experiences. My time studying abroad wouldn’t be as amazing as it is without trying new things.
Last weekend, I left Accra for the first time in a while to go to Cape Coast, a mid-size city some 150 kilometers west of the capital. Cape Coast is known to many Africans and oburonis alike for its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but aside from that I found it to be a bright, lively town of merchants and fisherfolk happy to see visitors.
On the rocky shore of the ocean is situated a massive castle, covered in white lime to reflect the hot sun, but weathered from years of salty spray. Hawkers, painters, vendors and their booths line the street leading up to the compound’s entrance. Akwaaba resounds from their mouths at the sight of foreigners. A tour of the property was 40 Ghana cedis for a non-Ghanaian student like myself. The price for a Ghana resident was significantly lower – around 15 cedis for an adult pass. Three of my friends and I joined a tour that had just gotten started. The group was 90% white people. It was the most white people I’ve seen here in one place outside of UG’s campus.
Our tour guide was a young man named Frances who studies at the University of Cape Coast, one of Ghana’s most highly ranked universities. We joined him and the group in the castle courtyard facing the ocean, the parapet lined with rusted black cannons and piles of mortar shells. I squinted as the sun bounced off the whitewashed walls and as mist from the waves blew into my eyes.
Courtyard of Cape Coast Castle.
Frances spoke with an exacted rhythm and tone that told me he’s done this dozens, maybe hundreds of times before. I followed him practically on his heels as he led us through the courtyard and toward a dungeon entrance. He invited us to put our heads into a 3×3 hole in the wall with a crumbled staircase that led to a dark tunnel. It smelled like must and salt and faintly of ghosts.
If you, dear reader, know nothing of the slave castles that are littered across the “Slave Coast” of Africa, I beg that you soon learn.
Established by the British, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French, these castles served many purposes for the growing imperial economies of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries. They housed the European merchant leaders and, later, colonial administrators who supervised imports and exports from major towns along the Gulf of Guinea – Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire; Lome in Togo; Lagos in Nigeria; Takoradi, Accra, and Cape Coast in the Gold Coast. In exchange for the promise of European trade, the land to build these structures was sold by the African leaders whose people had lived there for generations. They were designed as commercial hubs, defensible forts, and corrals for the human livestock around which trade boomed.
Scale model of Cape Coast Castle.
This legacy was in the air that I breathed as I stepped under an arch leading to the female slave dungeons. Like before, I was met with the smell of old dirt, wet rock, and thousands of ghosts spread out across two small chambers. Our wise guide explained how young adult women were kept in these rooms for weeks or months at a time, in total darkness with no air, surrounded by hundreds of their sisters.
Across the castle were the male dungeons, made up of three chambers, deeper underground. Frances bent over and placed his hand against the wall about a foot off the ground where there was a deep stain in the rock. Here, he said, was how deep in shit and vomit hundreds of men had to stand and sleep and eat.
On the south side of the chamber were about a hundred small sculptures of men’s faces carved into stone. Many of them were grimacing, or had their mouths open in shock, or simply looked broken – literally and metaphorically. Frances suddenly asked us to look at the faces. Did they look familiar? Whose faces did we see?
A sculpture similar to those found in the male dungeons.
“You might see my face,” he said, as he looked up from the sculptures directly into my eyes.
Whose ghosts were down there? Was it his family? Was it the father of any of the Black Americans I knew back home? People I graduated high school with? These ghosts came from Ghana, sure, but also from Nigeria, and from Benin, and Burkina Faso – maybe even further inland from Mali, or Sudan, or the Congo.
I blinked tears away as I broke eye contact with Frances and with the hundreds of men who stared at me from the dark floor of the chamber.
Upstairs, we faced a huge wooden door painted black with a plaque above reading “Door of No Return.” It was this door which led to the water, where small boats would shuttle captives out to the ships anchored offshore. Countless bodies passed through this door, never to step foot on their mother soil again. Of the twenty million who were led through this door and doors like it across the Slave Coast, only fifteen million survived to see the New World where they would be enslaved (N.B. below).
Five million ghosts, not counting those who died on the march from the inland to the coast, those who died in these dungeons, or those who died on plantations in the Americas. Five million dead not counting their descendants who didn’t survive convict leasing in the coal mines, or the Jim Crow South, or the prison-industrial system of today.
I felt all these souls as I left the castle. My skin, white as the walls that were beaten by the waves, crawled.
View of the coast and the Gulf of Guinea from the Door of No Return.
Examining my position as an American who has inadvertently benefited from the stolen labor of these bodies, I am humbled, humiliated, and somber. I am privileged enough to know where my ancestors came from. I know the names given to them at birth by their people. My ancestors were not doomed to a fate such as this – snatched from their homes, forced to walk hundreds of kilometers to be shipped thousands more kilometers across the sea, and given names foreign to their tongues. Of all the benefits I reap from the color of my skin, this is perhaps the most heart-wrenching. To my Black American sisters and brothers back home, I weep with you at the number of souls lost to the slave trade.
But more importantly, I will fight with you to get back what was stolen, to hold accountable those who devalue your lives and your labor to this day. Africans and oburonis alike – we, the living – vow to uphold this.
The exterior of the Door of No Return, relabeled the Door of Return for those of the African Diaspora who return through the archway.
N.B. There is much disagreement on the exact number of people captured from Africa and brought to the Americas, due to inadequate primary materials from the slave traders. Twenty million captives is generally the lowest estimate. Most agree, however, that of the millions who embarked on the Middle Passage, anywhere from 10-20% of them died on the journey. For more information on the particular controversies surrounding the historiography of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, see Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Panaf Publishing: Abuja) 2009 ed., especially pp. 108-120.
For further reading on the African Diaspora, especially from a Ghanaian-“American” perspective, I highly recommend Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing (Knopf: New York, 2016).
Additionally, the literature of Ta Nehesi-Coates and James Baldwin provide insights on the contemporary experiences of Black men in America as they have been shaped by America’s legacy of institutionalized racism.
Hello, everyone! Welcome to my blog! For the fall semester of 2018, I am participating as a student in the Beijing Center (TBC), a study abroad program based in Beijing’s University of International Business and Economics, or UIBE for short. I’m so excited to bring all of you along with me through this amazing experience studying abroad in Beijing, China.
That being said, it has already been a solid three weeks since my arrival in China.
I know. It’s already been three weeks.
In that time, I’ve already taken over 1,000 photos, stumbled through (and I mean, really stumbled through) some survival Chinese, eaten twice my weight in a bunch of different foods, and seen some pretty darn cool things.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s just recap my first week in Beijing.
Departure
In the week leading up to my departure date to Beijing, I felt a huge variety of emotions. Anyone who asked me how I was feeling about leaving to study abroad got the same general answer. I felt excited, eager, anxious, nervous, and, honestly, a little bit scared. This would be the first time I was going to be away from home for more than a few weeks. Granted, I had participated in an exchange program to Japan in the past, but that was only for two weeks. This time, I would be gone from home for four months.
That’s quite a long time, and as the departure day crept closer and closer, the realization that I would be on the other side of the world for an entire semester hit me pretty hard.
Especially when I was standing in the middle of Chicago O’Hare International Airport on departure day.
Me all ready to go to board my flight to Beijing!
Let me tell you, the picture shown above is a little misleading, as it was taken before the tear fest happened. When I say tear fest, I mean tears streaming down my cheeks as I said my goodbyes to my family. I mean I made my brother’s t-shirt damp with my tears when I hugged him as he wished me an amazing study abroad experience. I mean my mother telling me to stop crying even though she was clearly crying herself. I continued to cry well after I said goodbye; I had to go through airport security and then find my departure gate with my vision blurred by tears. I’m pretty sure the cash register at McDonald’s was wondering if my eyes could get any redder when she was taking my order for some chicken nuggets. The chicken nuggets soothed me for a little bit before I got onto the plane and the crying started all over again.
But, as much as I did cry, I boarded my plane and somehow managed to lift my 40 pound carry-on luggage into the overhead compartment by myself. I hope whoever witnessed that struggle had a good laugh (I’m 4’11”, by the way).
13 hours after taking off, I landed in Beijing, China, on August 12th.
Week One (Orientation Week)
The very first night in Beijing was, admittedly, pretty rough. I had barely slept on the plane, maybe about 2 hours near the end of the flight. I had spent most of my time anxiously thinking about the upcoming semester while playing my 3DS, doodling in my bullet journal, or just blankly staring out the airplane window. But finally getting off of the plane gave me some energy to perk up. Not long after getting off of the plane, I quickly befriended two other students who were on the same plane and were also participating in TBC’s program. The relief that no doubt all of us felt was liberating; most of my anxiety about the flight to Beijing stemmed from the fear of getting lost after getting off of the plane. At least with my newfound friends, if we got lost, we would be lost together. And so, we made our way through Beijing Capital International Airport.
After getting through customs, we were greeted by a group of Chinese UIBE students who worked for TBC as Chinese roommates and were taken to a cafe to rest as we waited for the rest of the students who were arriving the same day. At this point, my energy was fueled by nothing else but the excitement of finally being in China and the enthusiasm of meeting people involved in TBC. I remember having a lot of lively conversations with both the other TBC students and the Chinese roommates present, even though we students were all exhausted from the plane ride.
On the way to UIBE’s campus from the airport!
Once we finally got on the bus to go to UIBE’s campus, however, I think we all crashed. I know I did. Most of the rest of that night was spent in an exhausted haze. I remember everyone being extremely kind and patient with all of us who had just arrived, and I remember being really overwhelmed with so much new sights and information. TBC had graciously fed us dinner, and I recall being completely out of it, unable to bring myself to eat much because I was so exhausted. I remember finally going to bed feeling completely unsure of what I had gotten myself into.
But, the next morning, I quickly figured out that all of my emotions from the night before were a result of travel exhaustion. We had breakfast in a cute cafe and were able to socialize with each other more. I felt much better, and everyone was so open and kind to each other. It was obvious that morning that the excitement for the upcoming semester was contagious, all of us feeding off of each other’s energy.
The first of many group photos. Can you find where I am?
Then, Beijing Center’s orientation week finally kicked off. Throughout the week, most, if not all, of our burning questions were answered. We went over everything from living in Beijing as a UIBE student, navigating the campus, talking about the logistics of academics, and more. We also met all of the amazing TBC staff as well as the Chinese roommates and got to know one another better through group activities. We even were grouped together with Chinese roommates to go out to lunch and to dinner so that we would know food places around campus. It was such a clear, scheduled, organized way to get us orientated in Beijing.
One of many orientation sessions during orientation week.
In addition to the orientation sessions, there were a handful of excursions that we went on. We went sight-seeing at Tiananmen Square, we saw an amazing acrobatics show, and we went shopping at Aegean mall in preparation for our upcoming Silk Road trip. Every day, I had so much fun, laughing and smiling with my newfound friends, and the stress of the first night in Beijing seemed to just melt away.
TBC invades Tiananmen SquareCute giant koala at the Aegean Mall!
All in all, the first week might have started out a little rough, but after getting over the initial feelings of being overwhelmed and exhausted, I became much more comfortable. I was so relieved to realize that so many other fellow students were in my shoes. I was glad that we all shared the feeling of being in this wonderful experience together, and this feeling brought us even closer together when we all packed our bags and left for a once-in-a-lifetime journey along the Silk Road, a journey that would take us over 2,000 miles away from Beijing.
Alright, alright, I know I said last time that my next blog post would be about our second stop on the Silk Road excursion, but today, we went to the majestic Great Wall of China, and you know that I just have to tell you all about it.
The weather had looked like it was going to be overcast all day. There was some worried chatters about the chance of rain later in the day, but regardless of what the weather was going to be like, I was ridiculously excited to be going to the Great Wall. Up until today, it was only something that I’ve heard about in textbooks and seen in pictures, and now, quite proudly, I can say that I’ve seen it, touched it, walked around on it, and boy, oh boy, did I take a load of pictures on it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
We left campus around 8am on a bus, which was graciously arranged by TBC. I had some fruit for breakfast before passing out on the 1.5 hour ride to the site (most of us did), waking up to some clean, fresh air and pleasantly cool weather. The skies were still a little overcast, but it felt like the sky was perking up a little bit as the afternoon approached. I remember Ryan, the director of student development at TBC, who went with us on this little excursion, commented that we seemed lucky in terms of weather. Later, after our time was up at the Great Wall, he would say that we were extremely lucky, since he remembered there being a thick fog that covered the mountains the year before, blocking much of the views.
After getting off of the bus, we walked over to the ticket area, about a 5 minute walk. All of us were really lively, goofing around with each other and discussing our upcoming time on the wall. The weather was getting brighter and brighter, and the clouds were clearing overhead, seeming to reflect our happy moods. It seemed that we were really lucky after all.
Our tickets to the Great Wall! (…plus my good friend Francesca in the back haha)
As pictured, we got two tickets: one ticket for gaining entrance onto the wall and one for the shuttle bus. The shuttle bus drove us closer to the wall before dropping us off. From there, we had two options. We could have either hiked the stairs all the way up onto the wall, or, for a price, we could take a ski-lift type contraption (they called it a cable car) that lifted tourists up to the wall. My friends and I decided to do the hike, just so we all could triumphantly say that we climbed up to the Great Wall of China.
After all, when in China, hike up to the Great Wall, right?
I kid you not, there has not been another time where my legs have burned hotter. There must have been at least 20 flights of stairs, majority of them being pretty steep. It took us maybe around 30-45 minutes to drag ourselves up all of those stairs. Like, that hike was beautiful, sure, and now I can definitively say that I hiked up to the Great Wall of China, but if you asked me to do it again, I would politely and aggressively say “nah fam.” If the day had been hotter, I’m certain I would not have made it up those stairs. We were extremely lucky in terms of weather, indeed.
Me, tomato-faced, clearly not amused with that hike. The Great Wall is just behind me.
Anyway, once I actually got to the wall, my exhausted-ness pretty much melted away (well… eventually). The view was absolutely breathless, with the impressive green mountains and the blue skies in the background. In the distance, we could see the rest of the wall snaking in and out of the mountains and forestry like an ancient gray dragon. It’s indescribable to witness, let alone walk along, such a majestic structure, hundreds and hundreds of years old. To touch the bricks and to walk along the path that soldiers of ancient dynasties walked along was unbelievable. The sun came out and the skies completely cleared up, revealing that deep beautiful blue color. It became an amazing day for us to take pictures and to explore that small part of the Great Wall (the actual length of the wall is around 5,000 miles!).
Me on the Great Wall!
Because the wall was built in a mountainous area, the path along the top of the wall had stairs going up and down, depending on the terrain. So you could be walking down a really steep decline for one section and then you could be hiking up some stairs again in another section.
The Great Wall snaking into the mountains.
All of us were not afraid to be tourists and took LOTS, and I mean LOTS, of really adorable and heart-warming photos. I was all smiles today. I felt so comfortable, and I felt like I was a true part of this amazing experience with everyone in the TBC program. The feeling of togetherness, feeling like I belonged to this group of study abroad students, was… quite fulfilling and comforting. We all were experiencing this ancient piece of history of a country whose culture is richer than any one of us had thought together. I think our many photos captured that pretty well.
Disclaimer: there are many, many, other photos that we took other than those pictured below (in case you guys didn’t get that, yet). These are just some of my favorites.
Happy smiles! 🙂Showing some LUC Rambler pride!More Rambler pride!TBC at the Great Wall!
We spent about an hour and a half on the Great Wall, taking copious amounts of pictures and enjoying the weather and each other’s company as we walked along the path. Before we knew it, it was time for us to return to our bus.
But how in the world did we get back all the way down, you ask?
A toboggan, that’s how.
For those of you who aren’t familiar (as I was when I first heard about it), a toboggan is literally a giant slide, where you sit on like this little black sled with a lever that you can use to control your speed and you slide down however far the slide goes. If you pushed forward on the lever, you went faster, and if you pulled the lever towards you, you slowed down. The exhilarating feeling is similar to riding a roller coaster, only it’s a really smooth ride and you get to control how fast you’re going. I was whooping and laughing the entire way down, since my friends and I basically pushed that lever down as far as it could go for most of the ride down.
At some point in the ride, you were instructed to slow down and smile for a photo shot. Once we finally got off of the slide, we were able to look at our photos. Below is my picture; I was really fond of it, so I bought it for memories’ sake. I think it really nicely sums up my positive feelings about the day, with the blue sky, the Great Wall in the background, and my smile as bright as the sun shining down on me.
That’s about it for now! I promise that next time, we’ll get back to our Silk Road excursion! I can’t wait to share what else we were up to for those two weeks!
Since coming back from both the Silk Road and from whatever adventures we planned for ourselves during the Chinese National Holiday, all of us have been quite busy with schoolwork. We’ve come to the middle of the semester now. I’d be lying if I said that the semester hasn’t been flying by since the National Holiday. Midterms are this coming week, and many of us are spending this weekend preparing for them. As for me, I am a chronic procrastinator, so here I am writing this blog while my to-do list for this weekend stares mockingly at me.
With the help of finally having an academic class schedule, life living in Beijing, China has smoothed out to a fairly rhythmic routine. I had thought that adjusting to the new environment around me was going to be more difficult than it has been. Every day has many thoroughly enjoyable moments that I share with my fellow TBC students and the TBC staff, and it makes life here in Beijing that much more interesting. The days seem to all blur together because they’re all so fun, and you know what they say about when time flies.
As for my own academic schedule, I am currently taking 18 credit hours, so I’ve got a pretty full plate. Originally, I had planned on taking only 15 credits, but my sudden decision to switch into the intensive beginner Chinese language class has bumped those credits to 18. This hasn’t prevented me from going out and exploring Beijing or laughing with my friends in the TBC dormitory lounge, however. I love all of my classes because they provide a certain insight into Chinese culture and history that I couldn’t have gotten just by walking around Beijing. For example, I learned about the usage of Wade-Giles in my Modern Chinese Fiction class, a writing system that was used in China before the adoption of Pinyin. In Wade-Giles, if there was a “t” written, it was actually pronounced as a “d.” So, the original word for “tofu” in Chinese is actually pronounced and correctly written in Pinyin as “dofu,” but because people didn’t know about the difference between Wade-Giles and Pinyin when tofu was brought over to the West, it is now pronounced in the Western world with a “t.” How fascinating is that?
It also isn’t hard to stay on top of all the schoolwork, so long as you make the effort to stay on top of it. A bonus is that all of the classes for TBC students are located in one building, so that significantly reduced the difficulty of university life here, much to all of our gratitude.
In particular, I love, love, love, my Chinese language class. In the TBC program, everyone, regardless of their Chinese language level, are required to take a Chinese language class. I have never spoken a word of Mandarin before coming to Beijing, and I was very eager to start learning it formally in a classroom setting. Like I mentioned before, I switched over to the beginner Chinese intensive class, which basically means that the class covers Chinese 101 and Chinese 102, or two semesters of Chinese, in one semester. The pace that we’ve been going at is perfect for me, and I feel like I’ve been making leaps and bounds with my Chinese. Just the other day, during pair work in class, I was able to make a pretty good conversation with my Chinese professor, and it was so rewarding to know that I’ve come so far in my studies when I had no background in the language before coming to China. In fact, I’ve picked up a Chinese language minor!
我很喜欢学中文！I love learning Chinese! 🙂
My Chinese classmates and I! 我的中文同学和我！
In addition to having all of our classes in one building, they’re all located on the same floor, the 4th floor of the Ning Yuan Building, otherwise known to us students as the TBC Building. This is because the 4th floor houses the actual TBC center, with all the staff offices and the extensive TBC library as well as the classrooms that we students have class in. I can’t express enough how amazing it is for us students to have our own facilities and our own staff dedicated to helping us throughout our time here. Everyone is so, so friendly, and the friendly, welcoming, and warm atmosphere of the program has no doubt helped all the students, not just me, to settle into our lives here. I can pop my head into the Student Development Office at any time just to have a quick chat with the Student Development people. I’m so grateful for the support system here, through the staff members as well as my fellow students. My entire TBC experience would not be the same without any of the people I’ve made good friends with here, studying together, laughing together, stressing out together, eating together, and more.
But finally, I’d like to talk a little bit about living with the pollution here in China.
It really isn’t anything that is completely life-changing or life-altering. During orientation, we were advised to download an AQI (Air Quality Index) app in order to monitor each day’s air pollution rating, and I check this app every morning like I check the weather every morning. The app will give me a number index as well as a color to symbolize how bad the pollution is, with green representing pretty clean air (the number index ranges from about 0-90) and purple representing pretty bad pollution (an index of about 250-300). Basically, the higher the index, the more pollution there is for that day.
A screenshot from the Air Quality app that I use. You can also see the color coordination that they give the different ranges of indexes.
We’ve only had a handful of days where the air pollution has reached the nasty “purple” rating (I remember the rating reaching around 290 those days). The great majority of days, however, are “orange,” or an AQI of around 100-150. The difference between these two air qualities are quite jarring, as you can see in the pictures I took just a day apart below.
A “purple” AQI day.An “orange” AQI day.
I include these pictures to show that beautiful blue skies are still prevalent in China, and that the air pollution is getting much, much better than where it was in the past. Before coming to China, my assumption was that the pollution was just plain bad, and that was an assumption created by ridiculous media coverage. I’m here to tell you that the pollution really isn’t all that bad to deal with, and my health is completely okay — the effects that one might get from directly breathing the air of a bad AQI day are only very temporary and manifest in like runny noses and sometimes headaches. I will wear a face mask whenever there’s a “red” or higher AQI. But the locals here, regardless if it’s a purple AQI day or not, don’t really wear masks: this is just what life is for them. As one of the Chinese roommates for TBC put it, “I’m used to it.”
In terms of the water pollution, people just buy bottled water. Water here (including literally everything else) isreally cheap (we’re talking maybe 30 U.S. cents for a 550 mL bottle of water and 40 cents for a 1.5 L bottle of water), so access to clean water is not a problem here.
I will dedicate an entire blog post about the food I’ve been stuffing my face with while I’ve been in China — you will have to wait until then to hear about the details of the amazing food here in China! Trust me, it’s quite different from the Chinese takeout back in the States. What I will say that food, along with water, is really cheap as well. Most of my meals are around $2, and I usually won’t spend more than about $7 on food per day. Plus, because of UIBE’s amazing restaurants and street food vendors around off campus, I rarely get bored of Chinese food. But more on that later.
So yeah, in conclusion, life is good! Homesickness is definitely a feeling that I get from time to time, I won’t lie, but I know that my time here will be over within a moment’s time, so I gotta enjoy it while it still lasts!
That’s about it in terms of how my days in China are going so far. I apologize for the lack of pictures for this blog; I promise the next one will have more. But I have to get back to studying for midterms now, so see you next time! 🙂
I grew up in a Buddhist Vietnamese family. As a child, I went to the closest Buddhist temple to my house every Sunday to sit and listen to the morning chants and teachings alongside my family before attending Vietnamese school for a few hours. I grew up wearing necklaces with little Buddha carvings and prayer beads around my wrist. I was raised with Buddhist traditions, and I was told that whenever I felt unsafe, unsettled, or just not right, I should pray to the Buddha. Doing so would calm my rapid heartbeats and my noisy mind. So it was natural for Buddhism to become the belief that I would call my religion for a good part of my childhood.
But, as I grew older, I questioned what Buddhism meant to me and if it had a place in my life that was more than something I grew up with. I didn’t know if belief in the Buddha would help me achieve my goals — I came to strongly believe that my accomplishments were because of my efforts and my efforts alone. I also didn’t think that praying to the Buddha would do anything for me. I unfortunately found that whenever I did pray to Buddha, when my head would spin and my emotions would reel out of control, I found no calm, no real peace within those prayers. And so, I put Buddhism on the back burner and saw it as just part of my Vietnamese heritage. It was nothing more, nothing less.
Moving forward in my life, I labeled myself as “agnostic,” although I would often clarify to others, “But if I had to identify with a religion, it would be Buddhism. My family’s Buddhist.” I knew that I was spiritual. I knew that there were forces and miracles out there that just couldn’t be chalked up to pure coincidence. I also knew that Buddhism held a piece of my life that I could not just give up. It was huge part of my culture, after all. But I didn’t know if Buddhism itself, let alone any other religion, was right for me, and so for years, I considered myself to be agnostic.
Flash forward to my time here in Beijing, China.
Coming to China, I never expected that something like my spirituality and my relationship with Buddhism, naked and confused, would be brought out into the open. I knew that I would see Buddhism more in my surroundings, more than I saw it back in the United States, but nothing could prepare me for what I would spiritually experience here. The prevalence of Buddhist temples and motifs all over China forced me to confront what I had been neglecting to address for years.
It all started on the Silk Road in the Buddhist monastery town of Xia’he. If you’ve read my blog about our time in Xia’he, you already know that story of my hike around the Labrang Monastery early in the morning. I want to reiterate the significance of that morning to me yet again. What I felt is still something, even after a few months after that morning happened, that I cannot explain. It was a sensation that I just could not begin to understand. For awhile, it only made me really giddy to know that something that significant had happened to me that morning. It was something that I told people close to me because all I thought of it at the time was that it was important to me. After some time, though, I finally was able to bring myself to analyze and reflect on why exactly that feeling was important to me. It was too remarkable for me to just ignore. However, I wasn’t able to come up with an explanation for what it could have been on my own, so I decided to bring this conundrum before a Buddhist monk.
Sunset in the beautiful Buddhist temple.
This monk I met during a field trip my Introduction to Buddhism class took to a famous Buddhist temple in Beijing. After a tour of the temple grounds and a delicious vegetarian dinner, we all sat down inside of a prayer room that looked very similar to the prayer room that I sat in for so many Sundays of my childhood. We then had a Q&A session with one of the monks of the temple, with my professor acting as a translator. I timidly raised my hand to ask the first question of the night. I remember my voice shook as I tried to explain my family background and what had happened to me in Xia’he. I asked him what he thought of my story. I remember my friend, who sat next to me, pat my back in quiet support, hearing the emotion in my voice and knowing that the moment had meant something personal. The monk listened intently as I told my story, shifting his weight on the cushion he sat upon as my professor translated what I said into Chinese. Then, he gave me his explanation.
The Buddhist monk told me that what I had felt could have been a reaction of my soul to the circumstances of that moment. In the Buddhist tradition, the soul is reborn a number of times in a never-ending cycle. He proposed that I could have been a Buddhist in my past life, and my soul, in that moment, could have remembered that it was Buddhist in the past life. I was brought to tears because I unconsciously remembered that. He also said that if that particular explanation was a little far-fetched to me, I could have reacted the way that I did because what I had prayed for was very deep and personal, and because my prayers had come from the bottom of my heart, I was moved to tears as those prayers meant a lot to me.
After the field trip, the first thing I did was tell my parents about the monk’s words to me. My mom smiled with excitement on my phone screen as I told her and my father about the Q&A session. “Maybe it was meant to be for you to go to China and learn more about Buddha,” she said as a passing comment. But I took note of her words, and I held them in the back of my mind as I continued about my days in China.
Since I received that explanation, my heart felt a little lighter. My mom was certainly right that China was becoming a classroom for me to learn about Buddhism in a surprisingly subtle way. I felt like I could look at Buddhism in the eye, sit down, and have a proper dialogue with it instead of ignoring it like I had done for all of those years. I could see it in action in the lives of the people here. I knew, I knew, that deep down it held a very dear place in my heart. It was undoubtedly part of my cultural heritage, after all. I believed in many of its morals, and I had extensive knowledge about the religion. Yet I still had this weird complicated relationship with it, unable to call it my own because I still questioned it. Now that I had gotten to this point with it where I could comfortably reflect, I felt that I could search for an answer to the question I had been asking Buddhism for quite some time: “What role do you play in my life?”
One of the things that puzzled me about the religion was that it seemed contradictory as a result of its material culture. Buddhism is a religion that attacks the material world with such a vigor no other religion can compare. Yet material culture still exists within it. I didn’t understand why it is necessary for us to pray with prayer beads, to burn incense, and to read sutras as we chant. It disturbed me to see so many tourist sites along the Silk Road sell prayer beads and other Buddhist ritual items as souvenirs. So, what did I do to try and understand this phenomenon?
I wrote an extensive 13-page research paper about material culture within Buddhism for a class.
While researching information for that paper, my Buddhism class took another field trip to another different Buddhist temple, sitting down in a monk’s living quarters and having a very casual talk with him. The monk was named Yuan Liu. He spoke extremely good English and was very hospitable, constantly offering us more tea and more snacks to eat. As we enjoyed each other’s company, we were allowed to ask him any questions that we had about Buddhism. Obviously, I had to ask him about the role of material culture within Buddhism, both for my paper and for my own sake.
The answer that he gave me became an answer that I had been looking for.
He said that the items, like prayer beads, are a way to guide the mind, which by its nature is uncontrollable and easily distracted. Whenever anyone starts practicing the Buddhist belief, their minds start out as wild and uncontrollable. The rituals, the chanting, everything, serves as a reminder to practitioners of their belief and the path that they walk on. Perhaps most importantly, he reminded me that what really matters in Buddhism is the tempering of the mind and the discovery of inner peace and happiness through a simple life.
Again, the first person I called to tell this experience was my mom. She basically reiterated what the monk had told me. Perhaps the most significant thing she told me was that wearing prayer beads meant that one was always praying to Buddha, reflecting the dedication to the Buddhist way, even if one didn’t go to temple every Sunday or prayed all the time.
I contemplated on Yuan Liu’s and my mom’s words long after I turned in that essay. I slowly came to understand that all that stupid questioning I did was a result of me blatantly veering off of the path that my parents put me on during my times of turmoil. They had put me on that path because they believe that the teachings of the Buddha would allow for me to grow up into a responsible, strong, polite woman. They believe that the teachings could help me redirect myself when in times of difficulty. I’ve come to better understand that Buddhism isn’t a religion in which I have to do all these rituals to call myself a true Buddhist, but it is a guidance. Buddhism, at its core, is the nurturing of the heart and the spirit, and by passing down its traditions to me, my parents were nurturing my heart and my spirit, long before I’ve realized it. It’s taken me a trip to China to finally, truly, understand that. And that’s a powerful realization that brings me to tears.
My prayer beads.
The prayer beads that I bought in Xia’he as a reminder of that morning now serve as a reminder for the Buddhist teachings embedded in me as part of my Vietnamese identity. I don’t claim that I’ve had a sudden spiritual awakening during this study abroad experience in China. But I think the critical self reflection that I’ve done while I’ve been here is more than enough to say that my perspective on what Buddhism means to me has changed. I wouldn’t have been able to do this self-reflection if I didn’t hop on that plane to come here. I wouldn’t have come to terms with a part of me that I’ve ignored. Buddhism and I still have a lot to work on, together. It isn’t collecting dust behind me anymore as I walk forward in my life; it’s back to walking besides me, acting as a nurturing guide whose presence I am still getting used to.
Maybe my mom was right. Maybe fate meant for it to be this way for me after all.
So this past Thursday was actual Thanksgiving Day, and to be honest with you all, it didn’t really feel like Thanksgiving. In the days leading up to Turkey Day, I was feeling less homesick than I thought, most likely because I wasn’t being bombarded with the fact that Thanksgiving was quickly coming up (I made it a point not to check social media for awhile, knowing full well that seeing Thanksgiving food videos and ads would make the homesickness worse).
The actual day was just like any other normal day here in Beijing, China. I went to class and then back to the dorms to sit in the lounge and do miscellaneous things.
But fear not, I still was able to partake in some Thanksgiving tradition here.
Friday night was designated to be TBC’s annual Thanksgiving potluck in the basement of our dormitory building. I got together with two of my good friends and together we planned to bring a huge serving of guacamole to the potluck. The day before the potluck, my friend and I went to a small supermarket on campus to find something to contain our guac. Unfortunately, the supermarket didn’t have much in terms of kitchen container supplies, so we decided to get a green wash basin to use as our container for the guac (no, I’m not kidding). We then got the ingredients to actually make the guac: the vendor who sold us the produce gave us an amused look when we put a plastic bag filled with 11 avocados, 4 tomatoes, 2 onions, and 2 lemons on his counter. The actual day of the potluck, my friend who was an intern at the U.S. embassy was able to get her hands on three bags of Tostitos (which, I never realized I would miss until I ate one tear-inducing scoops Tostito chip). Once we all were able to get together on Friday evening, we rolled up our sleeves and after about an hour, we churned out 11 avocados worth of guacamole (spoiler alert: all of it was eaten by the end of the night).
11 avocados worth of guacamole in a wash-basin
After we reveled in our success in making amazingly delicious guacamole, we went downstairs and were warmly greeted by the Chinese roommates and TBC Student Development staff. Seeing all of the food already laid out on two long tables filled me with the joy and excitement that I feel on Thanksgiving. There was food ranging from Chinese dishes to traditional Thanksgiving foods like turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing.
My mood was lifted higher and higher as more people in the program came downstairs with their food items. As I enjoyed everyone’s company and ate some wonderful food, I smiled to myself, knowing that even though I was far away from my home in America, the home that I’ve found here in Beijing, among my TBC and Chinese friends, was quite enough for me to feel the Thanksgiving spirit.
I’m so, so thankful for the opportunity to study abroad at TBC, the time that I’ve spend abroad, the people that I’ve met while I’ve been abroad, and the people back at home eagerly waiting for me to return.
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I know I did 🙂
As a last huzzah before Finals Week, last weekend my friends and I hopped onto a 3 hour plane to Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan Province of China and also known as the Home of the Giant Panda. We ended up staying there for two days and three nights, and by the end of the short-lived trip, we were very glad that we were able to squeeze it in before the end of the semester. It provided a last push for us to wrap up our study abroad semester in China.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. We must address probably the most important, and definitely the most cutest, part of the trip. The first day we spent in Chengdu was spent squealing over the cute, sleepy, and amusingly clumsy pandas in the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, which was about an hour shuttle bus ride from our Airbnb. We had met up with an old friend of my friend, who was her exchange student many years ago and generously served as our navigator for the day, as he was a student of a relatively nearby university in Chengdu.
Our panda-watching group!
The park was filled with lush greenery that was mostly made up of tall bamboo stalks that at times towered over us and beautiful ponds and small lakes, where ducks and geese would literally swim up to you to greet you. It was magnificent to see all of that green. None of the zoos that I had been to before looked anything like the inside of this park, and the pictures don’t do it much justice.
Of course, it had endless amounts of designated panda enclosures, most of which were all outside. The pandas had plenty of room to roam around and to just… be pandas: all the enclosures had some sort of wooden playground structure that they could either nap on or lounge about and some trees that they could climb up and get stuck in should they please. It was just endless amounts of entertainment watching the pandas. For example, we watched one who was quite obviously stuck up high in a tree try his hardest to climb down but ultimately decided to just accept his fate for the time being. We also watched some adorable baby pandas stumble around, trying out their new paws. Whenever any one of us spotted a panda, it was instantly the greatest new thing we had ever seen. It’s a given that I bought a lot, and I mean a lot, of panda goodies at the various souvenir shops around the vast park.
Baby pandas!!!
After we had seen our fill of pandas (we probably spent a close to five hours or so at the park), we took the shuttle bus back to the area around our Airbnb, which happened to be near a huge shopping district filled with shopping malls. For an early dinner, we sat down and had the famous Sichuan spicy hotpot, where we ate a bunch of interesting meats, like stomach lining, duck blood, and liver, much to the insistence of our local friend. We were also served drinkable cold yogurt, in case we needed it to calm the fiery burn of that Sichuan spicy hot broth. Needless to say, we had quite the adventurous dinner that night!
Hotpot is a shared dish where there is a center pot with boiling broth. You are served raw meats and vegetables, and you basically cook the food in the broth. In the middle of this pot is the really spicy Sichuan broth, while the outside was the non-spicy broth. Yum!
To aid in digestion, we wandered into a random shopping mall and waddled around there for awhile with soup bellies. That was when my friend spotted a Vietnamese restaurant, and it was all over. We quickly made the decision to have tomorrow’s lunch there before we had dinner with my friend’s old math professor. It was a pretty easy decision, considering two out of the three of us were craving Vietnamese food and the third friend had been wanting to try Vietnamese food. Once night fell, we parted ways with my friend’s old exchange student, and we headed back to our Airbnb, where we played card games and talked for hours into the night.
The next morning, after sleeping in comfortably, we hurried over to that Vietnamese restaurant for lunch, stopping by to get $2 (you heard me) large brown sugar coffee lattes. I could barely contain my excitement as I flipped through the menu, feelings of nostalgia and homesickness and longing for home flooding my senses all at once. My friends were equally excited to have some Vietnamese food with me, sensing my eagerness, so we quickly ordered our food: two orders of pho (one chicken and the other beef), one order of bun, which is basically a cold noodle salad dish, one order of spring rolls, and one order of eggrolls.
The dish that brought me to tears.
Let me tell you, tears were shed all around that day. My friend, who for the first time ate eggrolls the Vietnamese way (wrapped up in lettuce and mint leaves), was also brought to tears at how good they were. But I cried for a different reason. The food genuinely tasted so similar to my mom’s home cooking, and the longing for home hit me harder than ever before. The sauce, nuoc mam, in particular was almost dead on similar. Just a drop of that garlicky, salty, sweet, and sour sauce by itself was enough to bring tears to my eyes, and it was a testament to how good the food was going to be. The refreshing bun dish perked up my taste buds, which, over the course of the semester, had slowly developed an unbearable craving of the fresh, floral, and bright flavors of Vietnamese cooking. It had taken me a trip to Chengdu to finally find some Vietnamese food in China, and the discovery of this restaurant made me that much more glad to have gone on this trip. Eating here was what gave me some energy to last for the rest of the semester. We were almost done, and I knew that I would be able to have that familiar and comforting Vietnamese food again.
We walked around the shopping mall until it was time to have dinner with my friend’s math teacher. He generously fed us a delicious Filipino dinner, and it was a pleasure to spend time at his wonderful apartment with his family. Before long, though, we had to go back to our Airbnb, pack our stuff, and then pull an all-nighter by playing cards and snacking on foods until it was time for us to leave for the airport. Our flight was at 6am, so we figured that it would be better to just stay up. We were back on campus by 9am, and after an emotionally and physically adventurous weekend, you know I passed out for a good while, dreaming of cute and cuddly pandas.
Thanks for reading! 🙂
-Justine
A Brew of Emotions: The Final Stretch (Last Week in Beijing)
There is one week left of my study abroad adventure in Beijing, and I am feeling a brew of emotions.
The first, excitement. For the past two weeks, I’ve felt really homesick, more homesick than I have ever felt before during this semester. It’s probably because the power of the holidays is on full blast back in the States. Missing the Thanksgiving celebration with all my friends and family was already hard enough, and seeing all the Christmas-related stuff on people’s social media hasn’t made it any less easier. So the thought of coming back to the U.S. and being bombarded with that holiday cheer is very exciting to me. I’m excited to just exist in my house again. I’m excited to see all of my friends again and catch up. I’m excited to eat Vietnamese food again. I’m excited to continue developing the relationships and the projects that I left behind all those months ago. I’m just excited, and I can hardly wait to jump on that plane back!
A picture of my family’s Christmas tree that my mom sent to me recently. I think this is the first year that I have not helped put up this tree.
The second, procrastination. As you probably already know, this last week is finals week, and instead of studying for my Chinese language finals or working on final presentations/essays, I am writing this blog post.
So that basically sums up that emotion.
The third, sadness. For the past four months, I’ve created countless numbers of memories, and I’ve taken an equal amount, if not more, pictures while I’ve been here. Scrolling through the pictures I’ve taken so far, I cannot help but feel sad to leave China. Here is where I’ve grown spiritually. Here is where I’ve conquered fears time and time again. Here is where I’ve seen a rich and beautiful culture and discovered that this country has dimensions that I’ve never thought even existed. To leave something so profound in my life makes me feel… empty? I don’t think that’s quite the right word, but it’s the best I’ve got. It makes me quite sad to leave behind this life that has challenged me in ways that I didn’t think would challenge me. It makes me even sadder to think about the friends that I’m parting ways with. The friendships that I’ve established here are some of the most enjoyable friendships I’ve ever had in my collegiate career. The people here are so vibrant, and being surrounded by them has allowed for me to grow into a better version of me. I’ll be leaving all of that behind, soon.
The Fall 2018 TBC Family
At our monthly (the last one for the semester) community meeting last week, TBC Student Development Director Ryan briefly talked about the possibility of going through reverse culture shock once we returned home. At the time of the meeting, I didn’t think much of it (mostly because I was distracted with the idea that they were serving us pizza after the meeting), but now that I’ve sat down to write this blog and to reflect upon what this past semester has meant to me, all of the things he talked about on the topic of reverse culture shock seems to be entirely plausible for me. Maybe the pace of life back at home will be so alien to me that it’ll seem… I don’t know, boring in comparison to the life here? Maybe I’ll be so overwhelmed with the go-go-go pace of back home that I’ll shut down? Who honestly knows how reverse culture shock will affect me, if it’ll affect me at all.
That leads to the fourth emotion that I’m marinating in, and it is perhaps the most profound one.
Anxiousness.
I call this emotion the most profound because I never thought that I would feel a little anxious to go home. I mean, I’m homesick. I’ve been longing to snuggle my dog, to goof around with my brother, to chatter with my family at the dinner table, to play hours upon hours of video games on my Nintendo Switch, to laugh with my friends, and yet I feel this tiny nagging sense of dread to return home even before I’ve come home.
The truth is, around the middle of the semester, I had a little bit of a crisis. One of the Chinese roommates for TBC whom I’m pretty good friends with was in the middle of applying for graduate school and studying for the GRE. Talking to him and watching him go through this process made me realize something: I only have three semesters left as a undergraduate student. Suddenly, the entire world seemed to have laid its entire weight on my shoulders. Horrible thoughts and feelings of falling behind on my studies because I’ve studied abroad creeped in, and a sense of paranoia flooded my senses. What if my studying abroad set me so far back that I wouldn’t be able to prepare for applying to graduate school on time? I still hadn’t looked at what graduate programs I wanted to even apply for. I didn’t even know what kind of programs I wanted to apply for. I had a plan for after graduation, but that was only a vague thought, not even a game plan. And here I was, in China.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t regret going abroad, and I won’t ever regret my time here. I just suffered a little from this realization that life seemed to have kept going without me back at home.
Well, this is where all of my friends and family would remind me: slow down, Justine. Remembering that advice allowed for me to jump off of that Paranoia Rocket off to Planet Anxiety and continue to enjoy my time here in Beijing while I still could. I knew that my fears were blown a little out of proportion, and I technically still had plenty of time, I just needed to use it well once I returned. But, to be completely honest with you, I might be strapped in to ride that rocket again now that my study abroad semester is coming to an end. It is the final stretch.
I know now that what I felt in the middle of this semester was like culture shock part two, and it was completely normal for me to have gone through that. As I get ready for finals this week and continue to swim around in this brew of jumbled emotions, I realize that I just need to take a deep breath. I need to remember that while it feels like life zoomed ahead of me back at home, I’ve also zoomed ahead in many other aspects. I’ve gained a new skill in speaking some Chinese. I’ve gained a spiritual understanding of myself. I’ve gained knowledge on China and Chinese culture, something that I’ll admit I misunderstood before I came. I’ve gained stories that I can share with everyone back at home. There are so many positive things that have come out of this amazing opportunity, and I have to keep them in mind as I come to terms with the experience ending.
Anxiousness doesn’t necessarily have to be negative. I can be anxious about a whole lot of different things in my life, and I figure that worrying about what the future has in store for me doesn’t do much good. It’s better to just sit back and enjoy the rocket ride rather than screaming the entire time.
I guess, what I’m try to say is that I’ll just have to see what’s in store for me when I return. I may not know what reverse culture shock will do to me, but I do know that I’ll treasure the least few days I have with TBC in Beijing and that I’ll return to the States ready to face the scary future more ready than ever.
