enjoying the semester break
Since exams finished, i’ve been mostly just hangin out and having some fun. I’m still working hard on chinese, though. The next few chapters in our textbook are a more complicated, and we’re going to be doing 3 chapters in the first week of classes in january. Normally the first week of classes involves almost no work, but this immersion semester will be different, i think. If i can go in with a head-start, it’ll be that much easier…i want to stay 1 week ahead as long as i can.
This set of immersion classes runs from january through april at SFU, but i was also getting some questions from my classmates about whether i’d be going with them to china in the summer. The rest of them are going to china for a 2-year period starting in the summer, and they start by doing a 2nd full semester of chinese immersion courses. I decided to ask the chinese advisor if i could join them for that summer semester, and i just heard back in the affirmative.
What this probably means for me is that 1 week after i finish chinese 390 at SFU in april 2007, i’ll fly to shanghai and then take a train 180km southwest to Hangzhou (which is pronounced sorta like ‘hong joe’). I’ll be taking more chinese immersion courses there, for 14 weeks. I’m incredibly excited about this…i can’t stop talking about it, probably to the annoyance of my friends. I think by the end of all of this i should be conversational and reasonably literate in chinese, which means i should be able to pick up more just by chatting with people and reading books or newspapers (all of which are reasonably easy to find here in Vancouver).
I still need to figure out a few things, like renewing my passport and getting a student visa for china, and i also want to figure out if i can follow my friend Will’s suggestion that i find a bike there and ride it from Hangzhou up north to Beijing, following the coast. hmm…now that i take a closer look at the map, it appears that Hangzhou might be 1400km from Beijing. that could be quite the bike ride, but it’d be pretty rad. if i don’t finish my courses until some time in august, then it means that it would cut into september unless i could blast out 1400km in 2 weeks. That’s totally doable normally, but it’d be better if i could just piss around and not be on a schedule. 100km per day should be no prob, but it means less flexibility. I guess i could just write off the fall semester and hang out in china for september or something…then maybe spend the rest of the semester working on some kind of project, like playing my bass or something. I’ll have to figure that out later. A good suggestion by Will, though. It’s got me thinking. It’d be the ultimate way to practice my newly polished chinese skills, certainly.
Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind for the medium-term….short term is all about spending some R&R time with a lover, and practicing a few dozen chinese characters this week. I guess i should figure out the whole christmas/family thing, but i hate doing the required shopping. ugh.
Ride hard, ride free