August 22
“I’m so glad I decided to come here a couple days early, to get my bearings, you know. To get a better feel for the place on my own before jumping right into a group orientation and classes.” This is what Brian, my fellow IU student, and I agreed about our decision to spend some time in Shanghai before checking in with CIEE in Nanjing. This morning, after we both gathered our things and made plans to split the cost of a cab to the Nanjing U Foreign Student Building where we’d be checking in later that day, Brian and I enjoyed our last morning of full freedom from CIEE by grabbing a breakfast of bao.zi (steamed buns) and nai cha (bubble tea) and exploring Zhan Yuan.
Zhan Yuan was another maze-like garden and the oldest existing garden in the city of Nanjing. This garden had been kept alive and growing in much the same state for over 600 years. Except that now, instead of being a home for imperial officials, the public can come and see elderly Chinese practicing Chinese or young children feeding the fish, turtles, and ducks that are now the garden’s sole inhabitants. In their aesthetic and harmonious mastery of nature, Chinese culture really captures my idea of beauty and peace. I’m even learning to appreciate the scholars’ rocks. The peace of the garden was disturbed, however, upon walking into the museum housed at the garden’s center. Its detailed accounts of the Taiping Rebellion, while definitely beyond my Chinese level (and even though we figured out over half way through that we were walking through the exhibits the wrong way) was able to wordlessly convey the destruction that came in the rebellion’s wake and the still-strong feelings about it. One room was even converted into a replica of a torn-apart battlefield.
The museum at Zhan Yuan’s core and the neighborhood surrounding it were, in different ways, at odds with the peace in the garden itself. Close by is Nanjing’s Fuzi Miao, or Confucius Temple, and a market and picturesque riverside bustling with tourists at all hours of the day. By the time Brian and I actually found the temple at the core of it all, we felt there wasn’t enough time to pay an adequate visit before check out time. So we meandered back to the Nanjing Sunflower International Youth Hostel, checked out, and hailed a taxi to take us to NJU. The driver dropped us off along what looked to be a random street, pointed in the supposed direction of our desired destination, and we just had to get out and take his word for it. Apparently we were lucky that he dropped us off so close and pointed us in the right direction: other fellow CIEE students we talked to later apparently got dropped off several blocks away.
Things seemed hectic at the Foreign Students Building, and I was surprised to see so many foreign students from all over the world (Korea and Japan and all across Europe), and so few that were part of our program. The small contingent of CIEE-ers grew throughout the day, but not as much as it should have: out of 33 students registered for the program, 7 were stuck in transit from Hong Kong due to a typhoon raging off the island and several more were unable to get one of the sought-after weekend train tickets from Shanghai upon arrival. And the few students that had shown up, to be honest… by and large I wasn’t so impressed. I enjoyed my time chatting with a girl named Brittany and a boy named Andy during our campus tour, but was almost ashamed to see the other students giving our Chinese student tour guides a hard time, insisting on speaking only English, and discussing their plans of living in Nanjing for its nightlife and not the classes and cultural experiences during the day (which is what I signed up for). Poor Fenxing, the NJU student charged with giving us a campus tour and helping us purchase cell phones, was sent back and forth across the expansive cell phone store catering to the demands of our group. He seemed a bit harried, and every time he rushed past, I was sure to express gratitude on behalf of myself and the other group members that neglected to express any sentiment of the sort.
Upon returning from that excursion, I found the door to my room closed but a new group member moved in, reading on her bunk with the door closed. Christine seemed rather sweet, but I chuckled to myself: this is the third time in the past 2 years I’ve been placed with an introverted roommate from a Korean family. I was glad to find, though that she and another girl from Georgetown named Kristen were feeling adventurous enough to want to join me to explore the McDonald’s Street night market. They were soon ready to get back to the dorm and get some rest and I was still raring to go, so I joined a group of the boys from the group, Brittany, and one of the group leaders, a great girl named Ping Ping, for an outing to a local sports bar to watch the US play Argentina in the Olympic basketball semi-finals. It wasn’t much of a match: the US was far ahead from the get go.
Brittany look about to fall asleep at our table, so I offered to walk back with her and get out of the cloud of smoke saturating the air in the sports bar. On our way, we came upon a group of 3 foreign students with loads of luggage and obviously lost. I called out his name into the darkness, thinking I recognized one of the 3 from the back by his head of curly hair. He turned around in surprise. “You guys need some help?” I asked, vaguely recognizing the to girls on either side of him from the Chinese department at IU. One of the girls, in fact, I recognized as everyone's favorite Chinese classmate, a student with a complaint for every occasion. ‘What are some of these people doing here?...” I kept asking myself, at the same time kicking myself for not keeping a more open mind. But I'm sure that this will be a great learning and growing experience for us all. Nanjing had already welcomed me with open arms and I'm determined to approach with an open heart and mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment