Do you have what it takes to be a CHINAMAN???!?!!

Me looking uber Chinese in front of the Temple of Heaven!!


"So this is where you buy your clothes?"



China Fashion!!



Lizzy and I pumped for a day of bargaining (in Chinese) at the markets!



“The Humps" (at least that's what I call'em)




The famous front gate of Peking University.



Aleck and I eating birthday cake with chopsticks!



Birthday Kiss!! :)



My Birthday dinner with a bunch of Chinese AIESEC members that I had never met before!!

I'm alive!

I can't believe it has already been nearly a month since I've updated this blog. I'm very sorry if any of you have been worried that I've been lost forever in the megatropolis of Beijing or maybe eaten by a panda. I'm doing fine!! My internet connection here is not that great so it's difficult for me to write updates. I've also been very busy teaching my kindergarten classes, exploring Beijing (aka looking for Western food), learning about China and speaking Chinese!

My thoughts about China have completely changed over the past month. To tell you the truth, my first few weeks here I kept wondering how I was going to survive the entire summer. Now, I can't imagine not being here. Every day, I learn something new that makes me love and wonder even more about this awesome country. I’m constantly picking up new Chinese words and phrases, learning the proper ways to show respect during a meal, and silly cultural facts such as the number "250" means "stupid or dumb" and that you should never wear a green hat because it means that your wife left you for another man. Oh, China!!!

Last week, the Kindergarten informed me that the classes will not be having lessons during the month of July. I guess just like American children, Chinese children need a break too. The Kindergarten has a close relationship with a company that owns an English camp in Shandong Province, so they asked me if I would be willing to go to work at the camp for a month.
So tonight I will be leaving the kindergarten and moving to a city called Jining, home of Confucious. The camp is called Crazy English Summer Camp. I really don’t know too much about what I will be doing there, but I’m sure I’ll have a lot to share once I get there.

Now some random things I’ve been up to…

I really enjoy teaching my classes. I can believe I actually get paid and the accommodations I do for such a fun job (although it is very tiring). I teach all my classes a few words and then we'll sing a song using the vocabulary. I use plenty of fun hand motions so that they remember what the word is. I really get a kick out of some of the songs that I have on one of my English tapes. I have about six classes a day and repeat each song about 4 times in each class. By the end of my day I barely have a voice left and I have these silly songs in my head! "Listen! Listen!! Vroom Vroom Vroom!! A car!! A car!! Vroom Vroom Vroom!!!"

It’s so humid and gross here and the air is always a yellowish/gray. Right before my birthday I thought I was coming down with strep throat. I explained to the teachers that my throat wasn't feeling well and they told me it was just the Beijing air. Lovely, eh? One day, the sky happened to actually be blue and some of the Chinese students I was with started taking pictures of the sky. Yikes...

Chinese people are the nicest people in the world. I’m always asking people for directions and they’ll always stop what they’re doing and help me out. If they’re not sure of the answer, they’ll find someone else and ask them for me. One Saturday afternoon, I decided to go wondering in downtown Beijing. I’ve always been pretty good at finding my way, so thought it would be alright to walk from one of the main shopping streets (Wangfujing) to Tianamen Square. It was a hot afternoon and I seemed to be walking forever and after turning many corners with no Mao Zedong in sight, I decided that I was lost. I approached a young Chinese couple and asked them (in Chinese, of course) if they could tell me how to get to Tianamen Square. Sure enough, I was nowhere close. The couple turned around and accompanied me to a bus stop 10 minutes in their opposite direction. I didn’t even expect them to that. They brought me to the bus and told me exactly where to go. Who would do that in the U.S? Not many people, that’s for sure, especially for someone who can barely be able to communicate in the language.

My Chinese friend, Carol, has one of the ugliest bags I’ve ever seen in my entire life. When I first saw her “Nightmare Before Christmas” bag, I wondered where in God’s name did she get it and how long has she had the bag. I told myself I would get her a nice bag/purse at one of the hundreds of clothing markets in downtown Beijing.
A week later, I’m walking with my friend Lizzy through one of the clothing markets. I had told her that I wanted to buy one of the teacher’s a nice bag or purse because I felt bad that Carol maybe couldn’t afford a new bag. As we were browsing the market, we pass by a bag vendor and sure enough, there it was, Carol’s “Nightmare Before Christmas” bag. Lizzy and I were horrified. I had thought that Carol’s bag must have been 15 years old and thought she just didn’t have the money to buy a new one. Well it turns out she bought it just recently.
After noticing this bag in the market, I’ve noticed over the past weeks many teens and young adults sporting this “Nightmare Before Christmas” on jeans, bags, shirts. Last week, I was wondering through a hip shopping mall downtown, and saw an entire store of “Nightmare Before Christmas” clothes. I don't understand why an animated movie from 15 years ago about a Hallo-freakish-Christmas appears as a fashionable clothing brand to Chinese young people? Anyone?

Here’s a short, but useful story. One weekend, I went on a day trip with two Chinese students to visit Peking University (the Harvard of China) and Tsinghua University (known as the MIT of China). I had to use the bathroom and realized that I forgot to bring toilet paper with me that day. Since there are no paper towels or toilet paper in Chinese bathrooms, it ended up being a very uncomfortable day for me (if you know what I mean). If there’s one thing you should know before your trip to China, always carry tissues or toilet paper!!



My birthday was a great day. During my classes, I taught all the children how to sing Happy Birthday, and they all sang to me. Then they all ran after me and tackled me to the ground. (Immediately after I end all my lessons, I literally have to run out of the classrooms because all the kids dart at me yelling my name and wanting to touch me.) The administrators gave me some nice traditional gifts like a bamboo pillow and this "big red thing" that you hang on the wall. That night my friend Aleck and also the president of the AIESEC group at UIBE (University of Int'l Business & Economics) were also celebrating their birthdays that were on the following day. When I arrived at the restaurant, I was surprised to see about 35 people from the AIESEC groups from Peking U, Tsinghua U, and UIBE, none of them I had never met before. After the meal, they all surprised me and sang happy birthday and gave me a gigantic cake, afterall it was really my birthday. They asked me what I was going to perform. I was a bit confused on what exactly they were talking about, because I really can't perform anything, at least not without music or an instrument. They suggested that I perform 10 sexy poses. So I did. To all beware dinner guests in China, you may be asked to do a performance, or even worse 10 sexy poses!!!


Chinese is so difficult, but I'm definitely improving. Recently, I've been dreaming in Chinglish!! In my spare time I like to memorize and translate Chinese pop songs that I like. I find that you can learn a lot of good vocabulary by translating music, and it makes things a lot more fun as well. Last night, I was craving pizza (again) so I went to the all you can eat buffet. I was sitting by myself until some girls from the nearby university asked me to sit with them. We ended up talking for a good hour. I can't believe how far I've come in the past month. I'm working a lot harder these days now that I've realized Chinese is not impossible!


I promise I'll update you again soon this time!


Zaijian!!

Mike

Yuki and I enjoying some Chinese food in Beijing.


UIBE AIESECers!!! (Me, Adonis, Joy, Rachel, Jack, Yuki [Japan], Francis, and Aleck)


Xiayu (aka Nemo) and I. Xiayu is fat (pa) and naughty (taochi).



Me at Tiannamen Square.

Lost in Beijing

I arrived in Beijing nearly a week ago to begin my summer as a kindergarten English teacher. “Why?” and “how?” you may ask. I’ve been studying Chinese for two years and decided that it was finally time to use what I’ve learned (which now I feel is not much) and go to China! I found my teaching job through an organization I’m involved in on campus called AIESEC. This is an international student organization that coordinates exchanges for college students to work or intern abroad. And that’s sort of how I wound up at Harvard Cradle Kindergarten located in Tongzhou District, a large suburb of Beijing. I’m teaching six classes of 2-6 year olds for about 15 hours a week. The school wants me to teach the children simple words and phrases and also to play with them while speaking in English.

My experience thus far has been interesting and fun, but also challenging and frustrating. The teaching part has been fairly easy as I’m only working about three hours a day. My acclamation to the culture and language, however, has been a little bit more difficult. After living here for one week, I feel like I’ve been here for months. Chinese is a bitch. I studied abroad in Belgium my junior year of high school so I know that being immersed in a language is not easy, but I’ve discovered that being 20 years old (Friday’s my birthday) and having a 3 year old’s speaking ability is not exactly what I call a fun time. Fortunately, one of the teacher’s here does speak English pretty fluently so at least I know what’s going on at the kindergarten and what I’m supposed to be doing. I think I’m already beginning to understand things a little bit easier.

Food here is another experience in itself. I usually don’t take an hour to eat lunch at home, but between using chopsticks and picking through all the funky tastes and bizarre textures, eating at the kindergarten is not a simple task. I’m one of those people that at home craves Chinese food once every few weeks. Never would I desire to eat Chinese food for every meal every day of the week. Not that real Chinese food is anything like American Chinese food, but to a boy raised in an Italian household, anything with rice gets old, fast. The kindergarten provides 3 meals a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Each meal usually consists of rice, a porridge or soup, a Chinese version of bread, and usually some kind of meat or tofu mixed with a vegetable. The foreign teacher gets a special addition to their meals, today I swear they gave me piranhas. Don’t worry about me though, I AM eating. Food is very cheap here because there are so many mouths to feed. I can stuff myself at a restaurant and not spend more than 2 dollars. If I'm really feeling homesick, I have Pizza Hut, McD’s, and KFC close by too.

This past weekend I was happy to finally go to downtown Beijing. I spent the weekend with members of the AIESEC group from the University of International Business & Economics (UIBE) located in downtown Beijing. Zhouyan (Aleck) is the one who helped me find my job. Most Chinese students have an English name, I’ll refer to people by what I call them. On Saturday, Aleck and other members of the AIESEC UIBE group took me around Beijing. We went to Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, Wanfujing Street, and spent some time in and around UIBE. On Sunday, Aleck and Iris (another AIESEC member) took me to the Emperor’s Summer Palace, just outside downtown Beijing. It was really nice to spend some time with other college students. They were all eager to practice their English with me and I was glad to take a brake from Chinese. I thought it was cool to visit a Chinese university and learn about Chinese college life. I learned that the Chinese are very serious about their education. I was a bit disappointed when we had to end our Beijing adventures at about 9 or 10pm on Friday and Saturday nights because the students had to be back in their dormitory by 11pm. (They don’t finish their semester until July). Nevertheless, I had an awesome weekend with my AIESEC friends. I saw a lot and learned so much about Beijing and Chinese culture.

I’m finally starting to become familiar with things here. I’m learning a lot and making many new friends. On Sunday night, one of the teachers at the kindergarten introduced me to her son, Richard, (27) who works for PricewaterhouseCoopers. They invited me to dinner and we had some really nice conversation in Chin-glish. Last night, one of the security guys (or maybe he’s the librarian) at the kindergarten showed me his library and pictures from when he was in the PRC army. He told me that he wanted us to be friends so that he can teach me Chinese and I can teach him some English. I thought that was pretty cool.

I miss you all so much!

Mike

About Me

My name is Michael Schmitz, I'm a rising junior at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. I'm majoring in International Affairs concentrating in International Economics and minoring in Chinese Language & Literature. I'm originally from Mt. Airy, Maryland.