好好学习，天天向上！: 倒数第二的 (Penultimate)

As is evident from the title, this will probably be my second to last post about my adventures as a foreigner here in Beijing. I have three full days left: the final examination and closing ceremony tomorrow, then the weekend before I leave on Monday. Time is zooming along now--with every passing day, I realize more and more how much I will miss this city and its people. During my (final) 1-dui-1 today, I was telling Yuan laoshi how much more 热情 (warm/welcoming) and 友好 (friendly) Beijing people were than I expected, and I ended up using about five new grammar structures, which made her laugh with delight. It was a good way to wrap up two months of intense and incessant Chinese study.

In other news, I've been rather busy lately trying to do all the shopping for cheap stuff that I should have done during the first seven weeks. I went to Liulichang yesterday, and successfully managed to buy a guitar plus its travel case for about $38 (an example of how much my haggling skills have improved--the shopkeeper originally asked for around $60). That wasn't even the best part of yesterday, though. During the taxi ride there, I had, for the first time in my stay here, an actual, meaningful conversation with a Beijing taxi driver.

A little background about the 出租车司机 (taxi drivers) here: their Beijing accents are particular fierce, and, as far as I can tell, they don't close their mouths when speaking. It doesn't help that they all listen to the same radio program--some sort of monologue spoken in heavily accented Chinese. Fortunately, my driver yesterday was younger, and thus had not yet been too heavily influenced by all this. We started out talking about what I was doing in China, and ended up discussing anything and everything under the Beijing sun, from his wife's recent pregnancy to Olympics ticket scalpers to underground Christianity. Most remarkably of all, there was not a single word he said that I did not recognize, though, admittedly, there were certain words which I had to ask him to repeat before I realized what he had said. I was actually a little sad when we arrived, and we had to say our farewells. Perhaps we'll meet again in the future--the world is getting smaller and smaller, after all.

I haven't posted any photos recently, so I guess I'll do that now. First, a question for the office people back at Yale: for those of us Light Fellows who have opted to keep a blog, is there a set of standards by which you judge the quality of our blogs, and which we must have followed in order to not have to write a final report?

And now, my (possibly) final set of photos from China.

Random photo of two laoshis. Guo Laoshi is really tall.

Micah (BK '10, I think) surprised at something during the dinner with Zhou Laoshi and Dean Gentry.

Zhou Laoshi! I don't know if it's just me, but he seems to have gotten older. Teaching Chinese 115 must be stressful.

Unripe mango slices in Sprite (and a rose petal for no apparent reason). Peter and I ate almost all of this.

The main gate of Beijing Zoo, made famous by the Chinese 115 lessons on how to give directions. Embarrassing story: I asked a local how to get to the zoo, and he gave me a strange look before walking away. It turns out, I was right in front of this gate. Sigh.