One month until departure
This is a photo I took in 2008 during a yoga and meditation retreat at Shambhala Mountain Center. The photos from that weekend are the closest I’ve got to a Chinese theme right now. I wanted to test the photo uploader.
I leave for China on May 15th. Most of the necessary arrangements have been made. There appear to be nineteen students in the group, and yesterday we received a tentative “syllabus”, which is just a fancy name for an itinerary that has credit hours attached. With class items such as a visit to the Great Wall and getting grad school credit for strolling on The Bund, it is clearly the coolest, most awesome syllabus I have ever seen. There’s even an entire day devoted to visiting the 2010 World Expo, this year hosted in Shanghai.
Somewhere along the line I got my hands on a copy of Rosetta Stone: Mandarin. I fired that up yesterday and began learning the basics. Man. Woman. Girl. Boy. Water. Tea. Food. Rice. Newspaper. Book. Car. Bicycle. I find Pinyin (phonetic Chinese using a Western alphabet) more confusing than learning simplified characters directly since none of the words seem to sound the way they are spelled. I doubt that I will need any of it, especially in Beijing where nearly the entire city seems to have been translated into English and French, the two official languages of the Olympics. I’ll feel better with a few handy phrases in my repertoire, though, and the idea of counting Mandarin as my third foreign language has a sort of nerd-cool appeal. (Though for the record, I’m not even close to fluent in the other two, Spanish and Italian.)
I took my China guidebook to the nail salon yesterday and leafed through it during my pedicure, learning valuable things like how you generally get the best exchange rates by just going to an ATM, that nearly everyone takes Visa and Mastercard, and to stock up on bottled water, even for brushing your teeth. Montezuma’s wrath apparently extends well beyond the Mexican border.
The last tasks on my pre-departure list are to pin down my housesitter once and for all so the kitties are fed and the garden is watered, and the purchase of a wristwatch. My phone isn’t going to work, so it’s going to stay in my luggage. That means I can’t use it to check the time while I’m out, and since we’re on a schedule that means I need a watch. I think that’s going to be my project tonight.