Monday, June 25, 2007

Sorry

I'm in Chengde, living with a Chinese family since yesterday until next Friday.
Chengde is a summer retreat around 200 km outside of Beijing. We took a bus on Monday and it took us more than 4 hours to arrive. There was a lot of traffic and they were working on the highway.
On Tuesday I started with my Chinese classes from 8 am to 12.30 pm. I got a tutor (like a language partner at DULAP), her name is Hatty and she studies at Chengde Nursery University, we meet everyday one hour and she is very nice.
The Chinese classes are really intense. I am in the beginner level and we are seven. Our professor is really good and we were working with tones and pronunciation the first week and then today we started to learn some characters. I really like the characters and writing them, but they are really difficult to memorize, and in a few minutes I forgot them.
This weekend we made a trip to Inner Mongolia and it was great. We visited a National Park, we ride horses, we met Mongolians, they made a Mongolian BBQ, they played cool music, we play some games and we walk around the forest and countryside.
Now I am living with a Chinese family. Yesterday when we came back from Inner Mongolia we met them and I came to their house. They had to change my family because the first one didn't know any English and I don't know any Chinese to communicate with them. I felt bad because the mother and her daughter were really nice, but I couldn't understand them.
In my new family the mother doesn't know English either, but I can speak with the father and her daughter who is a junior at high school.
Today I woke up at 5 a.m. because it was very light, then we had breakfast together at 6 a.m. and the mother came with me to take the bus. It was weird because we couldn't talk during the trip but we smiled to each other.
Then, I had Chinese class, we went for lunch, we met our tutors and I took a bus back to downtown. In the morning it was really sunny, but on my way back to home it was raining a lot and I didn't have an umbrella.
Now it is time to go and learn more characters because we have a test everyday at the beginning of each class.

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