Conclusion

Well, as is obvious from the date of this post compared to the date of the one before it, I finished with the program and came home a good bit ago, but I wanted to type up some concluding thoughts and also upload some of the pictures I had so much trouble uploading while in China.
I'm very satisfied with the way I spent my summer. I honestly wouldn't say it was the most relaxing summer I've ever had, between hours of class starting at 8am every weekday and pages and pages of vocab, characters, and grammar, but even so, it was time well-spent, and I was extremely fortunate to be given the opportunity to do this at essentially no cost to myself.
Studying in China has really made me want to understand the underlying history and culture of the place more than ever, and I'm really hoping to take some classes along those lines back at Yale. China is just so vastly complicated and so very relevant to the current world stage that I practically feel obligated to try to get a better sense of the bigger picture underlying the sampling I got while on the program.
I can't say I was always wonderfully happy with the program (even putting aside the roommate and incessantly leaky bathroom ceiling), but I really don't have major complaints. It was very difficult for me, but the fact is that I made it through, and I have a lot to show for that difficulty. No matter how far my formal study of Manadrin continues, I feel that I have a basic knowledge of the vocabulary, characters, and grammar and (more importantly) a basic overall sense of the language and speaking confidence that will allow me to pursue the language efficiently and effectively if Mandarin ever becomes directly pertinent to my future life/career. I don't think there's any way I could have acquired all that anywhere but within China itself, especially in such a short time.

So, here are some pictures from along the way:

This is from when we had an assignment to go haggling at one of the nearby markets. That's a fellow Yalie, Luci. Remember, if a Chinese person gives you a price, cut it down to a fifth or so.

This was really neat: When my dad showed me pictures from the trip to China he and my mom went on back in the 70's, I remembered seeing this exact building (built to look like a steamboat) in his slides, at the Summer Palace.

Terra cotta warriors in Xi'an!

Pondering later that day...


This is a clip from one of the acts at the show we saw in Xi'an on my birthday (when I got that surprise song and cake I mentioned earlier in the blog).

Chinglish: One of the simple joys of life in China. If you can read the quote at the bottom of this copy of "Shrek", you might get the sense that the translator either didn't quite say what he meant to or didn't quite get what the author of the quote was saying.

Pizza Hut is really classy dining in China, and it serves desserts like this one and even escargot.

This was at the nearby Gorge we visited one Saturday. It was gorgeous (we toured it by boat), and we went up to it from where we parked using the reportedly longest series of escalators in the world inside this absurd but photoworthy dragon:


This is how we came back down from where the escalators took us.

This is from my visit to my language partner's home. I really enjoyed my visit there, not least of all because of their dog and her mother's wonderful fried chicken.

From left: me, my language partner (Wu Xiao Ying), her mom, and her dad.

The Temple of Heaven!

The Olympics are coming to Beijing!

The sendoff dinner after classes ended featured a variety of talent displays. This was one of the less talented but most entertaining ones.

I finally got home August 13th after there was one last travel frustration that delayed me for exactly 24 hours: It turned out that my ticket for the Beijing-Shanghai leg of my return trip got ripped out of my ticket book somewhere (probably during my Manila-Beijing checkin two months earlier), and the airline wouldn't give me a replacement ticket despite the fact that they said my name was indeed on the passenger list. Anyway, I eventually made it on to a flight that might have put me in to Shanghai in time to transfer to the Shanghai-Chicago flight, but then that flight from Beijing was delayed two hours, obliterating any chance of making that flight out of Shanghai. After I finally landed in Shanghai, I found out that absolutely no other flights would be leaving Shanghai for anywhere in America the rest of the day, so I found a hotel for the night and killed time until I got on the identical flight the next day. My larger bag didn't make it on to the Chicago-Dallas flight with me, but by then, at least I was home!

So yes, a summer well-spent. Peace!