So it's been several days since I've posted. In the days since then I have started language classes, which I'll discuss after I've had a little more time there, and doing a little more exploring of the area. Unfortunately, with the start of classes I have also got homework again, which definitely cuts down on my free time...
So to make up for my lack of adventures recently, I will discuss the trip that Ben, Martin, and I did last Sunday. We were accompanied by a tour guide, a young Chinese woman by the name of Carol who spoke very good English, to the Forbidden City (故宫/gu4gong1) and the Summer Palace (颐和园/yi2he2yuan2). This was my second time to both of these places, but they're still fun places to go and be a proper tourist, gawking at impressive buildings and taking lots of photos.
The Forbidden City, the ancient seat of the Ming (明/ming2, 1368-1644) and Qing (清/qing1, 1644-1912) emperors, is at the dead center of Beijing, with the rest of the city built in concentric circles around the palace. As Beijing has no major natural features, such as mountains or rivers, the Forbidden City serves as the major reference point: the area around the Forbidden City is downtown and it serves as the center point when referring to an area as being in the north, south, east, or west part of the city. It covers a fairly large area and is a major tourist attraction, filled with tourists (mainly Chinese) just about every day. I believe the buildings within are from the Qing dynasty, and are great examples of that style. An interesting side note: almost every building in Beijing was built primarily out of wood, and so very few of them are actually very old. Wood buildings have a tendency to burn that prevents them from lasting an incredibly long time, and so most old-looking buildings in Beijing are actually fairly recent, built within the past 50 years to look old and increase tourist interest.
I am fairly certain, however, that the buildings in the Forbidden City are actually fairly old and not simple replicas. According to Carol, during the Cultural Revolution and the various other upheavals under Mao, when many ancient buildings and artifacts in China were destroyed, there was never a serious proposal to do the same thing to the Forbidden City, because of its importance to Chinese culture. So, thankfully, it's still around. And now, some photos:
The last photo there is a sign on one of the buildings, with its name in both Mandarin Chinese and Manchurian. The Qing dynasty emperors were Manchus, originally from Manchuria, not Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China. The script above is no longer used, according to Carol, though I believe Manchurian is still spoken by some of the Manchu people. However, like just about all minority languages in China, the number of speakers is very small and decreasing.
After walking through the Forbidden City, we headed out to the Summer Palace, which is in the far north-west of Beijing. The Summer Palace was the retreat for the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasty, and the current one, 颐和园 (yi2he2yuan2)，is the second summer palace, because the first, 圆明园 (yuan2ming2yuan2)，was burned down during the Second Opium War by the united European forces.
The Summer Palace is gigantic and sprawling, with many different buildings, all connected by walks through various green pathways. We ran through it very fast because it was late in the afternoon and we were approaching touristed out.
The Summer Palace is really impressive, and it's quite interesting because its most famous resident was not one of the emperors, but the Empress Dowager Cixi, who was pretty much in charge of the Qing Dynasty for the second half of the 19th century. She also pretty effectively signed imperial China's death warrant by refusing to modernize or reform China and placing her son, the emperor, under house arrest when he attempted to do so.
Carol, our tour guide, was pretty great. We spent a fair amount of time exchanging information on idiomatic expressions and talking about cultural differences. The big cultural differences that she regularly runs into, as a tour guide, is the ease with which Americans and Europeans both approach physical contact. The kiss on either cheek from Europeans, the hugs from Americans, both of these are fairly strange in China. It's a strange phenomenon, because your bubble of personal space is much smaller in China, with people right up against you on public transportation and walking much closer down the street. But when it comes to hugs or the like, they're not really done in China, though this is changing more with the younger generation. But still, Carol thought they were fairly weird.
When Carol mentioned that she wanted to learn some more idiomatic expressions, we kind of overwhelmed her, dumping a huge number on her at once: "keep your eyes peeled," "makes sense," "it's all Greek to me," etc. The problem with trying to come up with useful idioms on the spot is that it's rather difficult. You tend to use them without thinking, so when you're put on the spot to come up with the ones you use the most frequently...it's hard. So we tended to just throw them out as we came up with them. It was pretty funny.
The most amusing Chinese tip that Carol gave me as we walked around is that she considers the southern Chinese accent in guys fairly effeminate. Carol is from Harbin, in Heilongjiang in the north-east, where the local accent is much closer to standard Mandarin, though with some differences. A strong southern accent does not differentiate between the sounds sh and s, ch and c, or zh and z. This makes it fairly confusing for someone who is studying Chinese as a second language, as it creates even more homonyms in a language that is full of them, but it is something you can get used to. It seems to me to be the most common non-standard accent in China (probably followed by Beijing's Erhua/儿化, where a gratuitous amount of er sounds are added to words so that people start to sound very similar to pirates), and is definitely present in various amounts in Shanghai, Hubei, Taiwan, and Guangdong, so spread throughout all of the southern half of the country. According to Carol, it's often accompanied by a large amount of Chinese "particles." These are meaningless syllables of ya, a, ba, na, ma that are scattered throughout people's speech, most often at the end of sentences or clauses and apparently, according to Carol, makes one sound fairly effeminate. To me, it seems similar to the tendency among Americans of ending statements with a rising tone, making them sound close to questions. Both have a tendency to make you sound less sure of yourself and are more common among young women. This bad habit in Chinese includes the exclamation “天啊！”， tian1a, which translates and is roughly equivalent to "Oh heavens!" According to Carol, this is another phrase that is not very manly to say. I then asked her what men should say when they're surprised by something and she responded: men aren't surprised, they're always sure. “是的，是这样” shi4de, shi4zhe4yang4, or "yes, this is how it is" are how men should speak.
One final note on Chinese language before I finish this long, rambling post. There isn't an all-encompassing way of saying "yes" in Mandarin, which is kind of strange. The most formal way of affirming someone's statement is to repeat the verb back at them. So if someone asks you, "do you have any water," you'd respond with "have," or "don't have" for the negative. 是的, as noted above, also often works. If you're simply following along with what someone is saying, the equivalent of "okay, alright, uh huh," in Chinese is "好好好，” or “好的” hao3hao3hao3 or hao3de, where 好 literally translates to "good." However, the way that I've taken to using most of the time to respond to a question positively or to say the equivalent of "okay" is to simply grunt. It's not something I've made up, as I've noticed various shopkeeps and waiters using and understanding it, and the habit has started to infect my English, where I will more often grunt instead of saying "yes." This may be a habit that will be hard to kick, so if I start grunting while talking to you in the future, now you know why...
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