Muslim Quarters and First Day of Classes13 Jun 2010
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arabic writing!
mosque I
us at the mosque!
| Sorry for not updating this in a while! My roommate and I were stuck with a faulty room that lacked internet, a working phone, a working central light, and had a few sockets that didn't seem to work. Without internet in my room, it was hard to make time to journey to my friends' rooms with my computer or to a local cafe. Plus, going sans internet is incredibly liberating! Unfortunately our hotel/dorm was holding a conference and there were no free rooms until Thursday for us to move to. Now, however, all four of the Alliance rooms are on the same part of the same hall, which is nice! And we have internet! Though this room seems to lack hot water... On Sunday, we went to the Muslim Quarters. We were only there for a few hours though, because none of us had yet to start our homework for our first day of class on Monday. The main attraction was the Great Mosque of Xi'an, which was really neat. Xi'an has a large population of Hui people -- the official Chinese government designation of basically most of the ethnic Muslims. The Great Mosque was neat because it was Chinese in style, but has Arabic writing and was basically Muslim in practice. It was a bit touristy for my taste.For dinner, Zhao Yuan (the Xi'an Resident Director, and Omar's wife) brought us to this great, 4-story, seemingly famous tangbao place. Tangbao is literally "soup dumpling" and are basically dumplings with yummy hot soup inside of them. We also ate babaozhou or "8 treasure rice porridge." It all was sooo good! Class on Monday was good. I'm in a class with Eric. He was in Beijing with the Alliance for spring 2008 and just graduated from the University of Illinois. Julian and Ricky both have one-on-one classes this semester. For some reason, not as many people signed up for the Xi'an program as usual, so we all get super personal attention! We have 3 hours of Chinese class 5 days a week from 9-12 and then on Mondays and Thursdays was have 3 hours of Silk Road Class in the afternoons in English. The official teacher for the Silk Road class is currently at a Silk Road conference in Hawaii, so we have a substitute for the first three classes. He's a PHD student at Harvard named Devin. He's incredibly well-versed in the area, though 3 hours of complicated Silk Road history can be tolling. More about the Dragon Boat Festival later! We're also going to the Terracotta Warriors tomorrow (Saturday), so I'll try to stay on top of this, especially now that I have internet. Enjoy the pics! |
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