The travels of Justin

Our Canadian friends have just begun their semester, but school in China has just finished for Spring Festival and Chinese New Year. After a first semester of culture adjustment, business classes, language classes, and some Ti Chi, it’s time to look outside of Tianjin and deciding what to do with my huge holiday. School will not resume until February 20^th which gives my classmates time to return home to be with their families. People are always asking me the same question: “will you travel home to be with your family.” If I could speak Mandarin better I would tell them that (1) as a student, there’s no way I could afford the trip home for a month, and (2) whatever money I can muster will go into exploring as much of China as I possibly can. For now, I’m just enjoying the peace following my partially self-inflicted 6-day weeks and filling my days with random exploration.

A couple days ago, I took a day-trip to Beijing with my mate Jill. It was primarily a shopping trip and I managed to pick up some great items. My rucksack was overflowing with language books which will probably keep me busy for several years. Call it my new year resolution to keep up my language studies — especially upon returning to Canada. The best purchase, however, is my new electronic dictionary.

Click to enlarge

I’ve owned this bad-boy for about 2-days and it’s already proved its weight in gold. All of my classmates have an incredible command of the English language, but when I’m waiting for my lunch at one of the school restaurants and I can’t understand the key word of a question the server is asking me… well… I’ll need to do less guesswork now. The great thing is being able to quickly find that word and I expect the new convenience will speed up my learning of vocabulary. This can sometimes be a big deal when you don’t understand the fundamentals of radicals and their combinations.

Most Chinese characters are essentially combinations of other simple characters. The base character, known as the radical, is essential to using a dictionary to find the intended character. For example the character for tree 木 is used as a radical to represent a grove (林) and a forest (森). Since I have not learned the radicals yet, it’s almost impossible to use my paperback dictionary, but by using the handwriting recognition and the stylus I have a convenient way to translate characters — assuming, of course, I can write the characters legibly enough, which is another challenge in itself. I’ve made a photocopy of the menu of a restaurant I like to frequent and I’m looking forward to taking some of the randomness out of my ordering. I won’t soon be forgetting the first time I looked at that menu and chose the dish with “the most interesting-looking characters”, as I had said to Ryan at the time.

I still haven’t really had a real tourist-trap day in Beijing, so this afternoon I said to Ryan, let’s go tomorrow morning. We’ve invited a couple friends to join us and intend to visit the Forbidden City and some other sights. Geoff, our main contact at TRU World, had told me that one of the best aspects of Tianjin was that Beijing is only 1.5 hours away by train. He was right. The trip takes a bit longer when you factor in the bus from TUT, but it’s so cool to have the ability to decide to just go for a day-trip to Beijing. Armed with my limited understanding of Mandarin, my trusty new translator, a big smile, and (when all else fails) a lot of descriptive hand-gestures, traveling around is becoming more and more fun all the time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2006 at 9:22 am and is filed under Tianjin, China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.