Today was a pretty eventful day. I think it is the funnest day I have had since I have arrived in Beijing. It all started with a trip to Tiananmen …

This morning I woke up at 3:30 am, after 2 hours of sleep, to go to Tiananmen Square with my classmates. You might ask, “why so early?”. Every day at about 6:00 am the army men in Tianmen Square raise the Chinese flag. Since today is also a big holiday my friend wanted to watch the raising of the flag. The point was to experience the large crowd as well as see the proud emotions of the people around. Unfortunately the square was restricted today because there was an event for graduate students. The event included a speaker as well as some performances from Chinese ethnic minority groups … I think. At least they showed up wearing traditional clothing. In the end we were not able to enter Tiananmen Square.

All was not in vain though. Before the raising of the flags we met a group of students Minzu Daxue, a university for China’s underrepresented minority groups. Our conversation when they jokingly welcomed us to China in English. This was a chance for them to practice English, but we spoke Chinese with them. Since my friends Chinese is much better than mine he did most of the talking and as the time passed it seemed like more Chinese people stopped and listened to him speak since he can speak Chinese so well. We spoke Chinese for about an hour until one of our IUP teacher’s joined us.

After our teacher, Liu Laoshi, arrived we chatted with some other people. This was not as interesting as watching the police harass people and order them around. There were two situations which were pretty surprising to me. First I need to desribe the environment before I can talk about what happened. We were standing on the sidewalk of a side street that intersects the main road which runs between Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City. The road was wide enough for cars to park on one side and have cars drive on the other. The police had restricted people from standing on one of the side walks, so everyone was trying to crowd onto the sidewalk on one side of the street. This made it hard for anyone to walk up and down the sidewalk.

Now that I have explained the situation I can explain what happened. Both situations involved the ability for Chinese police to order people around and the lack of power that people have when dealing with the police. A few times people had mentioned this was a problem, but I had never experienced it, so I was uncertain as to what they meant.

The first incident involved 3 foreigners who were trying to stand on the open side of the street. They were being a little stupid in the first place when it was pretty obvious that the police wanted everyone on the other side of the street. After a few minutes the police motioned for them to move to the other side of the street, but the foreigners did not listen because they had an attitude as if they had some sort of extra rights or power since they did not understand Chinese and were foreigners. Almost as if the police could not tell them what to do. This only lasted so long before 3 police men tried to forcibly move them across the street. The police seemed almost more than happy to physically move the people rather than try to make themselves clear again. I think this displays the fact that the police almost have too much power and, unlike in America, citizens have almost no rights to keep the police from physically enforcing their demands. Eventually the foreigners moved, but not before my friend got ready to intervene, so that the police did not do anything more than push the foreigners around.

Not too long afterwards there was an older Chinese man carrying a younger child wrapped in a blanket down the street. This seemed really reasonable since there was no space to walk on the side walk, especially since he was carrying a child. As soon as he entered the area the police were in they began to yell at him even though he was only 10 or 15 yards from where he wanted to go. Needless to say a shouting match began and a female officer took the child. The shouting continued. I am not sure what was being said, but it probably centered about the fact that the police were being unreasonable and that he only wanted to take his child around the corner. However, the police were persistent about him returning to where he came from. As soon as he started asking for names and badge numbers the police got physical with him. He did not stand a chance against 3 or 4 officers, so after more yelling and shoving and detaining, the man eventually turned around. Even though this may sound like it spanned a long period of time it was actually only about a minute at most. This gives you an idea of how strict the police are and how quickly they resort to physical means to solve problems.

I thought it was all pretty disgusting. I could not believe how often the police threw their power around. It is probably a result of that fact that a lot of Chinese people have an attitude as if to ignore what they should do if it is harder than what they can do. This is not a quality of all Chinese people, but it is apparent in situations where there are a lot of people in a small space. Riding a bike is the same, for example. When I go back to America I am going to pay attention to these types of situations so I can compare the similarities and differences.

After all the police excitement my classmates, Tai Li, Ji Maike, Wei Lide, Ni Qiao and I all left for Wangfujing with our teacher. Since it was about 6:30 am by then, most of us were hungry. We found a McDonalds that was open so we ate there and relaxed a little bit.

We went to our teachers apartment after we ate breakfast. Wei Lide and Ni Qiao did not accompany us　because they wanted to go to a concert. When we got to her family’s apartment we ate fruit　and relaxed for a while. My classmates took naps, but my teacher and I watched TV. We ended　up watching an old episode of X-Files that was dubbed into Chinese. It was really interesting　to watch and listen to. Either the dubbing was bad, or I have not gotten to the point　where I can get emotion from the inflections in speech. It is probably the latter.

While we were watching TV a lot of my teacher’s relatives came over. The reason for coming over was to eat jiaozi (dumplings). I was ready to eat a lot of jiaozi, but first we had to make it all. The older members of the family had spent the morning making the filling and making the dough for the making jiaozi from scratch. First they showed us how to wrap the jiaozi. After we had enough practice with this they decided to increase the difficulty by making us actually make the wrappers from balls of dough. It looked hard at first, but it was not too difficult. They said that a skilled person can make 8 wraps in a minute. It took me a minute to make 1, or at most 2 wraps. We were rather slow compared to our teacher’s family.

It was fun making all the jiaozi for a few reasons. First, since I have not studied the vocabulary on how to make jiaozi and some of the accents were a little hard to fully understand I spent most of them time they were explaining the process simply nodding my head and saying yeah, yeah, (well the Chinese equivalent of yeah). Secondly, they would always make the jiaozi or the wraps really fast. Before hand and afterwards they would say, just like this or just like that, it is easy. Yeah … of course … just that easy. Haha, yeah right.

When were done making and eating jiaozi it was time to play mah jong. I had not played in a while, so I was a little rusty, but with some help with some family members I was able to win a couple games. I am planning on buying a mah jong set, so I can play when I get back home.

At 1:30 pm we called it a day and left our teacher’s home, but since we all wanted some coffee she came with us to Starbucks. That gave us some time to relax and feel like we were back in Seattle. My classmate Taili is also from Seattle, so it was good for us to drink some good coffee.

If you want to see pictures from the day, check out the Guoqing Jie Photos in my gallery.

All in all today was a great day. I have not had this much fun since I was in Japan, and before that, Florida. I always enjoy hanging out with my classmates Tai Li and Ji Maike because their Chinese is good. They studied Chinese over the summer, so they give me hope that I can get better even though I am only staying for 4 months. They both really like speaking Chinese, so we always start conversations with people on the street or the subway or where ever we may be.

Since we are on break next week and do not have to attend classes, the 3 of us are going to go to Nanjing and Shanghai. I think it is going to be a great time. I can’t wait to go and take lots of pictures. Along the way I hope to learn a lot of Chinese from the two of them. Expect a lot of stories when I get back.