it's harder than I thought!

Hello friends! I've been in Beijing for six days now and man, there's a lot going on. The foreign students' residences at 北京语言大学 (BLCU) where I'll be living for the next 8 weeks are newly renovated and much nicer than I anticipated. We've got air conditioning, TVs, mini-fridges, and western-style toilets. Life is good. Since arriving I've taken the placement test, signed the language pledge, explored some of 五道口, ridden the subway, visited a Hutong with my friend Yan, met my host family, tried lots of new food, and so much more. For the future HBA-ers out there, the placement test consisted of a 30-question, multiple choice grammar and vocab section, an essay (typed, not hand written, thankfully), and an oral interview.

I thought the whole "you can't really escape the Yale/Ivy bubble" thing was a myth, but it's not entirely untrue. During my first outing, when we were all still allowed to speak English, someone started talking about recruitment for investment banking and I wanted to throw the dumpling precariously balanced in my chopsticks at their face. Ten thousand miles away from home, yet I had found no escape. Of course, that was one person, one time. And, now that we can only speak Chinese, it's totally fine-- Goldman Sachs isn't in most students' vocabulary.

I ended up placing into the fourth-year level like I'd hoped but I'm still very insecure about my Chinese. There are a lot of heritage students, meaning their parents spoke Chinese at home, and their speaking ability is far superior to mine. I'm doing my best to not be self-conscious and learn from them instead, and I've already noticed some improvements! I also didn't think this program would be easy academically, but the workload is more than I thought it'd be. During our welcome ceremony, the teachers said to expect 3-4 hours of studying per night, and that was no joke. For me it's more like 5. Hopefully once I get into a routine and stop having to Pleco half the characters in my book it'll be more manageable.

All in all though, I'm having a good time, I swear. Adjusting to China itself and sticking to the language pledge hasn't been a problem so far, the teachers are all wonderful, and I'm looking forward to lots of sightseeing + a visit to the Great Wall this weekend!

Much love,

Sofia