He immediately impressed by correctly identifying every student and their country of origin, without reference to the register, and pronouncing my seldom-seen name correctly. Even though he seemed very laid-back, he really knew his stuff and was good at the whole checking understanding routine without being dogmatic about it. Another good class.
Ancient Chinese is an odd thing. The trend within the modern language is towards double-barrelled characters for every word. This is often accomplished by adding a 子 character to the end of the main word (窗子 (window), 桌子(table)) or layering two synonymous words (谘询 (to consult)). One result is that conversational Chinese is rendered more understandable - ambiguity over many homophones is eradicated. In Ancient Chinese however, words mostly arise singly, which means texts are more difficult to decipher, but also much denser and rich.
Another thing. It's often the case that two cognate words in the modern language were originally a single word. Thus, 坐 (to sit) and 座 (a seat) were both written 坐 in ye olden days. Meaning had to be inferred from context.
Grammar rules used to be different too. Much like Shakespeare's English, while technically modern, used archaic structures, it adds yet another layer of difficulty to reading Ancient Chinese. I haven't even got round to learning the grammar of modern Chinese yet!
All in all, though, despite the difficulties, it looks like a good way to strengthen my grasp of tones, build my vocabulary, and gain some insight into some famous, notorious, or classical thinking.
Culture class was a travesty. The teacher proceeded from Chapter One (concerning Chinese characters) to Chapter Nine (concerning food), so naturally noone had managed any preparation. We took it in turns to painstakingly crawl through the text, before I took it upon myself to change the direction of the class by asking lots of irrelevant questions - a tried and tested tactic!
We started talking about things we had eaten, and Teacher Xu made some outrageously bigoted comments about the habits of the Cantonese (who have a reputation for eating anything). He seemed genuinely disgusted at the thought of eating cat, then waxed lyrical about how he liked nothing more than to pop open the roasted head of a chicken and suck out the brains. Wearing a disgusted expression, he wondered aloud how Southerners could eat mouse, before describing how his wife would eat fertilised, unborn chickens raw and straight from the egg, in order to preserve her youth.
This led to a lengthy digression on famed author Lu Xun's usage of 吃人 (literally 'eat man') in his writings - it turned out it's metaphorical - before I lowered the tone again by offering up the plot of a Hong Kong movie (in which triads kill a man and make his corpse into meat buns, which they then give to the police investigating the case) as gospel truth.
To close out the lesson in the most boring, pointless manner possible, Teacher Xu launched into a lengthy list of things to eat in various destinations in China (e.g. Tianjin - Dog's Ignore Buns; Fujian - fishballs).
During the break, Teacher Guo in the student centre gave me the contact details for a prospective flatmate - a Master's student at HIT called 王冠臣 or Wang (another one!) Guan Chen. Tall and thin, with a friendly face, he met me outside class when we were done. Along with two Koreans from my class, one of the Korean's boyfriends, and Mingrui, the six of us went to get some food while Guan Chen and I determined if we'd make good flatmates.
We settled on the Korean barbecue from the week before, if only to get out of the snow which was starting to fall heavily. Turns out the deal was 18RMB (£1.20) a head, for all-you-can-eat buffet meat, along with vegetables, noodles, mushrooms and various pickled things which you barbecued on a little skillet. It was unlike anything any of the three Koreans had seen before, and they were mystified as to why the restaurant would claim Korean heritage.
When I asked for a drinks menu, I was told that a selection of beers was 2RMB per bottle but 白酒 (rice spirit) was free! My decision made for me, we were soon all tucking into chunks of chicken (hearts), beef (kidney, tendons), pork (heart again) and squid (just the tentacles), all washed down with some decent 52% 白酒.
Guan Chen was a good conversationalist and a keen teacher - bringing in elements of language and culture at every opportunity, and explaining everything extremely clearly in an impeccable Harbinese accent. His English seemed pretty decent too. If I'm any judge of character (and I'm not) then it will be good to live with him. Unfortunately, he'd already paid two months rent in advance for living in student dormitories, so it'll all depend on whether that's refundable!
After we'd eaten, we decided to go bowling. We jumped into two taxis, and not ten minutes later arrived at "Join Us Plaza" - an upmarket hotel near Harbin train station. Bowling was 15RMB per person for us foreign students, but Guan Chen persuaded the girl at the counter that we were all Master's students, which brought down the price to 6RMB. Not cheap by Chinese standards, but the alley was pristine, and service attentive.I bowled a strike with my first ball, before my form crumbled spectacularly. Three games hovering around the 100-point mark later, and we called it a day. I was keen to check out the local area, but was keenly aware of my Saturday morning HSK revision class, so after taking a couple of cheesy group photos (the prerogative of Orientals anywhere in the world), and a brief snowball fight, we all jumped back into a couple of cabs and set off home.
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