Paralympics, to Paralympics, to Beihai, to Behai

You know that really awesome scene in "The 13th Warrior" when the narrator doesn't know Norse, so he sits and listens to the other twelve guys talk for like three months straight and figures out the language all on his own? You know how after that you're thinking "wow, maybe i can learn a language if i try at it?" Well i'm here to tell you that you can't and that that some languages just weren't meant to be learned. See, i'm convinced, after my four weeks here that Chinese was invented with the distinct goal of never being able to be learned by outsiders, much like those Navajo languages they used in WWII to throw the Nazis off. You see, in Chinese things can be pronounced the same but have 10 different meanings, there are no tenses or conjugations to speak of, you can't really sing songs because then there are no tones to listen to, and using a dictionary to look up a word is the equivalent of trying to find the address of a Guantanamo Bay detainee using the local phonebook. I'm not really this mad about being here, on the contrary, it's really fun, everything is much cheaper than in the U.S. and the people are mostly very friendly. But after trying to get around the city using anything other than maps and guides in English, i'm conviced that Chinese and English could not be more antagonistic languages if we tried to make them so.

So my first trip to the Paralympics: The Paralympics are actually really great: The sports might be more obscure, and a bit strange, but the price of admission is low, the venues are still all the same, and thanks to them traffic in the city is still at half capacity. My roommate and I first decided to go to mang-ren-men-qiu (literally Blind people door ball in chinese) or Goalball in English. It was the one event being hosted at his university, so we figured we'd check it out. What Goalball involves is six people, three on a side, all blindfolded (they don't actually have disabilities), who stand in front of a 30 ft. long soccer goal. Then, one athlete will take the ball, which is probably 10 lbs., not bouncy, and has a jingly little noisemaker insided, and bowl it toward the opponents' goal. It's their job to stop the ball using any part of their body possible.
Needless to say, it's a pretty odd sport, and after a while it got a bit tiresome to watch, especially since the crowd has to be completely silent in order for the athletes to hear the ball coming, so i spent most of my time being entertained by Lele, the mascot of the Paralympics, who is a cow that, dances, sings, and every once in a while tries to induce the crowd into doing the wave or the hokey pokey with her. Nonetheless, the crowd all got fired up for the final match, China vs. the U.S. in which our team, who all looked like ex bodybuilders or navy seals, got completely trashed by three frail looking Chinese women with a combined height of maybe 16 ft. (i'm not saying there's an allegory here, but....). Afterwards, we went out so i could tour my roommate's school and meet his friends, none of whom knew exactly how big the school was, although the all insisted it was very big. Chinese Universities, if this one was anything to go by, really aren't too different from American ones, in fact they seem practically identical, minus the living situation. However, by then the bus lines had closed for the night and we had to use my roommate's bike to get back. What followed was a literally mortifying 30 minute ride in which i had to balance myself on the rear rack of his bike, holding my legs off the ground while trying not to overbalance and tip the bike over. The next morning my abs, legs and every muscle in between were feeling like I had been the one working out. Seriously, i've been on a lot of bike rides, but i think riding like that was more difficult than pedalling a bike has ever been.

Two days later, on Thursday, I decided to head out of town to catch some paralympic rowing. Little did i know how far out of town meant. So i foolishly tried to take the bus to the Olympic green, after hearing that lots of bus lines ended up there. As it turns out, there is no comprehensive map of the Beijijng Bus system, you have to be at the stop of a particular bus route to find any information on where that line actually goes. Because of this, after an hour of fruitless searching, i abandoned the busses, and decided to take the subway. Three transfers and an hour and a half later i arrived at the Green, only to hear that the special bus to the rowing park didnt come back for another half hour. By this time it was already maybe an hour into the rowing events, so i was slightly more than nervous. The bus finally arrived, and we got underway. However, for whatever reason, on a day with no traffic and all highways and expressways to go on, it took the bus over an hour just to arrive at the rowing park. Needless to say, when we arrived there were only maybe two events left. It was, i think most worthwhile just to go see the venue, which was really gorgeous in its own right. While I was there I met these three college students who wanted to know where i was from, and take a picture with me. Even though they knew some English and I (thought) i knew some Chinese, it was still really hard to communicate, hence my wonder that anyone is ever able to learn this language.

The next day, a few classmates and I decided to check out the Zoo, which is located very close to the school. Though we didn't get to see it all, it was really impressive, spacious, green and really well designed for both tourists and researchers. The Panda House was the highlight of the zoo, (it cost an extra 10 kuai to get in). However, the Pandas were really neat, and by all appearances the Chinese have taking care of them and breeding them all figured out. In one section they had sacks of sand roughly representing the weight of the Pandas, with the 1 year olds weighing in at about 110 lbs. and the two year olds around 270 lbs. I, physical specimen that I am, lifted the two year old and promptly destroyed my back for the next three years.
Afterwards we went to Beihai Park, a 1,000 year old Tang Dynasty lake area with several of Beijing's famous landmarks, including the Nine Dragons Fold and the Drum Tower (where the father in law of the men's volleyball coach was killed). The archictecture was all very classically Chinese, although it was so lacquered that it was hard to tell if it was authentic or had been altered recently.
That night we went out to the concert of a popular Chinese rock band, which unlike Chinese pop music, which I abhor, had some real artistic merit. The next day we went on a full fledged field trip, out to Beijing's most famous Buddhist Temple, Tanzhe, which I was initially excited about. As it turned out, though, the place was really very touristy, although it seemed like most of the Chinese people had come to burn incense and pray to one of the literally dozens of statues in the compound.
Maybe if i understood more about Buddhism it would have been different for me. It also seemed that the many outlying grounds of the temple were off limits, and those areas appeared to be more intriguing. The next day, for whatever reason, the people who had agreed with me to go to Tiananmen decided instead to change it up and go to...Behai! so i got a second tour, which involved exploring all the same places, although it was funny when we went looking for a site on the map called "the Land of Extreme Happiness" only to find that the map at that end of the park had no record of such a place. I'll never figure China out.