Studying Mandarin Chinese Language

As I am going back to the orient to Taiwan I have started studying Chinese again. When I was in China for 5 months I was studying language at ZheJiang Da Xue (The University of ZheJiang Province). About a month ago I dusted off my old school books and cracked them open. Fortunately my memory served me well in remembering most of what I had already learned. I made it through the first book in about a month. Now I am on to the second book which is totally new material.

I am finally realizing why my teacher had us doing such silly exercises to learn the language. Our homework was to simply say tons of syllables in 4 different tones. I had no idea what any of it meant, but I now realize that it really helped with pronunciation. As I am now on my own it is more challenging.
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(Photo of my Chinese Teacher in class)

It is really hard to learn a language when you are not in a classroom or submerged in the language. You just don’t use it everyday, which in learning a language you have to use it everyday if you are going to learn and remember anything. I am now struggling in pronunciation, toiling to learn characters in their obscure intricacy and trying to understand their simple, yet complex to the Western mind, grammar. I picked up Chinese a lot faster when I was in a classroom and in China.

(Chinese Bathroom Sign)

I think this is the reason why I did not get very far in Hindi. First, my teacher wasn’t very good at teaching or explaining the language and grammar. Also, no one in Bangalore, or South India for that matter, really speaks Hindi. You do not hear it in the street, and you do not have to use it in everyday interaction. In learning Spanish I feel that when I really realized I could speak, and when I felt most confident in understanding the language was when I was fully submerged in it, had no one around me to speak to in English, and was forced to speak it all day, everyday in order to interact with people. I could not run away. The best way to learn a language is to stop speaking, hearing or thinking your own.

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Thailand Travel Novels For Women

Anna And the King of Siam by Margaret Landon

I like reading female travel writers. Sometimes their books are harder to find because traveling has never really been for the average woman. Most travel novels are written by men, and British men at that.

Females have totally different experiences than men while traveling. They have different needs, different hardships, and a different mindset than men. A woman’s take is usually a little more down to earth, and a little less prejudiced. They often have more interaction with the “locals” maybe as a result of talking to their servants, having to do the shopping or if they are a working woman, because of their job. I like hearing a woman’s point of view. And the fact of the matter is that if a woman was traveling around foreign countries a hundred, two hundred, even 50 years ago she was probably freaking awesome and tough as nails.

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(Anna Leonowens in Thailand)

Right now I am reading Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon. Landon used Anna’s own journals on her experience to author this book about Anna’s time spent in Thailand.

The story is about Anna, a woman from Wales, who due to certain circumstances and events ends up teaching the royal child and harem of King Mongkut of Thailand. Through this she gets an inside peak into palace life, good or bad. As a student of cross-cultural studies it is interesting for me to read her story. She was a free thinking Western woman stepping into the lives of women who had never been outside of the palace walls, with their own customs and traditions totally obscure and often utterly horrible to Anna. It is a look into Thailand those the lens of her eyes, her views, and thoughts, her reactions to “their” actions.

(Old map of Bangkok)

Many people, especially after the popular Broadway show “The King and I”, believe that most of her story it terrible malarkey, completely falsified accounts in order to shock the readers and sell her books. To an extent this is true with any travel writer. Embellishment is a literary device to create an interesting story. No one wants to read about Anna just sitting around drinking tea and eating crumpets. But with Anna at least some of the story must be true.

No matter, I like this story, true or false. Next I am going to read her own journal entitled The English Governess and the Siamese Court, which I found online through the University of Penn's Online Books Page at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ (This is a great resource. Tons of free online books AND a special section on female writers featuring oodles of women travel writers.)

Anticipation of Traveling

I am oozing with anticipation about leaving. I am going to Taiwan and Thailand with the Comparative Religions and Cultures Program of Global College of Long Island University. It will be the last semester of my 3 and a half year abroad portion of the program in the college. I am leaving September 7^th, and I can’t wait.

I am now in a kind of period of doing nothing and it kills me. I have to be doing something at all times. I feel lazy if I am idle. I finished working in July, went on vacation, and now I am just waiting. I hate waiting. I want to leave NOW.

I have been reading tons of books on Taiwan and Thailand and this just made me more excited. I know I should relax and enjoy these few more weeks with my family, these last few weeks before life gets crazy and busy again, but I want to GO.

A Visit to the Thailand Embassy in Washington D.C.

After the Taiwan Embassy had had my passport for two weeks I decided there would not be enough time for me to send it to the Thai Embassy and wait 10 days for them to process it. As I was already in D.C. at my dad’s house I figured it would be easier for me to just go to the Embassy myself. I called the Thailand Embassy to ask where they were located. “Between J and M street on Wisconsin Avenue, in a hotel, but I don’t know the name of the hotel.” I don’t know how they didn’t know the name of the hotel considering they go to work there everyday. “How late are you open?” “Until 1 o’clock.” Did she say one or four? I rushed over, and dad got me there by 12 on the dot. I was ushered into the building. It was considerably more organized and neat than the Indian consulate (the only other place I have gone to get a Visa at). A short Thai man with a big bushy white moustache took my stack of Visa-getting papers. He mulled over them for a minute, stamped them a couple of times and handed me a piece of paper telling me when to pick up my passport. The Visa takes 2 business days. The Thai man did not say one word to me. Our only communication was through the little white paper that said Tuesday at 12:30.

Vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

Mira is going on vacation? Mira is going to Myrtle Beach? Seems like an unlikely place to visit for a girl like me.

Traveling is not necessarily going on vacation. I am going on vacation now. I am going to sit on the beach and do nothing and maybe drink some fruity drinks with funny little umbrellas. RELAX. I don’t get to do this very often. I am excited.

Myrtle Beach, though, is known to be a disgusting built-up, sleazy beach. Well I’m not actually going into the midst of that hell. I am going to a spiritual center where my family has been going there every summer for years. I think my first trip there I was under one year old. It is tradition.

The place where we stay has been declared a nature reserve also. So the contractors of ugly buildings are not allowed to come onto our beach. All the alligators come to the lagoons here when the golf courses kick them off. There are miles of trails through the pine and myrtle trees, hidden pagodas to laze away afternoons, paddle boats for visitor use (all free), and hardly anyone is ever there. Oh, and there is a two-mile strip of deserted beaches reserved only for center guests. It is usually empty. I am going to be alone with the ocean. Let’s just hope the sharks don’t eat me.

So my boogie board and bathing suit is packed and I am off. I don’t think I will be writing too much on my vacation. I do not want to stare at my computer screen until I come back to civilization in a week, nor do I think there will be wi-fi in the forest there.
Bon voyage!

The National Marina = Tourist Hell

My father and I were relaxing in the shade a few minutes before sundown. We were enjoying huge iced coffees and the idyllic mild, breezy Virginia day when dad decided it would be nice to visit the new National Marina on the Potomac River in Washington D.C. So with the words of the Dalai Lama echoing in our heads, “One should visit a new place each year” to keep life fresh and learn new things we decided to check out the marina and an enormous, awe-inspiring stature my father had heard about. We drove across the bridge and headed towards the boats. Instantly we were driving through a tourist hell. There was white concrete covering the landscape topped with kitchy, over-priced tourist shops. I peered over the water expecting to see vast shipping yards with regal ships, boats, schooners and yachts from all over the world squirming with bow-legged sailors. I saw none of this, only white people with funny hats dressed in khaki pants and no boats. We drove around the place a couple of times looking for a parking place and only saw parking lots costing $10. This area was not user friendly. They wanted to keep the riff-raff out. No pirates allowed. After circling the block like a couple of misfit vultures we drove off into the sunset. The marina was not worth $10 for parking.

Alternative to Travel Guide Books

I like to be innovative. I like to try to do things the fastest, easiest, most efficient way possible. When you are traveling efficiency and functionality are really important. If you have your whole life on your back you don’t have room for, as Wade says, “Big, dumb and heavy things.” More and more I am finding my Guide books to be big dumb and heavy.

I first began using guide books when I started to travel with Wade. In some instances they can be helpful. In some instances they can be a headache. My beef with them is that they have too much unnecessary information. They are chock full of things I will never read and never utilize, which makes them extremely thick and heavy. For me, all I usually use are the maps, hotels guides, and transportation guides. I want a guide book with just these bare minimum things. The rest I think I can do on my own.

My second problem has been that they are often times completely wrong. The Lonely Planet China guide book has led me astray more times than I can count on both hands. In Shang Hai it pointed me to a ferry ticket office that probably hadn’t been in use for at least 10 years. In Qing Dao it said I would arrive at a train station that was completely demolished, and instead I was at some weird train station not on any map in the middle of nowhere shadyville on the outskirts of the city.

The Costa Rica Lonely Planet once took me to a town which they described as a haven for hiking and rafting. Yet upon arrival there were no places to hike and the river was a trickling stream of green, murky water, clogged with mounds of trash. To top it off, a previous Lonely Planet guide book writer has just published a book bragging about how he wrote a guide book for somewhere in South America while sitting in his apartment in California. This makes me distrust guidebooks. I do not want to spend $25 USD on another Lonely Planet only to have it be constantly wrong AND I have to carry the darn heavy thing around.

So with all this said I am trying my hardest to find ways around this burden.

The internet is a tool potentially resourceful for a traveler in this day of age. I am looking for ways to use it, useful websites, which will by-pass my need for the travel guide book. There are hundreds of websites that now list hostels and hotels for almost every city in the world. Many of them even give detailed directions on how to find the hotel and maps. Andy from hobotraveler.com is developing a website with a database of hotels in every town or city in the entire world, hobohideout.com. So now as long as I have access to the internet, which with internet cafes worldwide I do, I do not have to rely on a guide book to find a hotel.

Wade (and sometimes I) is trying to compile a sort of online guide book to many of the places we travel to, vagabond field notes. We think this will be useful to travelers. We try to put the cheapest and best hotels and restaurants, maps, and basically the bare minimum of what a traveler really NEEDS. No frills.

(Photo of the Taiwan Lonely Planet from the library and photocopies of the book)

And if you really must have a printed version of a guidebook, and worst comes to worst, there is one more thing you can do. Find a guidebook in the library and photocopy it. I just did this for Taiwan. My local library has Lonely Planets, Frommers, and an assortment of other types of guidebooks all waiting for me for free. I know I will not be traveling to all of the cities in Taiwan, and I leave myself to my own abilities if I do, but for the places I definitely will be, I can copy the necessary information from the guidebook, and basically fashion my own guidebook with only the stuff I will NEED.

I am always looking for the best, most efficient way to do things. I need an alternative to lugging around huge Lonely Planets chock full of useless information.

Getting Scabies from Hotel Rooms

I got a phone call last week from the girl I had been sharing a room with for about 2 months.

“Hi Mira. Are you still itchy?”

“Uhh, no. Why?”

“Well, I went to the doctors and that rash I had, it’s not poison ivy. I have scabies.”

“Wait, what? Do I have scabies? How did you get scabies?”

“I don’t know. I gotta go. I’m driving and there is a cop behind me. It’s illegal to talk on a phone while driving.”

Click. Gross.

I was sitting on a train when I got this call. What was I supposed to do? My worried mind started going over in my head how she could have gotten scabies, do I have any weird rashes that could possibly be scabies, I am a little itchy, what are those bumps, did my roommate wear any of my clothes, oh I really hope I don’t have scabies. I was freaked. I started getting psychosomatic itchy rashes, and checking over my entire body for anything, weird.

The next day I get another call. I do not know who this person was, but they were official and from my work. She said there could be a public health issue. Scabies is a public health issue?

“Do you have any weird rashes? Have you had any weird rashes? What do you do for work? Why were you outside working? Are you itchy? Did you have any mosquito bites? Did anything else bite you outside? Did you notice anything in your hotel room? Did anything bite you while you were sleeping? Were there mosquitoes or other bugs in your hotel room? What about outside of your hotel room? Are there lots of mosquitoes outside where you were working?”

She threw a barrage of awkward questions at me about scabies and itchy symptoms. I then chronicled to her every bug bite, chigger bite, mosquito bite, unidentifiable bite, and tick bite that I had gotten over the last 2 months of working. I think there were probably over 200 bites in total. She wanted the date and place of each individual bite. This took a little bit of time.

But I still don’t think I have scabies. But you can never be so sure.