A Break for China

Yesterday, I gave my final presentation for the second semester of Chinese class. It was a riveting 10-minute show on my plans for summer. As one classmate noted, it was a lot like the last day of elementary school -- on account of both the subject and the level of grammar used to express it.

Hu Jintao and Barack Obama engage in a little 文化的交流 (Wénhuà de jiāoliú), cultural exchange.

By the numbers, our textbook says that we've studied about 700 characters. They say that it takes nearly 1,000 of them to be able to read a newspaper. From my limited attempts to read Chinese news, that seems accurate. I have to either read the news online or with a dictionary handy to make sense of it.

I'm heading back to China in a few weeks. This time I'll be in Yunnan province in southwestern China, just East of the Tibetan plateau. The last trip was big-city and I'm looking forward to spending some time in this scenic part of the country.

If you haven't seen them, the BBC's "Wild China" documentaries are awesome. They're available on Netflix and one of the 6-part series is all about Shangri-La (中甸) where I'll spend about a week.