I Totally Have a Lot to Say . . . No, Seriously

So much has happened in the past few weeks. Not to be lame, but I don't really know how to express it all in words. Sorry if the post is a little short, but it's going to take a lot of time sorting through this semester's experience, and I will be drawing tentative "conclusions" for a long time.

Nothing disastrous has happened. It's just that I'm still changing. That's normal. Perhaps so normal it's hard to explain.

In the past few weeks I've visited both Sicily and Rome. Sicily was significant in many personal ways and remains to be discussed. My favorite part of Rome was the Vatican, by far. Bad Protestant.

Down the road from St. Peter's Basilica is Castel Sant'Angello, formerly the mausoleum of some Roman emperor. During 590, while Rome was struck by an epidemic of plague, Pope Gregory the Great saw a vision at the castle in which St. Michael the Archangel signified the end of the plague by sheathing his sword. Again, bad Protestant.

This is the statue of St. Michael found inside:



I know it's sideways. Turn your head. Or your monitor, although I suppose that might require more exertion.

I like this statue because St. Michael has iron wings. And it communicates God's victory and strength. And I find it strange, or perhaps more delightfully surprising, that God found me in an ancient city full of people, in a tiny castle, just to tell me that He's protecting me.

Many more lessons to be learned. Stay tuned.

Fun with 漢字

"Dinosaur" (恐竜) in Chinese and Japanese is literally "terrifying dragon."

Awesome? I think so.

日本人のクリスチャン：少数派？

ノースウェスタン大学の先生達はこのブログをお読みになっていますか？

The train was late this morning. This may not seem incredible, but I have been taking the train to the city and back at least six days a week for three months, and it has not been late ONCE. I have a one-hour commute and take the exact same two trains every morning. Anyway, I had no idea what to do, and neither did all the other commuters, but then another one came, after an apology over the intercom.

I think I mentioned this before, but I've been attending a church near my school with one of the other students, Benjamin. My speaking abilities in Japanese aren't stellar, but I am finally at the point where I can listen to a sermon in Japanese and get all the main points. If I'm really paying attention and read the Bible passage in English, I can actually understand the majority of what the 牧師さん is saying.

Because the two of us are せっかく going to church here and wanted to learn more about Japanese religion, our Japanese language teacher recommended we do our final project on Japanese Christianity. So for the past few weeks, we've been giving surveys to the members of the church, and over the Internet to students in the Northwestern and Grinnell InterVarsity chapters. The topic is what characterizes Japanese Christianity as a minority religion (0.7% of the population identify themselves as Christian), and how that compares to American Christianity (roughly 80% of the population).

Given that we only surveyed 60 people, it's horribly unscientific. That being said, the results are really interesting. A few big points:

- The vast majority of the Americans surveyed became Christians by growing up in a Christian family or going to church, whereas a substantial chunk of the Japanese people converted after being invited somewhere or reading the Bible.

- Most Japanese said they had more non-Christian than Christian friends/acquaintances, where it was reversed for the Americans surveyed. However, the disparity wasn't as big as we expected.

- When asked how Christianity made their daily life different, over half of the Americans gave abstract answers (purpose, motivation, etc.), where almost all the Japanese gave concrete differences (not going to shrines, church attendance, not smoking).

- Both were equally likely to consult church/fellowship members in important decisions.

- American Christians almost universally said people have a poor opinion of Christianity because of hypocrisy, poor representatives, and history, where there was a huge spread over how Japanese people thought they were perceived.

For the last point, two people actually used the same answer ("Christianity is a different religion") with two different meanings - the first, the Christianity is different, so it's bad; the second, that it's different from the other minority religions, so it's good.

Edit: Just to be perfectly clear, this project was more to improve our Japanese more than anything else, and because of a lack of resources/time, the sample was heavily biased by age, class, and denomination. So don't base anything off of it!

私のお姫様

Saturday we went to see my host niece's Shichi-Go-San (七五三) ceremony. The name is super-literal: it's a Shinto coming-of-age celebration for three-year old girls, five-year old boys, and seven-year old girls. Mei is six and fell into the third group, because of some ancient Chinese way of counting birthdays that I don't understand - do you have any idea, Tom? Anyway, it was fun and a real overload of かわいさ (cuteness).


Her older brother dressed up too, but we forgot to check his shoes.


Mei seemed a little bored through the whole process, but was really happy in the end.


After that I taught her how to make a noise on the trumpet (there's a video on Facebook).

同志们好!

When my family lived in Kazakhstan, we noticed that American chicken legs get shipped there, since Americans only eat chicken breasts. Guess where the rest of the chicken parts get sent and enthusiastically devoured?

Okay actually I'm pretty sure they kill most of their own chickens here, but they really love the parts of the chicken that Americans tend to turn up their noses at.

For example, tonight at dinner...

"No, Ayi," (Ayi is what I call my host mom), "I actually wouldn't mind not sucking the flesh off of that segment of chicken neck, but you go right ahead." And she did.

I felt a little vindicated for many of the weird things that I have eaten in China when my host dad pointed at a dish tonight and was like "Uhh... what is that??"

But most striking of the dishes we had tonight was something I've only heard of but until today had not had the misfortune to taste: the dreaded 臭豆腐. Literal translation: "stinky tofu".

Title of this post: "Hello, comrades!"

Lessons from Cross-Cultural Communication 1

To answer a few of the questions: I'm about an hour away from the Pacific Ocean, but I haven't seen it yet. The weather was unseasonably warm for a long time but it recently dropped down to about 10 degrees Celsius. It's a bit of a pain, but at least there are no more spiders. :-)

I have a few anecdotes about my host family I'll save for later. I do have a joke, though:

Q: If a person that speaks two languages is bilingual, and a person that speaks three languages is trilingual, what do you call a person that speaks only one language?

A: An American.

I am taking three "normal" classes, but the vast majority of my time is spent in my fourth class, Japanese. It's similar to my class last year, except it meets 13 hours a week - I'm never complaining about class length at NU ever again. For "fun," we get to spend two hours on Tuesday talking to Japanese students who are studying to be teachers of Japanese (and it is fun). Recently we've been using a Japanese book on cultural differences and discussing different scenarios. I think this is relevant to a few of the people who read this blog, so I wanted to briefly write down a few things I've learned from these lessons:

1. You can't approach any culture objectively. Even your own.

I think this is a big problem with a lot of Americans today - we forget we have a culture and then assume our subjective cultural viewpoint is the objective one. When you interact with a person of another culture, you can't just leave your assumptions and experiences behind. But the good news is that because objectivity is impossible both you and the other person can gain something good from a cultural encounter, if you approach it with humility (what Luke was talking about below, I think). Sometimes, Japanese culture balances the weak points of my American culture.

2. It takes a long time to scratch the surface, and you can't learn all there is to know about a particular culture.

By "long time" I mean years. This reminds me of an anecdote about Albert Einstein: he's reading a physics book on a train, and a college student starts a conversation with him. She sees his book (this was before he became famous) and says, "Oh, physics. I learned about that last semester."

3. Labels can be useful, but in the end you have to embrace the complexity and diversity of humanity.

I think humanity is more complex than physics - I hope it is at least. People are sometimes divided into groups like "Asian," "white," "African," etc., and these horrendously broad labels just don't cut it. To start, we've been learning a little in our class about differences between the so-called East Asian cultures: Korea, Japan, and China. To complicate things further, there are differences by region, family, and of course each person is variation on their cultural theme. My host mother once said she didn't know Americans could be shy until she met me.

4. All cultural differences are equal, but some differences are more equal than others. (To paraphrase Animal Farm.)

The first differences you usually notice are those that are easy to notice and adapt to, like eating utensils, or how one does laundry. There are also deeper differences that are still easy to notice but sometimes hard to get used to, like gender roles or customs regarding hospitality.

Finally there are cultural differences rooted in your fundamental assumptions about daily life. You don't know they're cultural in the same way a fish doesn't notice the water around it. It's these that can cause the biggest problems and are the most important to learn. While you can learn some of them from books and classes, I think the only consistent way is through friction and failure, followed by forgiveness and communication. In that order!

Concerning this last category, I have two interesting examples from class we talked about, but this entry is long enough and I want to take a nap.

Flying fish spend much of their time in the air

When I claimed I would take to blogging like a fish to water, I of course meant a flying fish.

I think it's been about two months since my last post, which is a good long while. In fact, I forgot how to log in to this account in the meantime, having forgotten both the password I used and in fact my username, as well. As a result, the other TLWG's may have received some emails from Google about account help, or something like that, for which I apologize.

But finally, I blog again. After all, you can take the blogger out of a blog, but you can't take the blog out of a blogger.

Things are going really well here in Tübingen. I´m something like a month into classes now, and I think they´re going pretty well. I can understand most of what´s said, and haven´t found the work too overwhelming. But I haven´t had any sort of test yet, so we´ll see how that goes. I have my first tomorrow, on phase equilibrium and phase changes.

My living situation is really fantastic. I´m living with 7 Germans, which is great, because I can speak German when I´m home too, and not just when I´m in class, like I would in the states. I think my German is coming along, if slowly, and I´m optimistic that I will achieve real fluency by the end my year here.

I´ve started going to a Methodist church near where I live. I really miss Reba Place and the community at Northwestern, but I can see myself attending this church for the year. The people are pretty friendly, at least after the service once they´ve had their coffee, and the service is nice, if not quite as, erm, exciting as a Reba Place service.

In other news, I switched my keyboard into German mode. Now the y and z are switched, and the punctuation is totally mixed up. But on the bright side, I can now type Umlaute with ease. üöäüöäüöäüöäüöäüöä. I typed that in about two seconds. I say this only so that you appreciate the great difficulty with which I write this blog. Every piece of punctuation represents about five seconds of angrily pushing buttons at random on the right side of my keyboard.

OK, I´ve got to go eat something and then get back to studying. I might write something again in January sometime, if I get around to it. Til then!

Very Emo Introspection

My friend mentioned to me that since she's been traveling, she's suddenly stopped caring so much about what other people think about her. And I've found that's true for me too. I think it's because when we travel we discover not so much who we are but that there is a bigger picture outside of our microscopic viewpoint, and when we get a glimpse of that we get a better glimpse of ourselves.

This gives rise to a lot of disconcerting feelings: like having trouble understanding English-language movies, or feeling insecure when I'm only speaking English. Or waking up in the middle of the night speaking Italian to myself.

Not only is my view of the world bigger, my view of my Self is more faceted. The way I express myself in another language becomes a part of the way I will express myself for the rest of my life, and the way I understand my Self in Italian will be incorporated into my concept of who I really am.

My biggest fear is losing what I've gained when I return to America. My second biggest fear is who I will find myself to be -- because traveling has taught me, in one sense, how American I am, and in another sense I've discovered how un-American I am.

Sometimes I feel proud of America. Sometimes I feel ashamed of her shortcomings. But sometimes I feel proud of Italy, too. And sometimes I feel ashamed for her failures. So I guess I really did find a cultural identity, more than the one I found in Egypt.

Now for pictures. I went to Naples. And Pompeii. But my camera died as soon as I turned it on there. So you only get pictures of Naples. But since blogger is not my friend today, you actually don't get any. So I guess the beginning of this paragraph is a lie.

Biggest disappointment of this trip: Mount Vesuvius hasn't blown up yet.

An attempt at randomness

日本の蜘蛛が大嫌いです。 Trans. I hate Japanese spiders. They're like ten times the size as American ones and about a hundred times as disgusting. I feel like I'm in the Forbidden Forest when I walk to train station every morning. And as the biggest person by far in the neighborhood, I suppose that makes me Hagrid.

The Chunichi Dragons - Nagoya's baseball team - won the Japan Series a few weeks ago for the first time in fifty years. I don't pretend to not be apathetic about baseball, but it's nice for once to have your hometown team as champions. Next year the Cubs are at, what, one hundred years?

I don't believe I've ever talked about my diet, or asked the other bloggers about theirs (I'm guessing Luke's involves a lot of pasta). Sushi, contrary to popular opinion is reserved for eating out (外食) and special occasions, so I've only had it three or four times. I have a good amount of rice with every meal. Breakfast and dinner are quite similar, and we usually have red miso soup (a specialty to this area), a small salad or other vegetable, and maybe a little meat. Occasionally we'll have a Japanified (日本化した) version of an American, Korean, or Chinese dish. All in all, I like the food very much. It's a lot more subtle in taste and texture than Chinese food, not quite as savory as European food, but it's healthy and I don't get tired of it.

Blogs are so passive. Does anyone have any questions about Japanese culture/practices, the study abroad experience, etc.? If there's any good ones, I'll take a stab at answering them when I get back from Kyoto (!) next week.

这次我想写中文因为现在我的电脑用汉字

I thought about writing vaguely inappropriate things in Chinese here, since only certain people that I know would be able to read it, but then I decided it just wasn't a good idea.

So James has urged me with much vivacity to post here again so that you all can know of the exciting things that I am doing here in China. Let me tell you, it has been exciting. This past weekend I went to the Anhui province and played "Mafia" in Chinese with various Chinese students from Nanjing University all night long on the train there, with occasional interludes of BS. BS is a card game that involves a lot of lying, and it becomes especially hysterical when language and culture confusion gets thrown into the mix.

After we got off the train, we went to this awesome little village by the name of Hongcun - it was the filming location for several scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And it was really pretty, and very cold, and I was very tired and almost fell asleep while walking. While we were there I discovered that they have the world's best spicy sauce for guotie (potstickers), and I learned that the word for "drool" is 口水 ("kou-shui").

The next day, or maybe the day after that, we went to Xidi, which is a happy place. They have strange yellow fruits there, about yay big, with these seeds that you have to spit out, sort of like pomegranate seeds, although besides that they have little in common with pomegranate. I think they were just called "huangguo" which just means yellow fruit. It might have actually been that no one knew what they were, but an old man trying to sell us jewelry in the village said that if you ate too much you would get sick, so I suppose he knew what was up.

When we were in Xidi we stayed in the sketchiest hotel I have yet to stay in, and there was no heat in our room, even though it was cold. So some of us decided to sleep on the roof, since we figured it would be about as cold, and we were right. But it was also very creepy because it was super dark (no night life at all), and there was a ghost creeping about with a flashlight occasionally banging a gong on the streets. But we could see the stars, including shooting stars, which are called "liuxing". :)

In other news of great wondrousness, I finally have a Chinese name that Chinese people do not hate. My old name sounded like it meant "a baboon carrying a horse on my back", but my new name sounds like a regular Chinese name, and even sounds vaguely like my English name. :) For your viewing pleasure (those of you with Chinese fonts, that is), I give you Fang Tao: 方涛. The Fang is like "Fahng"; it's not pronounced like the tooth, if you don't know your Mandarin pronunciation. Fang doesn't really mean a whole lot here; Tao means "big wave".

Traditional "tao":濤

I was also knighted today.