This link will bring you to the group blog written about Pitt MAP this past semester. The author of the most recent entry is Dr. David Bartholomae, the English professor, and chair of the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, who travelled with us to Argentina, South Africa, and China.
If you’ve been following this group blog all semester, this last entry written by Dave is the final of the series.
Posted on my other Tumblr — if you wish to still follow me, I won’t be posting as onehundredtwentydays anymore, since the semester is over :-P
World: See Attached
For the next generation of Mappers, read this advice from a Pitt MAP alumnus.
Remember why you’re on this trip – to learn. Don’t lose sight of your
long-term priorities, but also don’t lose out on opportunities that you
may never have again. Balance is key. If you can master the Pitt MAP
balance, you will strive on this semester abroad. Also, some days you will
cry, I’m pretty sure we have all cried. There will be days when you will
feel utterly overwhelmed. During these days, keep in mind that this is a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that this is program is the first of its
kind, that you are a pioneer on this wild and crazy journey. Remember that
when you’re feeling overwhelmed, when you’re feeling inadequate, when you
feel like you can’t succeed, remember that there is a part of you that
accepted the challenging semester that is Pitt MAP, and the fact that that
part exists within you means that you can succeed. Don’t let the many
stresses of the semester hold you back while you journey through this wild
and crazy world, and you will learn so much – both about yourself and
about the world. Expect a deepened sense of self when this semester is
over. And, let me just say, as I look back at how much I’ve grown and as I
reflect now on the individual that I’ve become – and I speak for my fellow
Mappers when I say this, too – my decision to go on Pitt MAP has been one
of the best decisions of my life thus far.
As I sit home alone, the only one still awake, and have nothing to do but experience jet lag and let my head reel with thoughts of this past semester, I found this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz1xvhXBtUo&feature
It’s a video from the 6x7’s Embrace the Chunder competition I spectated when I was in South Africa at the University of Cape Town. Since pictures didn’t do the event justice at all, ch-ch-check it out.
*PS. If you pause it at the right moment around 2:40, you can see me, Racheli, Suzanne, and Brit in the crowd
My mind was a whirlwind of dreams last night. I dreamt about every aspect of home.
While I know I had many dreams though, I can only remember one. In it, I got my old cell phone back - the one I used before Pitt MAP - and I no longer knew how to work it.
It is now 10:30 AM in Beijing, and I just woke up - for the second time. The first time I woke up was at 4:30 AM. I wanted to say goodbye to the first eight Mappers to leave today and their bus left at 5 AM. Rene, Colleen, Kayla, Corey, Kerri B, Sarah Sull, Kathleen, and Amy - their plane left about two hours ago and at this time they should be thousands of miles above the Pacific.
Racheli Facebooked us last night. Her travels ended safely and she is now happily in the States. The first Mapper to return home.
Last night, we spent the night exchanging music and American cell phone numbers. Everybody pooled together songs that they wanted the rest of the Pitt MAP family to have. In the end, we totalled over 550 songs. It will take 36 hours to listen to the entire playlist - good thing I have a 16-hour travel day ahead of me :-)
As soon as I’m done typing this I’ll be jumping in the shower, then packing up my laptop and toiletries. Everything else I own is already packed. Packing my life into three bags for (what feels like) the hundredth time this semester.
I woke up fifteen minutes ago and my first thought was, I wonder what Rene is doing. Then I remembered: this is all over. Not to get cliche, but it truly feels like yesterday that we were awkwardly gathered, a group of mostly strangers, in front of a Christmas tree at the Pittsburgh airport on January 5, 2011. I can’t believe how quickly these people have become family, and how quickly this semester has gone.
In a few short hours, I’ll be leaving Beijing and returning home. I will forever hold close to my heart these last 120 days.
On PittMAP
Journey of what time zone are we in now?
Pictures of awkwardly bunched together travelers
To best friends smiling, laughing, hugging
Cities of the rolling R, clicks, and different tones
Semester of hectic scheduling and amazing excursions
World where children are walking vessels of disease
Trip where Corey learned to swim, cook, and do laundry
Gang of PVB and the Diagnoses
Semester of city of
Adventure of African Lion Safari
Followed by a series of more improv singing: the PittMAP musical
Excursion of broken glass and forgotten artwork
Class of, “I majored in the sciences…all of them”
Airplane rides where it was always Hancuch, Heck, Hoffmann, Hund
Bus rides of songs inspired by confusion, of repetition, of infection
Journey of “so romantic”
Semester of airplanes, subte, buses, taxis, vans, cabs, boats, jet skis
Estancia dock, mountains, and Great Wall where we sang
Program of epidemiological studies concerning our own illnesses
Of openly discussing our diarrhea – desensitized
Journey of “Ohhhhhhh Cape Town”
Baggage of rolling suitcases, backpacks, duffels
Of “Crap, how can I fit my entire life into three bags?”
Semester of late
Who are we waiting for now?
Trip of fragments, of blog entries, of living in your sentences
Journey of medialunas, chocolate croissants, and oh yeah China doesn’t do bread
Of springbok and chicken feet and unending carbs
Trip where I learned that I will eat anything—once
Land of wine, wineries, and fake wine worse than Franzia
Journey of being half way around the world makes me understand home better
Professors of – oh, I’ve done something amazing that relates to this perfectly! –
Perspective
Residencia of “is there any more bread?”
Trip of singing candles and birthday cakes
Trip of a lifetime
Program of oh, you have another assignment, excursions and sidetrips
Time spent making new friends, best friends, life long friends.
Journey of too many potatoes, then too many chilis
Tour guides of cool drinks, fifteen minutes on the beach, two hours on the wall…who are
we missing?
Journey of 3 continents in 4 months
Four months that is the highlight of the first two decades of my life
Airplane rides of “what 5 movies are you going to watch?”
Classes of essay, essaying, essayed, will be essaying - did anyone actually turn in Dave’s
paper by Friday?
Fragment of delirium that we now have to fit into our lives beyond this
Semester of lines
Time that flies by but still seems to crawl on so slowly
Class of pro-med, inboxes full of bovine tuberculosis, measles, and undiagnosed illness
in Thailand
Excursions of spongy sandwiches and coca-cola greetings
Journey of dividing by 4, dividing by 7, dividing by 6
Street food is basically free
Journey of culture shock
Collections of souvenirs – flags, stickers, shot glasses, coasters, scarves, dresses
Journey of panda hats and wigs
Time when we’re young, beautiful, and we only live once
Beaches of microscopic worm fears
Semester of the amazing microbial world we live in
Oh Mama Laur, your glorious wrist, missing not a soul
Oh Joyce, your impeccable Spanish, your warm smile
Oh Nancy and Vanessa, the mothership of wisdom and protection
Backbone of PittMAP, the creators, makers, architects
Oh Dave, Peter, and Svitlana,
Masters and pioneers of travel writing, anth, epi, and international economics
Gracias, Thank You, Xie Xie
This is PittMAP!
Pitt MAP purgatory. That’s what we’re calling it.
I’ve reached this weird place where I feel like I’ve left China, while knowing that I’m not home yet. It’s not that I want to leave, because I really will miss Beijing, but we’ve all begun to accept the fact that the people we’ve been living with - and that have really become family - for the past four months.. we’re all getting separated.
The mood on our floor is somber and restless. Racheli leaves tomorrow morning for Los Angeles, the first Mapper to depart.
The rest of the Mappers leave on April 23, some in the morning and some at night. There’s two bus trips leaving from the dorm, one at 5:00 AM and one at 12:30 PM. Since I’m on a later flight, I’m on the 12:30 bus.
My (13-hour) flight to Chicago leaves Beijing at 4:10 PM local time, I land in Chicago at 4:13 PM (3 minutes later??!) central time on April 23. I will be flying into the Buffalo airport around 8:45 PM EST that night. The whole time, I have Brit as a flight buddy, who is going to Buffalo, too.
Follow my flights! First one: United Airlines 0850, Second one: United Airlines 0246.
It’ll feel damn good to be home. :)
Pittsburgh, I’ll be seeing you on April 27. Be ready!
I feel like a different man. Life since my virtual proxy network in Beijing stopped working has been a whirlwind. Who am I? What am I doing? Is this that phenomenon that they call, “Attention Span”?
My VPN has stopped working officially, and since I am only in China for a few more days, I’m not even bothering trying to fix it. Instead, I am focusing on the six final papers that I have due this week. And guess what, boys and girls? Life post-Facebook and post-Twitter has brought much rejoicing for my GPA. Today, I finished 3 of the 6 papers alone. Go me, right!?
Yesterday, we went to Grandma’s Kitchen for some authentic American style brunch. I HAD FRENCH TOAST. (All caps is the only way to do my taste buds justice here.) Grandma’s Kitchen now has four locations in Beijing, and it started as one American-midwest style diner, established by an actual American grandma! Go grandmas.
Today we had our group photo professionally taken. Pitt MAP is abuzz with post-MAP plan discussion. Cait is going to Korea for a month, Lauren is spending a week in Thailand. Most people are going home, though, including myself, and I am very ready. While I’m in no rush to finish this semester, it will be nice to live somewhere that is familiar again. Buffalo and Pittsburgh will seem so much more manageable when I get back - surviving in the three cities this semester, and successfully exploring them, has now given me more motivation and confidence to investigate every last corner of Buffalo and Pittsburgh when I go back.
Tomorrow, Suzanne, Will, Kerry, and I were selected to meet with some medical professionals who practice Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). We’ve been studying TCM in China, and I’ve actually written a few papers on the subject. It is my impression that we were requested to attend this meeting to give the professionals insight on how to successfully market TCM (like acupuncture and herbal remedies) to Westerners. In all honesty, though, I don’t know too much about it, but will update this afterwards.
一 yi 1 = little finger
二 er 2= index and middle finger
三 san 3= 3 fingers, from little to middle
四 si 4 = 4 fingers
五 wu 5= 5 fingers
六 liu 6= little finger and thumb
七 qi 7= thumb touching index and middle finger, looks a bit like a duck
八 ba 8= thumb up and index finger out, sign looks like a gun
九 jiu 9= hooked index finger
十 shi 10= two index finger in the shape of a cross
Yours truly can officially count in Mandarin!
— Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe, Bill Bryson (via samcnitt)
(via caitbeck)
If, one year ago, you had asked me what I would be doing in one year, “sleeping on the Great Wall of China” would not have crossed my mind.
The Mappers and I did just that last Saturday night, however. Ranked among the coolest things I’ve ever done, we found the opportunity through a hostel called Peking Downtown Backpackers in Beijing. Joe, as our guide introduced as his English name, picked us up in two vans on Saturday afternoon for the two hour drive. There were fifteen of us total who decided to brave the conditions on the Great Wall that night. And brave the conditions we did.
We arrived at the wall at around 4:30 PM on Saturday. The hike up to Tower 7 consisted of fifteen minutes on a dirt trail up the mountain and then about thirty to forty minutes of hiking along the top of the wall – uphill most of the way. At Tower 6, there was a man standing next to a flimsy ladder made of thick branches held together by thin wire. The ladder led to a platform atop the tower, where I imagined ancient Chinese warriors once perched. We returned in the middle of the night to this tower, when the man who had probably built the ladder by hand had gone home and was no longer charging two kuai to climb it.
We found ourselves on what is known as the wild wall. The wild wall gets its name because it’s the part of the wall that hasn’t been restored for easy tourist navigation. When we got to our campsite at around 5:30, I felt as if we had entered an alternate world. Here we were, perched on top of a massive ancient wall lining a mountain ridge in rural northern China, setting up camp for the night, amidst a dense block of smog that obscured what was revealed the next morning to be a beautiful view of rolling hilltops for miles and miles. The wall was visibly crumbling, it’s missing chunks a testament to the test of time it has survived through.
We were huddled into six tents within Tower 7 of the HuangHua section of the wall – normally Downtown Backpackers uses Tower 8 but the wind was too strong that day. Tower 7 is nestled between two hills and tower 8 is on top of an adjacent hill. The hills did little to protect us from the wind, though – Colleen’s tent literally became airborne, with her inside of it, at around midnight.
As the temperature dropped and North Faces emerged, we built a bonfire. The fire was at the bottom of the stairwell that led directly from our tower to the wilderness below. Atop the stairwell, which became a flume providing heat from the fire below, we huddled to tell ghost stories. “You guys realize that millions of people died building this wall, right?” someone said, which was followed by, “We’re probably sitting on top of ancient corpses right now.”
Eventually, someone remarked that “this would be the perfect setting for a horror movie,” which we then came up with a plot for. In case you were wondering – spoiler alert! – Emily is the lone survivor.
Before our bonfire and ghost stories, upon returning from a short hike, Brit, Racheli, Amy, and Brittany reported that they saw a “man with a long cape” walking along the wall toward our tower, when they were perched at the highest point. To their surprise, the man with the cape was our hired muscle for the evening. Apparently, a man had been murdered overnight on the Great Wall recently, so Joe had hired a security guard for us.
The security guard wore a long, dark green coat. He didn’t know any English, but he built us a fire and listened to us sing as Andy strummed on his banjo-lele. We knew him as the Green Man. He scuttled around the campsite, moving from the bonfire to the tower to a ledge, periodically. Eventually, he fell asleep outside of my tent, laying on his back, arms curled into his chest, on the stone – no pillow, no blanket. In the morning, he was gone.
I awoke at 7 AM with Rene and we climbed to Tower 8. The air was clean now and the sun had been up for at least an hour. The view was breathtaking. At 8 AM, Joe asked us to wake up the rest of the Mappers, so we could leave around 9. After packing the tents, backpacks, and sleeping bags, and after taking a group picture, we began the near-hour hike back to the vans. The ride home was uneventful, save for a brief sandstorm we ran into around Fifth Ring Road. We were back in our dorm by noon.
[To see the pictures from this camping trip, see my Facebook at www.facebook.com/chris.hoffmann1 they will be posted there shortly]
I had read alot about Medicins Sans Frontieres in Sizwe’s Test for my Anthropology class this semester, so when my professor told us of a film screening by the organizaton in Beijing’s artsy 798 district, I was all over that.
Clara, Emily, Will, and I made the hour-long cab ride northeastward to 798 on Saturday afternoon and met Peter - our professor - and Jane, one of our Beijing logistics providers.
The first film was called The Invisibles. It was a gathering of short stories from around the world about problems of poor people. Very eye-opening.
The second film was about several doctors and their experiences on MSF missions in Liberia and the Congo. I liked it because it was brutally honest; one of the doctors absolutely hated his MSF experience, and they didn’t censor it. They showed that the doctors drank and smoked, every day. One of the doctors said a line that in medical school in Colorado, his classmates and him smoked marijuana everyday to get through it. It showed the doctors as real people.
Yesterday I went to a pearl market. Bought a north face fleece for USD 25. She originally wanted RMB 1,200 for it and I got her down to RMB 150. Woooo. As you walk through the market, the vendors harrass you to buy their things. The people selling purses would grab onto you out of nowhere, even if you didn’t even glance in their direction, and say, “Buy a bag? For your girlfriend?” And because they were so rude, I would reply, mumbling and looking down, “I don’t have a girlfriend…Thanks for reminding me..” hahaha that shut them down. Other times I’d just reply in Spanish - No hablo ingles, lo siento - that was always fun! HAhaaha.
After that I went to Green Drinks Beijing at a bookstore called Beijing Bookworm. Green Drinks is a gathering that happens in cities all over the world to discuss environmental problems. There are also drinks, one of which is green. Yummmy. Kayla, Suzanne, Andy, and I went and I had my first caesar salad since being in China - so good! I also found a book entitled 101 Stories to Help Westerners Understand Chinese People. Hahahaa
PS. We are officially camping out on the Great Wall of China this Saturday night. :)
We went to an organic farm yesterday, and at the start of our tour, a six car envoy swept in. The Minister of Tourism of Beijing wanted to take a picture with us. He scuttled from one of the identical black cars, surrounded by his entourage. We were herded into a group and they posed with us. We smiled, a picture was snapped, and without a word the Minister and his cronies scuttled back into their vehicles and sped off.
Then during our tour, three of the workers of the farm (who were our age) took a few of us away from the group and handed us what looked like roots. After handling them in our hands for a few minutes, it turned out that we were holding yam roots, which apparently have oils on them that most people are allergic to.
Then at the end of the tour, a boy with the English name Jacky performed break dancing while his friend played Usher’s “Yeah” on his phone. All 22 of us and our 3 professors crowded around to watch this 20-year-old Chinese boy break dance to Usher on an organic farm in the outskirts of Beijing.
Oh and that morning at 8 AM I was shaken awake by an Asian man who came into my room and was talking in Chinese to me. He was wearing a suit. I just nodded and said, “Okay.” Then, my door was taken off its frame. Then, they draped white sheets over all of my belongings. Then they constructed new doors and new frames for us in the hallway right outside of our rooms. It took 12 hours. Wooden debris flew everywhere as they hammered at door frames and cut planks of wood with power miter saws. Rene mentioned that China still uses asbestos even today in construction. Yayyy mesothelioma…
The other day, I rode in a floating pagoda. Yep, you read correctly, Desmonian. A floating pagoda.
That’s how parks roll in China. Instead of playgrounds, they have fitness appliance zones. Instead of paddleboats, they have motorized, 8-person floating pagodas. Ours was fully equipped with laser guns and a soundtrack of what sounded like modern Mulan. The laser guns were used to shoot buoys in the water that would then spray water at any unlucky group nearby - and I mean DRENCH ‘em.
Oh, and I got a haircut today. Besides telling you that the salon was playing Hilary Duff music the entire time we were there (INCLUDING her christmas stuff), all I have to say is: Hahahahahahahahahahhahaahha.
That is all.
This sign at the Delft clinic encourages every visitor to get an HIV test.
As I said during our...
Pitt MAP family, representing the PGH every where we go. [Uh huh.. You know what it issss.]
A customer asked me yesterday, “Are you excited for the...
Occasionally, you meet a young, rising member of this...
