The first week of classes have passed, and everything everyone's ever said about how difficult HBA is is absolutely true. Classes start at 8 every morning with a diction quiz, followed by two hours of lecture class, and two hours of drill class. You get a little break for lunch from 12-1:30, then its an hour of individual tutorial until 2:30 or 3:30 depending if you got the first shift or the second shift. Just when you feel like you have some time to yourself, there's extracurriculars, lectures, or language partners to see which goes to at least 5:30, where here you take another break for dinner. Then back to the grind on the homework, along with memorizing another 50 - 200 words for tomorrow's diction quiz. An essay is due every wednesday, and a two hour test is given every friday. On the weekends there are planned activities, such as climbing the great wall or going to beijing opera, which takes up the whole day. On Sunday, maybe you'll see your Chinese host family, which can go on for longer than you had planned for it to be. All in all, prepare to be busy, busy, busy.

When we arrived last weekend, a group of us Yalies took a trip to Hou Hai (后海). It's a rather large lake, that's a predominately a bar area. We had dinner there, and then rented a paddle boat to go on the lake. The scenery was spectacular, you can see the lighted outlines of Chinese flavored architecture gleaming red and green from the water, reflecting in the ripples. We enjoyed our last moments of being able to speak English.

This past weekend, we went to the Great Wall - Si Ma Tai - a part of the "wild" wall, not competely for tourists since it's twelve towers long and not in repair. But the scenery was beautiful and the climb to the top was very satisfying. We got back by 5, and I fell asleep by 9. It was a thoroughly exhausting week.